Marsden is Here

This weekendish DreamWidth is changing one of it's service providers because [DW have] ethics. You can read the details in the DW Maintenance post and comments if you want to know more.

The comments took a left turn into free-speech, censorship and content-moderation (which are, to be clear, completely unaffected by this move) and several very good analogies were brought up which I want to preserve for my own future reference/use :)

Content warning: references to potentially triggering topics.

For a tamer example, it would be entirely possible to make a bot that responds to everything a particular person posts on Twitter with pictures of human poop. If you use public-domain images, like Wikimedia's, it's even legal. But no one wants to use a website that's plagued by Poop-Bot and its ilk. A site that allowed Poop-Bot to run rampant would lose all its users in short order.

I somehow think, even though it's just gross and not actually dangerous, Poop-Bot would get kicked off the vast majority of "free speech" sites.
raininshadows

Everyone always says they want to use a website that doesn't "censor" content. ("Censor" in scarequotes there because people treat it like it's a magical word even when they're not treating it like the greatest possible offense... If you actually look at how people behave, though, the vast majority avoid unmoderated or undermoderated spaces, and the people who don't avoid them are the ones who've been kicked off every other service -- usually for cause -- and are shitty fucking neighbors. People do not actually want to hang out on a website that is nothing but spam and neo-Nazis! They just have no idea how much careful effort it takes to keep a website from becoming wall-to-wall spam and neo-Nazis, because good content moderation is invisible; they never see the amount of stuff that gets removed or the sheer volume of shit-tier spam and garbage that would cover 95% of every even mildly active site in 24 unmoderated hours.
denise

...banning content that actively harms human beings isn't censorship, it's basic safety and human rights.
...
This isn't about free speech, it's about protecting users from actively harmful content like human trafficking and doxxing. As in, things that happen to real human beings and should not be happening to real human beings.
sarajayechan

"Free speech" is the wrong framing! "Free speech" is about the government suppressing or punishing you for what you say, and we aren't the government. Any online site that accepts user-generated content (which is the fancy term for "the stuff y'all post" as opposed to "the stuff the site itself posts") has to set forth content policies that govern what their users can post, because without those policies (and active enforcement of them) a site will be unusable in days, if not hours, because it will be overrun with spam, child sex abuse material, and a thousand other categories of things that make a service impossible to use and create legal liability. Like every other site out there, we have content policies that govern what people are and aren't allowed to post, and we will (and do) remove content that's reported to us that violates those policies.
denise

Actual free speech actively requires deplatforming those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others.
onewhitecrow

There's an immense difference between fictional content and conduct that has concrete, tangible, offline harm. (Not trying to police your use of the term at all, but I personally try to avoid "real-world", because dammit, after 20+ years of us all living, working, and socializing online, and *especially* after the pandemic and associated virtual event shift, "online" *is* also the real world.) But there's also a huge difference between "someone posted a link to my Twitter account" and "someone posted a link to the GPS coordinates of my house", and the potential consequences of both are wildly different. Smart policy needs to recognize that!
denise

Update 2018: Facebook "threw it's toys" and for a while became completely unavailable through IFTTT. All existing applets were deleted. As I write this it has come back a little, but you can currently only push posts out to Pages, not your personal feed :(

~~~

One of the few reasons I continue to maintain my LiveJournal account has been the FaceBook cross-posting extension (so posts go from here at Dreamwidth to LiveJournal, and them public posts go on to FaceBook). It works pretty well, but I've been meaning to find a way to cut LJ out of the loop so that people clicking on my FB links come to here instead of there. The final push came in learning that LJ now has it's hardware and thus it's data in an even more insecure location than previously.

I've also been meaning to investigate the If This Then That service for some time and multiple responses to googling for a pre-existing solution pointed there.

This solution will work for any blogging or journal service which provides an RSS feed of recent entries. (Find your Dreamwidth RSS urls here). This will only work to cross-post publicly published entries not friends-locked ones, but that doesn't matter for my use-case. The cross-post is not instant as IFTTT will only check the feed every so often; but should appear within the hour.

[Note: the below captures are displayed at reduced size for ease of layout]

1. Sign up for an IFTTT account and find your way to the My Applets page.

2. Click the New Applet button

3. Now the first time I visited this page I didn't even register that the blue "+this" part of "if +this then that" as displayed in this screenshot was clickable (damn flat designs) and followed the link below it instead, which was not helpful. So click on the +this - assuming the interface is mostly unchanged.



4. Choose your service: the service you want is "Feed" (generally an orange-and-white icon with a dot and two semi-circles above-right of it)



5. Choose a trigger: I just used "New Feed Item", if I wanted to narrow it down for Dreamwidth I would set up the feed itself to only display particular tags rather than relying on the content to include a keyword.

At the next screen paste your feed url into the box and click Create Trigger. You'll be taken to a page displaying "if [RSS icon] then +that". Now it's more obvious where to click, we're learning.



6. Choose your service: FaceBook. I think it was at this point I had to link up my Facebook account into IFTTT. Don't give it access to anything it doesn't need; and see step 9 to clean up these permissions from FB itself as there doesn't seem to be any way to edit them from the IFTTT end.

7. Choose your action: Create a link post.
At the next screen the Link Url field will be filled in for you, don't touch that.



You can add what you like to the Message field, click on the +Ingredient button below it to add details from the post itself. After some experimentation with various post content and the EntryContent ingredient I gave up on that and just put a generic message about the source of the post in here. There were some issues around getting line breaks in the right places while stripping out html tags and dealing with journal cuts. Some of my posts can get quite long and I can see them copying over to FB in a very messed up way.

On that note: the link tag will pick up on an image you have in the content; it will not pick up your profile icon as a fallback. The short summary and the icon were the two things that I consider were better about the LJ implementation.

8. Click the "Create Action" button, wait for the page to update, leave notifications or turn them off as you wish (they only show up in your IFTTT dashboard, I'd leave them on for a while at least for debugging, you can come back and turn them off later) and then the Finish button. The applet will now be available in your My Applets panel.



Click on it here to go to a larger view where you can see see it's status (bottom pane), manually run the check for new posts (bottom pane) or change the settings/delete (cog icon, top left)

9. Go to your FaceBook > Settings > Apps and click on the IFTTT icon to check what permissions IFTTT has actually received (they certainly didn't match what I thought I had allowed it). At minimum for this purpose it should only need the "required" access to your public profile and the ability to Post to your timeline. If you are pushing the posts to a page or group instead of your personal timeline it may also need permission to manage those. Also make sure it is posting with the level of access you told it to.



"Helpfully" once you uncheck items and save they disappear from display. I haven't found a way to get them back except theoretically by deleting the App from the FB end and re-establishing the link from IFTTT. In the course of my experimentation I did "Disconnect" and "Reconnect" from the IFTTT end but this did not give me the option to re-select permissions. It did delete the instance of the cross-posting app I had created with no warning though :( So beware of that.

