The Mandelbear's Musings

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.)

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!

...The judge dismissed the lawsuit, noting that security firms have every right to label software as they see fit, citing part of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

We often point to section 230, because it protects service providers from liability for the actions of the service providers' users. However, this is referring to a different part of section 230, which says that no service provider is liable for a good faith attempt to restrict access to something it deems objectionable. The court felt that the security company was a service provider, and that since it believed Zango was objectionable, then it has every right to try to restrict it. The court makes a second very important point. Zango complains that its software is not objectionable, and therefore the security providers cannot block it as objectionable. However, the court points out that the statute clearly says that it's for what the service provider finds objectionable. In other words, the content in question need not be "objectionable" at all -- it only matters what the service provider feels about it. This is a pretty strong endorsement for the idea that security companies absolutely can call software whatever they feel is appropriate.

This post by technoshaman points to annathepiper's recent post, which indicates that word of the latest LJ kerfluffle has been spreading, getting as far as Firefox News.

Now, whether Abe Hassan's comments on efw can reasonably be construed as "insulting to fandom" or merely a misguided and tactless attempt to get into the spirit of the Existential Flame War, the fact is that people have been construing it as an insult, adding to a rising tide of cynicism and anger. There is no doubt whatever that Hassan is a SixApart employee who makes official announcements on news, and should have known better (added) than to stick his oar into a hornet's nest (to mix a metaphor slightly).

There's an interesting contradiction in LJ's Terms of Service: Section XIV.2 seems to say that they have to notify you before they take anything down:

Should any Content that you have authored be reported to LiveJournal as being offensive or inappropriate, LiveJournal might call upon you to retract, modify, or protect (by means of private and friends only settings) the Content in question within a reasonable amount of time, as determined by the LiveJournal staff. Should you fail to meet such a request from LiveJournal staff, LiveJournal may terminate your account. LiveJournal, however, is under no obligation to restrict or monitor journal Content in any way;

... but section XVI says

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

1. Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; [my emphasis]

... and ends with:

If LiveJournal determines, in its sole and absolute discretion, that any user is in violation of the TOS, LiveJournal retains the right to terminate such user's account at any time without prior notice.

Which gives them a loophole they can drive a stretch hummer through, and they've obviously been invoking this clause with a heavy hand to please whatever entities are yanking their chain this week. It's an open question whether this loophole is a recent addition to the TOS, and whether it would get them into trouble if it came down to a court battle. I wouldn't count on it.

Bottom line: don't trust 'em. Back up your posts yourself, and start looking for a way to move your primary blog to a host -- or multiple hosts -- under your own control. To your scattered servers go, in other words.

So I see that permanent memberships are going on sale again -- for a week, starting Thursday. I've given them as gifts in the past, but I won't be doing it this year. I don't trust LJ anymore -- they're more concerned about looking good to investors than they are about their users' freedom of speech. (I was originally thinking of giving one as a graduation present, but I have since thought of something more personal, and arguably more useful.)

Like technoshaman says in this post, I'm looking forward to a day when we have a completely distributed blogosphere, where everyone controls their own content and it isn't tied to anyone else's server.

It's closer than you think.

Live Journal Attacked by Inocents (?) by panGloss

A rather more likely rumour is that LJ at first held firm, confident they were protected by the CDA, but panicked when WFI began going round their advertisers suggesting that LJ was not a nice place to hang out. This seems to have lead to a rather panicky surge of deletions of communities and journals. A more helpful approach would probably have been to have identified, before deletion or suspension, which communities were at least devoted to incest survivor support, and spared them the trouble of protest.

There are several opinions expressed that I don't agree with, but then it's an outsider. Some of them are answered in the comments, so keep scrolling.

See this post by czircon.

Despite the latest half-assed "apology", it doesn't look as though LJ is getting any of my respect, my trust or my money anytime soon.

Go read this post by ravan -- it's a line-by-line response to this post on news. It says a lot of what I'm thinking, only much better than I could have.

Let me put it another way: just because I now have censorship on my list of interests doesn't mean that I approve of it, any more than having La Marseillaise there means that I'd like to see "impure blood water our furrows". Though I might make exceptions in certain cases. Interest does not imply liking, no matter what their moronic sidebar says.

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.)

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.