So apparently some shit went down this weekend or last week as LiveJournal decided to integrate with Facebook via their Connect thing. Many people have apps and such that update FB when they post on LJ or any other blog, btu this apparently goes deeper. Something about comments also crossposting and F-Locked and Private entries making an appearance without the owners say so. Plus, some weird stalking stuff that… I don’t even fully understand. I really should try, but it’s all a labarynthine mess of fuckedupness that I just want to run and hide.
Apparently tons and tons of people have left LiveJournal over this but tons and tons of people also signed up. There is screaming, worries, and a really good explanation of much of this from Cleolinda. Okay then.
My main concerns are thus: even if I don’t give LJ permission to integrate my journal with FB, can other people do so? Like, can someone like or comment on a locked post, thus exposing its contents to people on FB? Even if it’s only a snippet or the beginning of the post, I am not at all down with that. Given FB’s horrid privacy policies and their penchant for letting other people put all your business on the Internet (i.e. Places lets you check your friends in to locations, tagging a picture puts that on your wall and photo album without your express permission, etc.), I think this new mess does not bode well for the semi-privacy of the FLocked content.
But I moved all semi-private operations to Dreamwidth long ago, so there’s not as much stake for me. For others maybe so. I guess this is why so many people moved over there.
For right now, my strategy isn’t going to change. I’ll still cross-post to LiveJournal but ask people to comment here. All of my Dreamwidth posts are restricted to my access list right now1 and there’s an RSS feed of this blog there. The only change I can see happening is that I might start cross-posting from this journal to my actual DW account and not just the feed and maybe allow comments.
I don’t plan to leave LiveJournal because there are still plenty of people there. But I long ago stopped giving them money directly and I hope everyone who views my journal there uses ad blocking software. It may take a while, but I think the community I care about is going to end up on Dreamwidth as well as spread out over Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. What I like about right now is that there are ways to aggregate these disparate social networks so you can keep up with someone no matter what. But I understand the longing to keep the community at LiveJournal intact as it is something special. I just wish the company wasn’t making it so damn hard…
At any rate, for those of you who just moved to Dreamwidth, you can find me here. Please introduce yourself if you subscribe just so I can match accounts/people in my head. Here’s the feed for those who want that. I have some DW codes if people still need some.
Footnotes
- BTW, I really like this feature. For those who don’t know, on Dreamwidth there are two levels of following/friending. There’s subscribing to someone’s journal — wherein you can read their public posts on your FList — that can go either one way or be mutual. But even if I decide to subscribe back to that user, she does not automatically have access to my locked posts. I have to grant her further access to those if I choose. This means I can follow someone without worrying whether they are the type of person I want reading my locked stuff. Everyone is happy. [⇧]
What made me decide to at least set up a DW account and crosspost isn’t the privacy-risking thing itself (though I do have friends who have very good reasons to separate real name and LJ handle, ranging from stalkers to professions) so much as LJ’s complete and utter lack of useful response to complaints and questions. Again.
When someone comments to your locked post and chooses to crosspost, what gets posted on FB/Twitter is the text of their comment (shortened if need be to fit within character limits) and a link back to your locked post, and the link names your journal. Roughly, “so-and-so-crossposter posted a comment to yourjournal at livejournal.com, .” Which does not expose your words in your post — people following the link can’t read your post unless they would have had access anyway — but the context of your post can often be betrayed by the text of the comment, plus now all these FB/Twitter friends of your commenter now know that there exists a journal (your journal) under your journal name, and that you discussed this general topic in that journal under lock. If someone knew you had a journal but weren’t on that filter, well, now they know you filtered them out. If you had mutual friends who didn’t know you had an LJ but would recognise you from the name/profile, your protective obscurity is stripped away. And it happens without any notification to you.
There’s also the problem of it being common practice when commenting to quote portions of an original post, so anything this hypothetical crossposter quotes would be posted publicly too.
Btw, don’t know if anyone else is experiencing this, but when I try to put my website url in the form, it causes some kind of open id error and won’t post.