~~~
Now the last thing I need to dispense with LJ entirely is a reliable way of backing up Dreamwidth locally. Currently I still use LJArchive (from the LJ cross-posts) but I haven't had any luck getting it to reliably talk with DW.

Last week Public Address put out an appeal for donations not just towards keeping the server lights on but towards keeping the site owner/manager paid. The latter bit was new, the former happens periodically. Aggregated I probably throw $100-$150 at PA a year (or would like to), that's probably comparable to the cost of a quality dead-tree subscription (I really have no idea.) That is a measure of the value I see PA providing as a current events forum and community.

Comparatively I did not sign up with the NZ Herald when they experimented with a paywall a while back regardless of the amount of personal value I was finding find in their site because they were locking the content away from everyone else. (And signing up for a subscription / having to log in to see stuff / just seemed too complicated. There's a low but non-trivial barrier there.)

I repeatedly refuse to take out a subscription to The Press (local dead-tree paper) when the telemarketers call because I have no interest in the bulk of the content, even though it would leave me better informed on local events and I do eagerly read the interesting parts of the paper whenever I happen across a copy. I would probably subscribe to a pdf version of selected sections delivered to my inbox daily.

Back to PA - some discussion surfaced over there about how to pay for "the good stuff" in general - not just stuff that brings value to the individual but that adds to the entire conversation. Or provides the forum in which to have the conversation, which PA excels at. As Russell sums it up (emphasis mine)

But there is another model. The subscriber radio model. My readers don’t actually need much persuading that the argument for paying so that everyone can have nice things is a strong one. In the past two years, I’ve made more from asking them for a contribution than I have from advertising. Keith Ng has also had some success in asking readers to crowdfund his stories – after he’s published them.

But this needs a permanent structure, and it needs to work for all of us. One solution I see is this: a simple, voluntary subscription system which can be joined by any New Zealand website or blog at one end, and any reader at the other. In concept, it’s simple.

As a means of funding advertising just doesn't cut it, especially for the niche sites and site-specific subscription models / paywalls only seem to work if you have a (large) critical mass of subscribers who find personal value in what you deliver.

But the things I find myself paying for in something like a subscription manner are those that match the bit I emphasised in the quote above - those who can afford contribute so that *everyone* can have nice stuff, and can hopefully be secure in the fact that should they fall on hard times they (which includes quite a bit of "I") will still have access to those services.

This is the model Livejournal used to have before it was sold to someone who wanted to make a profit from it and the model Dreamwidth is emulating since it opened up basic accounts.

Wikipedia is another site that I consider "new-media" which I contribute to periodically. And I have put my bit towards crowd-funding other initiatives like NWZ

Heck even the photo-hosting I pay for is to ensure others continue to get use and enjoyment from my putting them out there, off-site backup is a bonus.

I'd happily pay for the things FaceBook does well - essentially providing hyper-local news about my social circle and event management - as long as it meant that my friends also continued to be able to use the service and were treated a little less like "product". I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay; maybe around that $100 a year; maybe up to $300 in small chunks. That might sound a lot in this digitally priced age but remember conceptually I would be paying not just for me, and it would still be less than a dollar a day.

