Post-strike analysis

[mdlbear]

My analysis of today's LJ content strike can be found at:

http://steve.savitzky.net/Doc/Web/2008/missing_the_point/

Many of the people on my flist are respecting the strike (reluctantly in some cases); many more are ignoring it either because they haven't heard about it, or because they don't believe in either its goals, its methods, or both. A few have gone on to post the reasons why they are or are not respecting it. Almost all the arguments I've seen, on both sides of the debate, are missing the point entirely. I don't think even the originators of the strike understand it fully.

Bottom line: it was never intended as an economic weapon; it's merely a simple, reasonably painless way of sending a message both to LJ's Russian overlords, the public at large, and to ourselves. Of the three, the message to ourselves is perhaps the most important:

Leaving LJ isn't really a good option right now, because there's still a community here. If we could all pull up roots and transfer our blogs, our comments, and our network of friends over to someplace better, I think most of us would do it. I think we should be figuring out how to do just that, and not by moving to another centralized service that will eventually betray us in turn, but by building a decentralized community that can keep us in touch after we all take back control of our own content and "to our scattered servers go".

Some post-strike links I like: a post-strike analysis from technoshaman, and a good economic and cultural analysis by chipotle (by way of lysana). A striker returns...and responds to the critics by thatcrazycajun. (added 3/22: this post is also noted in comments to this post by beckyzoole.)

Comments

Marching to Different Drummers?

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

Another thought on LJ's user demographics, at least among those who post in English (I can't speak for the Russians): We seem to be heavily skewed toward various alternate-lifestyle communities.

If you look at stories in the mainstream American media about blogging, LJ isn't even a blip on their radar. But go to any gathering of science fiction fans or filkers or Pagans or kinky-sex folks and ask "Who here is on LiveJournal?" and you're likely to see a fair number of hands (or tentacles or whips or whatever) raised.

So what, if anything, does this mean in terms of building and maintaining our communities?

For one thing, we may not respond to some types of ads the same way "ordinary people" do. This could have implications for any type of advertising-supported setup.

What else is there to consider?

Re: Marching to Different Drummers?

[mdlbear]

Well, for one thing, it means that we're likely to place a much higher value on privacy, access-control lists, and reading lists. (LJ's "friends "list conflates access control and aggregation, which is a mistake.)

LJ is really very bad at defining friends filters: as far as I know you can't copy a filter and then modify it, or do boolean operations on filters.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

the community is the important thing and getting that beyond any single site needs an identity abstraction layer, an identity metasystem. sadly, the people doing the most interesting stuff around this so far work at Microsoft so get treated with more suspicion than not, but we need something that exchanges identity claims and tokens across systems, so as well as publishing private posts to a,b,c at LJ I can publish to x,y,z at blogger.com i,j,k at IJ and my sister with her rotorooter email.

[mdlbear]

Yup. Identity, reading lists, and access-control lists are the big ones.

To a lesser extent, some kind of hash-based identifier so that you can track posts across different servers.