Livejournal strike

I don't know how many people noticed, but last Friday (aka Good Friday) many people participated in a live-journal strike. The key facts are:

* The company running livejournal has been sold again. The ownership do several things which piss off to a greater or lesser extent people using livejournal. Removing the option to create free advertless accounts. Disallowing certain topics which are questionable to some people (eg. slash writers, but eg. breast-feeding and abuse survivors groups get caught in the fall-out). Disallowing certain interests. (Some of my friends barely noticed any of this. Some felt they had to leave.)

* But most importantly a lack of transparency: policies unilaterally decided, and vague and inconsistently used, and lying about why things happen. I can understand why the owners don't want to get into arguments and only care about paid users, but like it or not, livejournal now hosts a massive sprawling community. These things all hit paid users too, (even worse if a paid account is banned), and paid users are here because many of their friends with free accounts are (to a greater or lesser extent).

* Many people feel very personal about this because they made a lot of friends on livejournal and feel they'd have to give this up. That's understandable but not quite true. LJ has less lock-in that web-forums, though more so than newsgroups.

* Many people think the problems aren't really important. I don't think livejournal has become unusable -- it still does what I use it for, and probably will do so for years. But I think it will, it's just too big and will only get more ossified, not less.

* Some people say livejournal has a right to do what they like. That's mostly true -- they provide a service, and can do so as well or badly as they like. Although you might argue that someone who bought a permanent account has an expectation it won't be made useless by policy changes. However, you still have a perfect right to point out that their policies, while allowed, might be counter-productive and an implicit betrayal of what they previously offered people.

* Many people think a strike is useless. Certainly it doesn't directly harm the company at all. And many people do it simply because they feel an entitlement to what they were given before and want to make a fuss. However, if you're genuinely willing to leave livejournal, I think it's a perfectly good way of saying "Here are all the people who wanted to pay for the old service, and don't want to pay for the new service. Go ahead and do what you like, but remember, we don't like it, no longer feel any loyalty, and won't pay for it."

* However, I don't think it will achieve anything. I don't think the company will suddenly change it's mind. I think it's inevitable that the large the company is, the more bureaucracy becomes necessary. If I used a small community on a friend's server, there'd be no policies about what icons were ok apart from what he said, and I'd trust him.

* If livejournal were the first phone company, I'd be worried. A phone company is essentially a monopoly, if you don't like what they do, they have to be nationalised or you're stuck.

* However, I think a combination of openid, rss readers, and other blogging software can nearly replicate what livejournal does, without needing all your friends to move to the new system (or do anything at all) and a minimum of effort on your own behalf. Whether this "nearly" is close enough or not I need to find out. Currently, shifting to insanejournal or an openid website is a certain amount of hassle. But I expect there to be some tipping point where it's easy enough that you can move without losing your friends, when I expect/hope people to move across to independently run servers en mass.

* And if so, that'll also have the useful properties that (a) you're no longer reliant on one server being run in a sane manner, you can use a friend's server, or use a commercial server and leave if you don't like it any more (b) a long laundry list of features LJ never had the time to implement can be implemented on individual servers according to whoever has the time to code them.

* However, a truly distributed system suffers from lots of headaches. I don't know what'll be possible, if anything.

(no subject)

This weekend has no fixed plans. Feeling quite happy, I can do what I like. Should I:

* Go to london, see the zoo?
* Go to london, see the gallery?
* Write a short story about a murder in a fictional pantheon?
* Write lots of emails to livredor?
* Curl up in public somewhere and read for a day?
* Write some code for something simple but potentially useful?

Eastercon

* By Monday, I'd got tired and a weird ache in my back, so didn't sleep terribly well. I was fine, but decided to flake out early (ie. about 7.15). However, I have to remind myself that was still a wonderful weekend, I don't have to squeeze every second out if I don't happen to feel like it.

