where will i go

[piranha]

don't know yet. i am not leaving in a huff with a bag hastily thrown together in the middle of the night, i'm leaving when i've found a place that seems better. and then i'll transfer what i want to keep of my content here. and that'll be a little while.

and i'll maintain this journal to read and comment on other people's LJ's. i'm not leaving with intent to punish LJ in whatever small way the withdrawal of $25 a year will "punish" them, but because i just no longer want to slide along on the descent into prudish mainstream sentiment. it doesn't fit me; i want MORE freedom of expression, not less, even if i might find other people's kinks gross and distasteful. it's becoming a more and more important issue for me that people be allowed and even encouraged to express themselves creatively however suits their fancy.

and when i go i'm gonna go journal elsewhere and RSS feed it, so at least all the people who're staying here can get it easily. i did that before; the feed is even still around (though it's not feeding anything right now). it worked alright, except that LJ still allows comments on RSS feeds which i wish they would stop.

haven't decided where. i have an account on journalfen, but i am basically not a real fan, and feel mildly out of place there. greatestjournal has no actual policy that makes me feel any better about them than i feel about 6A. also, the name sucks. insanejournal has a clearer policy, but the name also sucks. i should check whether my old deadjournal still exists, and what their policy is, but you know? the name was funny at the time as a counterpoint to LJ, but now it... sucks. :). there is the LJ clone twocorpses is creating (http://scribblit.com) -- the name doesn't suck, and it's not designed to be fandom-specific, but i expect it'll be mostly fandom at first. and the mods of yaoi_daily are beta-testing their own site, yaoi-fandom specific. since i am sorta part of that fandom more than any other, i'll definitely stake out a presence there, but that will inform my posting content, and remove me even more from non-yaoi-loving pals, which is most of you, so that's not the best all-around solution. i want to post more general things again.

i don't know about usenet. i keep missing it, but whenever i try to rejoin, it doesn't stick. i think it's the hierarchy-bound structure -- even in groups i love, where topics are allowed to drift some (like alt.polyamory) i feel bound by the topic space. and i really don't want to talk about just polyamory anymore; it feels... old. i live it, and i have zero problems with it, and i don't want to re-chew all the newbie issues; i sound like a broken record. i want to talk about "whatever" with other people who're similarly interested in intelligent discourse.

while LJ is in some ways too insular, too alt.fan.me.me.me, one of the main advantages of the LJ platform is its easy community formation unrelated to specific interests -- the, albeit misnomered, friends list is so handy. if i leave, most of these friends will not be on the same site anymore. and the LJ paradigm leaves me wanting something more; i've never been really happy with it. ergo i am strongly inclined to leave the LJ platform altogether.


since i've been asked what it looks like, the sort of place i want, i'll write a separate post on that in more detail, and i'll be asking y'all what your ideal place would look like.

Comments

Re: Usenet and topicality

[eagle]

Yeah, I got what I wanted out of Usenet via That Hierarchy, which has that complete topic freedom (threads sometimes move into vaguely more appropriate groups and they generally start in some group relevant to the original message, but that's about it and there's a *.general group). It's really about the collection of people rather than the topic, and that works great. I post probably as much to That Hierarchy as I used to post to Usenet proper except in areas where I wasn't just posting for fun and instead was playing some sort of role.

I don't think the set of people meets the set of people you really want to talk with, though. It's a bunch of sysadmins and related technical people mostly geeking about computers, and while that's fun, there's a certain breadth of discourse that's a bit lacking (and which I personally get from chatservers).

Also, it's as healthy as it is because it's closed and you have to know someone to get access.

Re: Usenet and topicality

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i've lurked there now and then, and i feel like much more of an outsider than i used to, because i am really out of all that techie stuff now. it's like That List; i no longer fight spam, so i am just not in the thick of things anymore. and the discussion of the side subjects, because the group of people is techie and in general pretty hardcore stubborn just tend to annoy me more than delight me.

they're both sorta my people, but i am on their periphery. which is true for most groups; SF fandom being the largest. i wonder how yaoi fandom will be for me; subject-wise i can be right in the middle of that, but age-wise i am way outside. i'm really curious how that new yaoi site will work out; it'll be fun to be in on the ground floor of a new community. but i don't expect it will fulfill my discussion needs overall.

i've never made a new place with the idea "if you build it they will come". i don't think i have what it takes to do that -- one of my LJ interests is "unintentional communities" after all :). but some days i am tempted to try. without a fixed idea of "for what", but with all sorts of modular structure in place that could support anything.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm also really frustrated at the gap between LJ, where I can't really start or participate in long discussions, and usenet, where there are heaps of cool people, but I feel constrained by the subject area. I think almost everyone on alt.poly feels like that these days; we only really talk poly when a newbie asks a question.