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

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