Here I am!

[trixtah]

Yay, I can haz a Dreamwidth account! I'm crossposting this to LJ, and for those there who don't know what I'm on about, here's a precis of the compelling features from their homepage:

Dreamwidth Studios is based upon the LiveJournal codebase offered by LiveJournal, Inc. We've taken the LiveJournal server code and updated, modernized, and streamlined it -- and we make all of our changes available under an Open Source license.

We know we can never be all things to all people, and we're not going to try. We are, however, hoping to be the best option available for people who want to make things and share them with other people, and we want you to have confidence in our operations and our decisions.

We believe that you should always be able to figure out why we make the decisions we make. We'll communicate with you, openly and honestly, as people and not as a corporate face. We'll make our decisions and our process as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback and opinions at all stages. We think you should always know what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what we hope to accomplish.

We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don't own you or your content -- we hope that you'll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.

We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it's possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship -- and we're committed to showing you what we're taking in, what we're spending, and where the money's going.

So there you go. I feel very optimistic about this project - they're certainly going about it in an open and professional way. I also very much agree with their stated aims and ethos - I'm happy to give my money to people who are determined to offer this kind of service with those kinds of underpinnings.

The "open beta" starts at the end of the month, but I'm glad to have received an invite early, thanks to denise and the big invite giveaway for those who pre-registered using their LJ OpenIDs. Anything I post here, I'll be crossposting to LJ for the foreseeable. I'm also thinking about revving up some of the communities I moderate on LJ - there definitely needs to be a SUID. :-) Even if there aren't that many people around yet (some thousands), placeholder comms are probably not a bad idea.

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

Glad your here.

Creating comms sound like a good thing.

[trixtah]

Yep, I think it'd be a good idea to get some community stuff going for those of us who aren't of the fannish persuasion (and for those who are, of course!).