Stand up and be counted!

LJ seems to be deleting journals and communities based on the presence of trigger words in their interests lists; for the most part these are fanfic, but the set also includes survivors of child abuse (that being one of the triggers).

To show Six Apart how many of their users are fans, the fandom_counts community has been started. You can join it here. Then post a pointer to alert the rest of your flist. I first got it from filkertom.

Sometime later tonight I'll post about what I think can be done. Hint -- it does not depend on persuading 6A to change their policies, nor on finding a friendlier provider.

The Recent Unpleasantness

You can find a good, reasonably objective summary of "the recent unpleasantness" in this post by catrinella. In brief, LJ's abuse team has been suspending journals and communities based on certain trigger words in their interests lists. In addition to clearly-inappropriate content, the suspended journals include some clearly labeled as fiction, fanfic, and even survivors of child abuse.

The following quote from this article at news.com sums up the situation pretty well:

LiveJournal's terms of service ban "objectionable" content and say any account can be deleted "for any reason." But the company also claims to "provide users with as much freedom of speech as possible."

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)."

In other words, they are deliberately targeting fanfic and other material they feel would be offensive to their advertisers and corporate backers, possibly on the word of an external group. It's important to realize that this is merely the most recent in a long string of actions on LJ's and 6A's part that demonstrate that they are simply another soulless corporation interested only in their bottom line. Their site started out as a platform on which one could build a lively, living community. But now you can build your community only up to the point where it attracts the ire of anyone with money or influence. Then you're gone.

This is not surprising, and it represents the fundamental problem with all social websites: you don't control your content, the service does. They will host it only as long as it doesn't interfere with their bottom line.

The only way to control your content is to host it yourself. The only way to build a community that will last is to build strong links among the sites controlled by the community's members.

In my next post I'll make a stab at one way to set about doing this.

... and what to do about it.

In previous post I described the recent unpleasantness and suggested that I had the beginnings of an answer. This article gives a little more information, and notes that many are jumping ship to LJ clones like JournalFen and GreatestJournal. But I don't think that's the answer.

As I said before, we need to take back our content.

There are some details I haven't worked out -- I'd like to have a simple, complete out-of-the-box package, but all I have are pieces. Here are the basics, though, and a few tools to get you started:

You need a place on the web where you can host static web pages, preferably in a domain that you own and without anyone else's advertising. But your ISP will do to get started. You do not need to be able to run scripts or a database. If you have a DSL or cable connection you could even host it at home -- I think that's where we're heading, but we're not there yet.

You do that, if you want to, on your computer at home. A program like Blosxom or ikiwiki will let you format and organize your own web pages offline, and construct the RSS and HTML summary pages you need to make a proper blog. I'm working on a more geekish solution based on the Unix utility make. You don't really need either. Just make a subdirectory of your main web page called "blog", and make entries with paths like "/blog/2007/0530/2150.html" or maybe ".../2150/title.html".

In other words, every entry is either a web page or a directory (which lets you put any images the page uses together with the text). Now all you have to do is run a little script to generate the RSS and HTML summaries and upload any new pages to your public website using a program like rsync or a web-based version-control system like Subversion or git.

Now, here's the part that will require a little more hacking on my part: there needs to be a script that parses the page for tags, builds the tag indices, and cross-posts to LJ or some other blogging site -- or sites -- based on the tags. That way, you can use LJ as your comment aggregator. The other missing piece is the little script that screen-scrapes LJ's email comment notifications and puts them back into your working directory. (You could run your own comment CGI script, but it seems like a lot of hassle. I stole this idea from ohiblather, by the way -- she has multiple blogs elsewhere on the web, and posts pointers to them in her LJ, which is also where she directs most of the comments.)

That takes care of the mechanics of blogging. I like the way Blosxom and ikiwiki let you integrate blogs and comments seamlessly into a website that might have much more in it. There's no reason, for example, why you can't allow comments on every page, or make a "changeblog" out of your version-control changelog entries to point your readers to new or revised pages.

The next thing you need is a "friends" page. Probably the easiest thing to use for that is Planet, a simple feed aggregator that generates a web page. Check out their list of planet-powered sites. But you don't have to publish your friends page at all if you don't want to; you can keep it on your own computer at home. And you'd better not if it has private or friends-locked posts on it, like you might acquire by reading your LJ friends page.

The thing I really don't have a good handle on is the community-building aspect of LJ. The rest of the blogosphere does this using things like trackbacks, pings, and blogrolls. I suspect that the FOAF project may be a large part of the answer: you put a machine-readable profile on your home page, and let FOAF-aware search engines do the rest.

What I'm really advocating is a move away from centralized services controlled by faceless corporations, back to a world where everyone (oops! ETA: runs their own node in the peer-to-peer network that is the Internet. Remember that TCP/IP is a peer-to-peer protocol -- which machine is the client and which the server depends entirely on what they're doing at any given moment.)