Justification for leaving LJ
Just for the record; I'm just doing the mirroring; the post was done by atrata, and isn't my work. I'm just doing a mirror (in case the main site at LJ goes missing) so that it's easier for folks to read. There are going to be a couple of posts today, so I apologise if it spams your friends list.
Original post here. Please direct comments there. I'll enable commenting if the site is deleted from LJ.
For a variety of reasons, I think it is time to start talking very seriously about fandom's exodus from LJ. I don't think this is the space really discuss the whys; those have been done to death. This is a discussion predicated on the fact that many of us feel that the time has come to leave, but we have concerns about doing so. As far as I can tell, the concerns are these:
We're not going anywhere our friends aren't going, too. All our friends, in all our fandoms. Fandom is not just about fic and art and vidding and icons. It's about community, and that community needs to stand up and move, en masse, if this is going to work. Not just HP fandom or SPN fandom or PoT fandom or, I don't know, Japanese boy band fandom, but all of fandom.
We're not going anywhere that's going to screw us again. Almost all of us have been burned at one point or another by an archive or a hosting provider or a journaling service. We've been assured that, yes, this is a safe fannish space. Then we've been banned. We are therefore pretty cautious about signing up for new things that don't have some kind of proven track record.
Actually, I'm not sure what the other concerns are. We need a place that's safe for all of us. We want the perks we've become accustomed to here on LJ: our icons and our styles and our whathaveyous.
There are other journaling sites out there, but I feel like if we were going to move to one of them, we'd have done so already. So I think what we need is a place that has been built by fen, where the people in charge are fen, and we know each other and are accountable to each other.
Over in my LJ, I said that I was going to buy some server space and download the LJ code and see about getting it installed. Some people pointed out that others are doing something similar, and someone else asked about fanarchive, etc. Which I think is a great idea and I'm absolutely open to working with them on that project. However, it doesn't seem to me as if this will really compete with that. Fandom, sure, is about fic and other fanworks. But mostly it's about community, and I think we need to maintain a journaling service to maintain that community.
But this isn't going to work if five groups of people make five different journaling sites. We need to work together, as a giant fannish collective, and make this happen. So. What are you doing, and how far have you gotten? What do you need? What problems have you run into? What should I be thinking about? Who should I be talking to? PS. Please direct any comments to the original post here. I'll enable commenting if the site is deleted from LJ.