For a couple of years, I was a volunteer for the LiveJournal Support department. I was there long enough to rise to the level of a Support Administrator. I was initially drawn to it for a number of reasons. While much of it was boredom, I chose LiveJournal Support in particular because of the open-source nature of the project, the high ‘webmoral’ standards of the people in the driver’s seat like Brad Fitzpatrick, and the great community feeling of the people who did it. It was users helping users.
Over the couple years that I was involved with the project, lots of things ended up changing. Danga (LiveJournal’s parent company) got bought up by SixApart in January of 2005. 6A was a much larger company, and initially we were all quite happy that more development time and money might be provided to the project. However, this was not the case, and LiveJournal was sold once again to Russian-based SUP (pronounced “soup”).
Now don’t get me wrong — the time with SixApart wasn’t really all that bad. A lot of improvements were made to the service. However there were also some controversial changes (e.g. introduction of site ads). I can’t go into any detail (due to the NDA’s I have with Danga/SixApart), but there were things happening in the background that were out of control of the people who managed LiveJournal day-to-day (e.g. changing company circumstances, directives from upper management, etc..). In any case, the site continued to change under the direction of SUP, most recently with the removal of the Basic/Free account level (leaving only the paid or ad-supported account levels), and now proposed restoration.
Now I didn’t leave because of these reasons. I left because I no longer had interest in devoting time to the project. Now this is partially due to changes in my own life, but I think that deep down part of me was feeling a bit alienated. I lost my passion for what I was doing and had no motivation as a volunteer to keep helping.
The ideals of the original site are all but gone.
The site has the same name, but deep down at it’s core, it’s not the same site. It’s like waking up and realizing that your spouse of some years is a completely different person. Okay, well not quite as dramatic, and less worry about STDs, but you get the picture. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking a swipe at SixApart or SUP — there are some very smart people who have and/or still do work for them. I’ve never operated that large a company and am not qualified in the slightest to comment on their operations, beyond being a user who wonders if his journal, as he knows it, is going to be there tomorrow.
Now this is where an intrepid group of people comes in. A group of people — some former staff, some previous volunteers, all just regular LJ users — dared to really dream of where a site LiveJournal could be if it was completely driven by the community and had less overhead of a corporation. And so, Dreamwidth was born.
Now this is no small undertaking from both a technical and social standpoint. This group not only has to work on getting their new fork of the open source LiveJournal-codebase up to modern spec, but they are also looking to start a hosted community around this software, with more open and transparent community-based management. They are however making great leaps and strides.
It really gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that a community can grow so passionate about what really is their online “home” that they can pull something like this off. And I have every bit of faith that they will. Good on you, Dreamwidth team.
And we’ll see.. maybe I might try and see how far my PHP knowledge translates over to Perl…
