I’ve been doing some musing on Dreamwidth, off and on. The question that keeps coming into my head is… why?
Reading the various getting started posts there, and the various FAQs, it appears that Dreamwidth is going out of their way to make it easy to integrate their accounts with LJ. When you post to your DW account, you can automatically crosspost to your LJ account. Your LJ friends can read your accounts as DW friends via OpenID. You can use tags to easily refer to LJ users on DW. You can import your entire journal over to DW with no effort on your part.
So, with all this, who is going to move over to Dreamwidth? I can see some of the fandom-obsessed folks moving — the ones who were turned off by the whole “adult content” thing… but I can’t really see most individual journals moving, unless their constituancy was mostly fandom (and I’m pretty sure such journals will cross-post to LJ). So what it seems to me will happen is that the LJ/DW division will be like the good company/bad company split they’ve spoken of for banks and the automakers. LJ will retain the folks that haven’t chafed at the restrictions — the type of folks that aren’t posting the borderline or problematic posts — and the type of folks that advertisers probably like. DW will get the folks who were writing the more borderline posts… but to keep their friend base, they will likely still crosspost to their basic or plus LJ accounts. Thus LJ will still benefit from their content.
Of course, those who want to write their more intense (how’s that for a euphemism) fanfics and have their more intense RPGs will just migrate over to DW. They will be happy, because that content will be permitted. The specific groups interested in that writing will either follow along, or read from LJ. LJ will only be hurt if fandom is a significantly large portion of the user base that brings in funds. I’m not sure that’s the case.
It will be interesting to see LJ’s reaction to DW during the next news post… and how the comments will react. Will fandom and the folks that tend to comment on such posts be less invested in LJ’s actions now that they have DW as an alternative? Time will tell.
Lastly, as I’ve noted before, although I do have a DW account, it exists only to reserve the name and read any F-O posts over there. LJ will remain my journaling home for the foreseeable future.
