The Mandelbear's Musings

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.