* I saw quite a bit of several SGO friends I've known for a while now, and realised that I've often been comparatively quiet in their company, to the extent they don't hear long discourses on religion, etc, that sometimes come out of me.

* Bugshaw made my day saying one of my stories, the Ted Hughes inspired "How the Kitten Became", made something about Christianity suddenly seem comprehensible. Can you repeat it here, I can't quite describe it? But I was very chuffed that someone had read it and got something out of it, thank you.

Gender neutral pronouns

I'm sure you all know the history of Gender neutral pronouns. And most think the question is mostly settled, although not agree in favour of what :)

However, it occurs to me some reluctance might come from the fact that although I have a little voice in my head saying "Women and men are the same. Gender neutral is good" I have a great big klaxon blaring "ALL INFORMATION IS GOOD! LEARN THINGS! BE INFORMED! COMMUNICATE FULLY! INF. ORM. ATION. GOOD." :)

That is, apart from not being aesthetically fond of most of the choices of gender-neutral pronouns, I'm not fond that that word choice is deliberately less informative. If you're talking about a genuinely neutral (eg. hypothetical) or ambiguous person, or you don't know, there's no information lost, but I still only use the pronouns where I have good reason.

But today a friend made another reference to the concept of "Geek as gender" and something occurred to me so obvious I couldn't believe it hadn't before.

What if we had two or more pronouns that drew *different* demarcations? We already have special pronouns for royalty and gods. ("Her Royal Highness's" etc and "His" etc).

You could adopt the archaic second-person model and have "te" (pronounced with a long e), "tis" and "ter" and "ve", "vis" and "ver" for intimate acquaintances and others. Or for social acquiantances and work acquaintances.

Or have different pronouns for different groups people can adopt as whatever they feel like identifying as in a certain concept. (Of course, you shouldn't identify solely as one thing, but most people are happy to identify as one thing but others as well.) Perhaps two sets would be most common ("he" and "she" or some other division), but that someone would borrow the Sindarin or Quenya pronouns from Tolkien and use them when affectionately referring to people from the Tolkien society.

Of course, now we near the Chinese problem of having too many, and having to decide when meeting someone whether to use the very formal or the extremely formal version of their pronoun.

But on the other hand, it seems more positive, as choosing to use such a pronoun doesn't sound like "my gender isn't important to me" but "this other aspect of our acquaintance is more important". And if you have a good reason to use other pronouns, it's not so jarring when someone does.

I'm afraid I haven't thought this out in detail, but I thought it was a lovely idea.

Features for blogging system

Not for an immediate livejournal replacement, but in general, how useful do you think friends-locking is, as compared to restricting to an arbitrary community? There seem to be several models used currently:

* Everything public
* Everything restricted to one community (eg. chiark, eg. an lj community, eg. the forum of a website) with some filtering to ensure that random people can't just join.
* Restricted to a set of people you know (a friends list)
* Restricted to a subset of people you know (eg. close friends, or people in society X)
* Restricted *from* a subset of people (eg. friends except for mum and friends of mum)

Almost all of the time I want posts to be either:

* Public, or
* Public to everyone online, but not to people I've never met

I appreciate the ability to talk to a subset of people, but rarely actually use it. The latter is when, if I were in a restricted community, I wouldn't mind posting to everyone in it, but don't want it completely public.

That is currently accomplished a couple of different ways. A restricted community of people on one server. That works, but gets awkward as it grows -- new people can socialise with community friends in a community only by joining one or the other. Or locking to a friends-list, but that means you can't get helpful drive-by comments from friends-of-friends.

Ideally, I'd like *both*. So journal posts I make can be seen by *either* members of the SGO *or* other people I designate as friends (or in an extreme case, according to my own pet heuristic, eg. "anyone in these groups, any other friends, and any of their friends except X, Y and Z". But even if the community was restricted to be "set of people on this server" that would be useful.

This is just one of the things I'm bearing it mind would be nice to think about in theory, and people use something instead of livejournal, it would be nice if it were able to have it.