links and more thoughts
Again, original post by atrata at this LJ post. Please direct comments there. First, I totally think we can do this. If there's one thing fandom is good at, it's organizing.
I'm at work, so I haven't had a chance to thoroughly read everything, nor to e-mail the million people who need e-mailing.
But here's what I'm thinking right now. Initially, I figured we could just set up an LJ clone on our own servers and call it good. But while LJ has a lot of awesome features that we all know and love and, to some extent, depend on, that feature set is not particularly optimized for fandom. I think Ponderosa's post brings up a lot of features that a journaling site could incorporate to make it more fandom-friendly.
Which brings me to the idea of porting the site over to python (or ruby or PHP or something; I am not married to the idea of any one language right this second, and I think it's too early to pick one). That will take a while, but I think it will give us a more extensible site.
The timing on that will help, I think. We're not ready to pull up stakes and move tomorrow. It will give us time to get our ducks in a row. It will give us time to figure out how to move our LJ content to the new space (I have an idea about that, actually, and I don't think it will be too terribly heinous). It will give us time to spread the word and get organized. I like florahart's idea of taking it somewhat slowly, of migrating our content over and testing the waters and then, one day, we all go.
Other issues that have come up: Money. Yes, this is going to cost us. We'll need our own servers (several of them) in a data center somewhere. We're talking about thousands of dollars a month. But we're also talking about tens of thousands of people, and right now, this project isn't really at the fundraising stages. It's in the talking-about-it stages.
And speaking of talking about it, talk about it! Please. Link, join, comment, post, spread the word. We want as many people from as many fandoms as possible in on this conversation or it's never going to work. Tell your friends. Tell your newsletters. Tell your mom. Etc.