Moderator Announcement: Davis_Square (the community) is moving!

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

As previously noted in the community, the four moderators of your community here (ron_newman, surrealestate, cos, and prunesnprisms) have agreed that the current state of LiveJournal under its new hosting status and new terms of service are not one we would choose to continue discussion under.

Your community will be moving to this location at the hosting tool Dreamwidth, beginning May 1. You may create a free account with Dreamwidth here. You may also choose to continue with OpenID from Google or from Facebook. Many of you will know already that this is a similar blogging site to Livejournal, maintained by former LiveJournal team members, and hosted in the US -- here is some recent information for new members posted by the team here.

While we don't plan to remove any content that's ever been posted here, we'd like to mark a line in the sand at which point we leave the top post on this community as a pointer to where we are now located. ron_newman has backed up the community twice to make sure all our older posts and comments are preserved. However, there is no way to continuously cross-post the community, and none of us will continue to push new posts over to Livejournal after May 1.

You can read more about the concerns regarding Livejournal as a platform here

Your team of moderators are open to suggestions about the style of the community on Dreamwidth, as it has not been chosen recently and is probably not as up to date as it could be for mobile or other readability. Please feel free to share in the comments.

On a personal note, leaving Livejournal a few months ago, other than this community, was personally very difficult for me as I’ve been using this platform more than fifteen years. I do quite like Dreamwidth and had no problems migrating over. I believe in the leadership team’s statement of diversity and guiding principles. I really hope that those of you who are similarly conflicted about LJ and want to maintain an open community for us to have discussion about just any old thing happening in Davis Square will find us there.

Comments

another moderator chimes in here

[ron_newman]

Thank you for making this announcement, which I agree is absolutely necessary. If read strictly, the new Russified LJ terms of service appear to prohibit a considerable amount of content that we consider routine here, such as discussions of politics and LGBT issues. They also refer to Russian laws that we'd rather not have to understand and comply with.

Although I suspect the Russian government doesn't much care what we post on LJ in the English language, I'd rather that our community not take the risk.

For comparison, here are Dreamwidth's terms of service, along with their guiding principles. Also worth reading is today's news announcement from the Dreamwidth team.

[ron_newman]

See also the discussion under the previous post on this subject, which was made by a non-moderator.

[gingicat]

Please note that if you have a Dreamwidth account, you should claim your OpenID so that things properly connect to you. The site owner also wrote up a good welcome note this week.

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38065.html

[siderea]

Yay!

[volantwish]

:thumbsup:

[ruthling]

thank you for keeping this community alive, and for moving here now.

[pru]

I hope it will stay alive!

[jducoeur]

Thanks much for all the hard work y'all are putting into this community.

I know that upping stakes and moving is tough, but I think it'll be for the best in the long run -- Dreamwidth is a lot more like LiveJournal used to be, in the general spirit and ethos of its team...

[pru]

We try! Most of the real work comes from ron_newman, I'd say.

[emcicle]

I made it! Change is scary, but I'll give it a try. :)

[pru]

I'm so glad!

Just saying hello!

[elramsay]

I created an account here. I usually post information about the Somerville Garden Club. We have a Garden Tour fundraiser coming up on June 25th that we're pretty excited about. I'll post information about it soon.

Thanks for keeping this community alive!

(I am using the Pink Panther for Lefty by sarken style for the site and it looks much nicer than the default.)

Re: Just saying hello!

[pru]

I just rediscovered this comment and just wanted to say it's hard to see it without entries, but I will take a look. Default styles usually look like garbage, so I'm not surprised that whatever we picked 7 years ago when DW was new looks like that.

No Google, Facebook, or Twitter login

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to point out that Dreamwidth does not provide a way for users to login with Google, Facebook, or Twitter credentials.

RE: No Google, Facebook, or Twitter login

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

You are right. I will note this.

[smammy]

What about davis_meta and davis_snark? (I know they're mostly dead, but it'd be nice to have the history at least. And who knows? Maybe there will be a snark renaissance!)

[pru]

Truthfully I think they are dead. Davis_meta mostly got replaced by a mailing list that the moderators use infrequently, and by the quietening down of the community as other sites like Facebook and Reddit spread out the online community related to the area.

Davis_snark has never been one of ours and I think is still run by rufinia -- but I don't know her or have a way to get in touch with her.