The Nexus of 2024

Kallisti on Dreamwidth: Hiiiii! (waves)

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by

jon
in ,

dreamwidth logoEver since Skud’s 2009 OSCON talk I’ve been meaning to check out DreamWidth, and now I finally am.  My account there is kallistixf, and at least for the time being I’ll move some of my more personal posts there and keep Liminal States focused on social networks, diversity, innovation, software engineering, security, and politics. I think that’s enough topics, don’t you?

Here’s some excerpts from my Hiiii (waves)! post there:

The only time I kept a regular journal in the past, it was mostly about personal experiences and reflections, wrestling with philosophy and psychology, personal and professional growth, poetry, and a writers notebook for a work-in-progress. Since then Liminal States has become my non-fiction writers notebook, and also had it’s share of poetry, fiction, and very journalesque posts (for example the Notes from underground series). It’s been great mixing the personal with the professional and the political and integrating the different aspects of my life and writing.At the same time, though, it’s also somewhat problematic. I’ve had to post my recent fiction password-protected; my blog is also the hub of my professional web presence, so it’s not really a place for a love letter veiled as a story or for tentacle porn. I’ve also had to password-protect some posts when we were traveling, since I’d rather not advertise to the world that our house is empty. So, I’ve been looking to explore Dreamwidth for quite a while and this seems like a great opportunity to experiment with a separate journal. The posts about Diaspora are a good template for how things might work out over time: thought piece, (1, 2), and details on Liminal States, summary and presentation on Tales from the Net, and here on Dreamwidth talking about a party and a troll and embarrassing myself with technology….

a brown eye with glasses visible through flowersI haven’t really felt like I had a good discussion place on the internet for several years, ever since tribe.net, free-association, and Seducersworld all had problems. Facebook and Twitter are great but it’s hard to have real conversations there — plus Facebook is creepy and privacy-invasive and bans pictures of breast-feeding and treats its users like product etc. etc. etc.

So I’m hopeful that Dreamwidth will feel that gap, a place to hang out with old friends and meet new ones. Fingers crossed!

Comments

One response to “Kallisti on Dreamwidth: Hiiiii! (waves)”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    Here’s an example something I really like about Dreamwidth. From the weekly update:

    Speaking of styles, a few weeks ago we ran a poll for the new default style for newly-created accounts. New layout Practicality won for the layout to be used as default, and this week we’re running a followup poll to see which theme should get that honor!

    The winner of this poll will be used for the default for newly-created accounts for around the next 3-6 months. It will not change any existing accounts — even if you haven’t changed your layout from the default at the time of your account creation, it won’t change your journal layout. This will just be used for newly-created accounts.

    As well as letting the members decide one of the things that’s really great here is that Dreamwidth changes the defaults regularly. That helps bring variety to the visual feel. Speaking of which you’ll notice my Dreamwidth experience is now a different color — there are options for several different background colors so it was easy to find one that would complement my profile and browser background. Not to sound like a broken record or anything but compare-and-contrast this diversity- and accessibility-friendly attitude with Facebook’s Kurt Vonneguesque “Mark is colorblind so everything will be blue” approach.

    Here are the style options. Oh look, there aren’t any all-blue ones. “Dreamwidth: the inverse of Facebook.” Warmth and Practicality seems like a good theme for Dreamwidth for the next six months. It’s time for a new look for me, so I changed my theme as well.

    Choco Craze works well for me too so perhaps I’ll give that a try at some point. Do you think Neutral Good makes my prose look flat?

    Reply

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