There is certainly a personal use component - Twitter or Tumblr could both operate on the same model and at the present time I wouldn't "subscribe" because I don't use them a great deal although I have accounts and follow some people who surface interesting stuff. But I'm certain there are plenty of people who would.

~~~
Another model I saw some time ago - and I can't remember what it was called now - was a Tip jar model where you paid in some amount each [time period] and sites authors could embed a click widget - at the end of the [time period] however much you had put in was divided among the people whose content you had found valuable enough to 'Tip' on. As I recall the service folded because of not reaching critical mass.

And that is really the rub when it comes to setting up a mass provider/subscriber model. Not only do you need the people willing (and able) to pay for the greater good and the people willing (and able) to help generate content with value (including the work of maintaining the spaces/communities where good conversation happens around the content) you need to strike the balance where they break-even. I say break even because I don't think there is a for-profit model here. Instead you have people being paid for producing content, people being paid for maintaining communities, developers being paid to improve those communities with new features, web-hosts being paid to host them .... quite a lot of people (hopefully) making a living, quite a lot more people getting value from the work they do, and really what more do you need?

So since
- LJ completely screwed up one of the main things I'd been paying them for
- and are in the process of breaking another, and more
- and not a lot of my friends post here any more any way

... I've taken my money and my posting to Dreamwidth. Public entries at least will still be cross-posted back to LJ - I'm not sure if that will work for friends-locked entries.
See you on the flip side.

(This also means that when my paid time expires you'll start seeing ads on the journal. That's another thing I was paying them not to have, sorry.)

There was a note in my reminders today that it is my 10th anniversary of signing up for LJ. 10 years is a long time on the internet and it seems almost ironic that this comes as I am only a couple of procrastinated posts away from wrapping up here. (I have turned off the auto-renew on my paid account - it expires fully in January).

So what will this archive say about me to some future e-anthropologist? Looking at my tag list (tags hadn't been "invented" when I started but I did go back and tag many of my previous posts when they came to LJ) the biggest one is "life". And indeed this is the closest thing to a diary I've ever managed to keep. It is sporadic and incomplete, recording more of the bad than the good and there are certainly things there which time has mercifully buried in my personal memory. (For this reason I'm always cautious about reading randomly back through the archives myself.)

Breaking out more useful topics than life, blather and vent - photos (almost synonymous with party and kaos) of course, links (before Facebook and Google+ made sharing these so much more immediate - if even more ephemeral), family, material things (money, house, car and computer), rpgs and board games. Work. "To do" chronicles serious minutiae as I resorted to publicly presenting and crossing off the chores as a motivational aid. Angst and introspective and more recently "puzzle pieces" deal with self-consciously spitting out the pain, acknowledging and trying to figure out myself (with limited success).

Wider matters are spread among many tags - politics, economics, and the like but I have put quite a few words into some of these posts. Tags are a very imprecise measure of quantity or quality - the meme tag is still quite significant even though it has been years since memes were a thing on LJ. Many of those entries included external content which is now broken.

~~~
Some stats pulled from my logged-in profile.
3,354 journal entries
4,637 comments received
3,473 comments posted
172 tags
16 memories (never used this much)
7,017 photos (now mostly inaccessible due to LJ a) completely borking the transfer to a new scrapbook while b) dropping sub-galleries)
25 userpics

92 friends of which 76 are mutual and about 4 post with any regularity (another handful with some irregularity). A far cry from the day when my friends page could move at the same speed as my Facebook wall now does. "Also friend of" 30 accounts (which I'd lay money have no greater rate of activity on them).

~~~
I still need somewhere in my life to put all this stuff down. I've looked around a few times but nothing else has the same combination of features that LiveJournal has had - Facebook is a pain to read back and temperamental about what it shows your friends (even before the privacy issues). Blogger has recently introduced the ability to have a friends list of sorts but I don't think you make groups or limit who can see your posts. Wordpress.org does sort of but no-one I know "lives" there. Tumblr for all that you can customise your posts page does not allow you to similarly modify the appearance of your friends page (dashboard) - and that is the page where I spend all of my time and that is the page anyone following me will see my posts in - it lacks personality.

This last is the change that LJ is about to force on all its users (but with a far less pleasant dashboard) and this is the change which is forcing me to leave.

Dreamwidth seems to be where it's at. Not where the people are at - a few of my friends have moved but I don't think even they post over there any more. Facebook and to a lesser extent G+ are where the people are. (Hmmm, I wonder if G+ has integrated blogger to the point you can push a post out to one of your circles. That might be worth another look.) Dreamwidth is an LJ clone/fork dedicated to keeping those feature which made LJ so damn useful in the first place. It will apparently let me cross-post the public stuff back to LJ so the people who come here looking for photos can still find them. It will let me import custom friend groups so I might even be able to cross-post back friends-locked stuff.

~~~
So long LJ. Thanks for being there all those times when I had no one to listen to my rants or my woes so that there was at least the illusion that someone might notice. Thanks for giving me that window into other peoples lives and thoughts that I could never get through meatspace interaction. Thanks for improving my typing speed and my writing style, thanks for teaching me how writing thoughts down can clear the head and bring insight or finally, closure.