New Livejournal terms of service

[gruene.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you all have seen the new Live Journal terms of service, but in my mind, they seriously compromise the ability of this site to serve as a forum for our community: http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos-en.bml

In short, Livejournal users are now governed by Russian law, and risk having posts removed or accounts deleted if they don't comply with it. Among other things, "Political solicitation" is now banned, meaning no more talking about Aldermanic or state legislative races. Any discussion of LGBT rights will require the "adult content" label to avoid running afoul of the "Gay Propaganda" laws of the Russian Federation.

While moving will certainly be disruptive, in the long run, I think it is essential if this is going to remain a home of free discussion of issues pertinent to Davis Square. I welcome your thoughts on this.

Comments

[zdenka]

I would support a move to Dreamwidth (as many individuals and LJ communities have been doing recently). It's possible to import all the current entries from DSLJ to a DW comm, if that's what the community decides to do.

[ron_newman]

I have actually done this import process twice, in late December and early this month, and will do one more import later this week. See https://davis_square.dreamwidth.org .

[zdenka]

Ah, good to know. I've subscribed to the comm on Dreamwidth.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

Great news! Thanks, Ron.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

I have a DreamWidth account and still need to update some entries over there via import, but a friend said she read somewhere that the Russian owners don't pay any attention unless an individual entry gets more than 30,000 hits. I would presume that to be extremely unlikely with this community.

Not to minimize the concerns, though. Another theory is that the new ToS is aimed mainly at political bloggers writing in Russian and other Eastern European languages. So, who knows.

[siderea]

3,000 unique visitors a day is the yardstick, and I think that's actually where Russian law (!!!) puts it – the line that differentiates a social networking account from a blog, for the laws regulating what can be posted on a blog.

[cos]

This hit while I'm travelling, but I did find time to move my personal account to dreamwidth this week. Well, did the import last week, but only figured out the crossposting and footer and added more people and started using it this week. I know we have a davis_square community on dreamwidth, from a while back, created for this eventuality, but I haven't had time to look at its settings or think about it. I wanna catch up w/ron_newman about how to do a move to there, when I get home next week.

P.S. I would favor getting everyone to post there rather than here, and having it crosspost to here, but I don't know if crossposting is supported for communities, so that may not be possible.

[nonelvis]

Communities can't cross-post, unfortunately. The way I've worked around it for a Dreamwidth comm I administer is to set up an LJ subscription to the Dreamwidth comm's RSS feed, but that still requires people subscribing to the RSS feed here rather than continuing to read the (now-abandoned) LJ comm pages.

There may also be a way to use a combination of IFTTT and LJ's post-by-email feature for this. See this kind person's comment for more info.

Come to Dreamwidth. We have pie.

[jadelennox (from livejournal.com)]

We could. We could have a dreamwidth DS pie party.

Anyway, Dreamwidth is awesome. The site is accessible, unlike LJ. Comments load without Javascript so they load much faster. Comment length limits are longer. The site owners are great people, and have stated there will never be ads and they will never sell user's personal information. Support is responsive and friendly. You can import livejournal communities. They comply with US law, but they make take-down claimants go through all necessary hoops, instead of proactively assuming all takedowns are valid, making it much harder to harass DW users. The community is warm and welcoming. The diversity statement is a work of art and they live by it.

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

I suppose someone ought to mention /r/somerville (https://www.reddit.com/r/Somerville/) as an alternative as well. I know Reddit is also problematic in its own way of course.

[ron_newman]

I like Reddit and am active there as well (a few people know my name there), but I don't think it can serve as any real substitute for what we have here.

[squirrelitude]

I would very much support this. I'm no longer particularly comfortable using a journaling site that doesn't support HTTPS, so I've burned all my old posts; DW is where most of my friends are now as well.

[sovay]

I would happily transfer. I am in the process of moving myself.

formal moderator note

[ron_newman]

Yes, we should move to https://davis_square.dreamwidth.org . I have made two backups ("imports") of this community to that one, first in December and again early this month. I apologize for not keeping the community abreast of these plans, which all of the four moderators have now agreed to. I'll try to make a new post later tonight or tomorrow.

There is unfortunately no way to cause automatic cross-posting (of either top posts or comments) from Dreamwidth to LiveJournal for a community, like one might do for a personal journal. The best we can do is enqueue another import or two, until people stop posting here and start posting exclusively over there.

I do not plan to remove any content that has already been posted here on LiveJournal, and I urge other members of this community to also leave their contributions intact if you leave here.

Re: formal moderator note

[ceelove.livejournal.com]

Ooh! This was the only reason I was going to regret leaving LJ for Dreamwidth, was having no Davis Square community to look to. Woot!

