Livejournal strike
Mar. 26th, 2008 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI 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.
* 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
Date: 2008-03-26 10:47 am (UTC)I think the biggest hole, currently, is filtered posts. RSS is fine for notification of posts, and with a bit of S2 hackery, an LJ server where you have a paid account can be persuaded to export complete posts over it (as I've done). Unfortunately, it seems that if your audience currently uses LiveJournal, there's no way to put your filtered posts where they want them to be, on their friends pages, except to post to LiveJournal, because LJ has no concept of private/authenticated feeds. I consider this to be slightly artificial lock-in on LJ's part.
In the longer term, the distributed system you suggest could use authenticated RSS or something similar to let people view each other's posts. A trackback-style system would avoid polling, but there'd need to be some kind of bulk-synchronisation fallback. The hole in these systems is comments, and rather than developing some sort of increasingly-complex comment synchronisation protocol, I think people are going to have to accept visiting separate sites to see/add comments at that point. Ideally, of course, this should be transparent to them: perhaps, instead of polling RSS feeds to get entire entries, you just retrieve an authenticated RSS feed with subjects only, at the time of viewing, and your viewer then uses something like an iframe to show you the post, its comments, a comment form, etc.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-26 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-26 12:42 pm (UTC)I don't have a coherent design for an entire distributed blogging system built around it, but I should at least point out that a protocol for synchronising a constantly-growing set of posts between multiple servers does already exist and has had decades of testing and several working implementations...
no subject
Date: 2008-03-26 01:00 pm (UTC)As for using it to synchronise between blog hosts... maybe, but it would need so many extensions to be on a par with LJ that I fear much of that stability could be lost.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-26 01:39 pm (UTC)NNTP isn't inherently plain-text only. Posting multimedia articles in MIME, bristling with encoded binary attachments and rich text in HTML or any other format you like, is perfectly technically feasible; it's just Usenet convention which frowns on it as poor etiquette.
And NNTP does have access control! The server through which I read news imposes distinct access restrictions on different groups, and provides me with a cryptographic authentication protocol via which my client can prove my identity to the server without revealing the cookie or any replayable data to eavesdroppers. (Active attackers can have more fun, but one could always shoot for NNTP over SSL if one cared about that.)
no subject
Date: 2008-03-26 10:46 pm (UTC)I think if that problem could be solved everything else would be pretty easy.