RE: formal moderator note

[vlayne.livejournal.com]

There is unfortunately no way to cause automatic cross-posting (of either top posts or comments) from Dreamwidth to LiveJournal for a community, like one might do for a personal journal. The best we can do is enqueue another import or two, until people stop posting here and start posting exclusively over there.

Ron, I think I can do better: I think I have everything I need* to set up a system such that when somebody posts to the DW comm, a post is automatically made here to LJ saying "User: USERNAME posted: TITLE OF POST on Dreamwidth, come join us there." with the title a link to the DW post. You could then restrict posting here to just the account doing the cross-posting (I would set up a new LJ account just for the purpose.)

I just can't do it right now due to being utterly hosed.

[* If somebody wanted to come up with a perl script that takes the body of a DW tracking notification email as an input on STDIN, and returns the URL of the post as a string, that would be the one thing I don't have immediately to hand and would shorten my development cycle by however long it would take me to write that. ]

RE: formal moderator note

[ron_newman]

Let's talk about this soon.

formal moderator note #2

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

To echo what has previously been said, yes, so glad this has finally been raised within the community. I'm all for a move to Dreamwidth for all the reasons stated including the lack of HTTPS here on ye olde Livejournale.

RSS

[curiositykt.livejournal.com]

I ask that what ever is picked is still RSS friendly as that's how I get these updates.

RE: RSS

[redbird]

Dreamwidth has RSS (and Atom) feeds for all accounts, and if I read this right we won't need to do anything to set it up:

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=117&q=rss&lang=

(I'm almost entirely at DW now, having stopped cross-posting most of my entries from there to LJ after this policy change hit, but am still poking my head in on this side for a little while.)

Re: RE: RSS

[curiositykt.livejournal.com]

Wooohooo! Glad to hear!

Tech challenged

[smk0307.livejournal.com]

I will trust you who know way more than I about these things that we should move to Dreamwidth. What does that mean? What do I need to do? I have no idea what you are talking about and don't want to be left behind when things move.

Thanks!

RE: Tech challenged

[vlayne.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth.org is a fork of LJ run by some ex-employees of LJ, and under active development. It has no advertising, and is 100% user supported; it has a free account level. So it's basically just like LJ, only with a slightly different feature set, and no ads.

You could, if you wanted, participate over there with your LJ log in, by means of OpenID. But it might just be simpler if you signed up for an account over there.

Huge numbers of LJ users have been migrating their LJ accounts over to Dreamwidth, because DW has a handy-dandy push-button Importer to import your LJ account (all posts and comments, your own user icons, your friends filters (and the correct filter settings on all imported posts, so no loss of security) but no images, no embeds, no phone posts.)

Also, people are moving their journals now because of the ToS and because one of the Terms of Service seems to suggest LJ doesn't want things like the DW importer running against LJ any more. LJ has been breaking or turning off a lot of their interfaces for third-party applications, so there's concern that LJ may turn off DW's access to the LJ interface the importer uses.

Here's the how-to-migrate-your-LJ-to-DW-in-5-minutes instructions: http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2002597.html

RE: Tech challenged

[teko.livejournal.com]

Or simply make a new Dreamwidth account here for free:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/create

And follow Davis Square on Dreamwidth here:
https://davis-square.dreamwidth.org

[vlayne.livejournal.com]

I'm wildly in favor.

[elramsay.livejournal.com]

Seems like it's time to move...

I do wish the Dreamwidth site wasn't so awful looking, however.

[keithn.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised that a site that claims to value accessibility is so hard to read. The text rendering is terrible and the words seem to almost run together.

Hopefully there's a way to change it on my account. I tried to change the "site skin" but it doesn't actually apply to the community page.

[elramsay.livejournal.com]

Ah, It can probably be skinned by the Admin of the community, which would be Ron. So, that needs a quick look at. The current default is painful to read.

[ron_newman]

I would probably like to defer that responsibility to surrealestate or prunesnprisms, both of whom are much more familiar than I am with how Dreamwidth works. Here on LJ, I'm the community "owner", but Dreamwidth doesn't have that role; all four moderators there are co-equal.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

If you have suggestions, let me know.

[smammy]

if you're going to do this—which, i mean, sounds excessive but ok—please do it quick and make the legacy comm readonly as soon as possible

[gruene.livejournal.com]

Without commenting on whether it's excessive, I agree that if the moderators want us to move, we need to create a new post that says "DAVIS SQUARE LJ HAS MOVED!" with the link to Dreamwidth and prohibit new posts here. Otherwise this will continue to limp along and the new community will not get as many participants.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you, it's being discussed. :)

[ron_newman]

We have made an official announcement here.

[jducoeur]

Strongly in favor -- I've already moved to primarily using Dreamwidth, and this is one of the few things I'm still following at all on LJ. (My analysis of the situation here on LJ can be found in my post on the subject here, with more details at my earlier post on DW.)