Dreamwidth's Privacy Feature

[unspeakablehorror]

One thing I really like about Dreamwidth is that you select the people who can see your private posts by putting them on your access list and that concept isn't folded in with followers or mutuals. Because for me whether someone follows me (and whether I'd like to allow someone to follow me) or even we both follow each other isn't the same as whether I feel comfortable with them viewing my private posts.

I can choose to add people who aren't following me at all on my access list if I want to, and I don't have to show my private posts to all my followers or even all of my mutuals if I don't want to. I'm glad places like Mastodon and Pillowfort have real privacy features, unlike a site like Tumblr, but I like Dreamwidth's privacy options in terms of who can see your private posts the best out of all of those.

Comments

[alisx]

Mood.

Granular post privacy settings came from LiveJournal way back in the late 90s! The fact they got lost along the “Web 2.0” way will never not bum me out. :(

[unspeakablehorror]

That makes sense. My first social media was Tumblr so I missed out on LiveJournal's heyday, but I've read about how the LiveJournal software was open-source so Dreamwidth is basically uses a fork of their software. I remember people talking about other forks like DeadJournal back in the day too, but I wasn't really very into socializing then so I never made any social media accounts. I'm guessing a lot of the functionality here is similar to what LiveJournal had.

And yeah, I really think certain older interface features, like the granular privacy settings here, or the tag cloud, are superior to what's common in newer interfaces. My dream social would be a mash-up of all my favorite features from different new and old social media sites.

[alisx]

DW is pretty much straight LJ circa 2009, with a few minor tweaks. And yeah, there were probably about… four? Five? Main *Journal sites in the clone heyday.

I actually think it was blogs, i.e. decentralization, that killed the old LJ privacy model, since there wasn't an obvious way of doing cross-site role-based access (and most blog software didn't even try and solve it as a problem, ref. for e.g. WordPress). So by the time the first gen social media sites rolled around, people had sort of gotten out of the habit. (And then of course everything became more about "engagement" and advertising and Mark "privacy is only for the guilty" Zuckerberg, so…)

[unspeakablehorror]

Definitely an interesting part of web history. I like that Dreamwidth's kept those features.

I think it might be the way blogs shifted the culture of privacy that had the biggest effect? Like, instead of sitting down to write in a diary one has no intention of showing others, instead people were encouraged to talk about their personal life in a very public way, and while this may have started out innocuously enough with things like posts about books read or personal opinions or what someone ate in the day, people gradually felt more and more pressure to talk about more private aspects of their lives to be a prolific blogger. And then yes, Facebook came along and I think very deliberately accelerated that aspect of encouraging people to make personal information (like their real names) public.

[alisx]

So the general conventional wisdom on the "birth of the influencer" was that it started with "mommy blogs", particularly Dooce (a.k.a. Heather Armstrong).

You can still go back and see what some of the very earliest blogs were like, but those days it was still very much… kinda social groups? Like not necessarily friends per se, but the scale was a lot smaller. So people posted about personal things because (relatively) so few people were online, that basically the only people you knew IRL who you'd expect to find your blog were the friends who also had blogs. (And, in general, the only people reading blog also had blogs. And there was just no real concept that people would still be looking at your posts over two decades later!)

That started changing probably around 2006-ish, where people like Armstrong started effectively becoming the earliest versions of what we'd now call influencers, and blogging in general started both becoming a career and merging with more traditional forms of printed media.

2006 was, of course, also when Facebook became open to the general public, and more and more people started using social media for interpersonal interactions. So blogging was no longer just you and twelve other terminally online weirdos who knew HTML, but also your mum and uncle and boss and the mean kids from school. So I think people moved away from blogging partly because social media was "easier", but also because it was getting more and more common for IRL people you'd prefer not to find your blog to find your blog (the failure of the ol' "security by obscurity"). Plus a whole bunch of those early bloggers had grown up, either moving into the industry itself (most famously probably Evan Williams), or just drifting off into adult life.

Blogging after that kind of drifted into the realm of the professional and semi-professional, with the more personal forms of online posting moving to social media sites.

So the standalone person blog had kinda mostly died out by the mid-2010s, I'd say? But… not for all of us. :P

(Source: I was there, man. /stares blankly into the middle distance)

[unspeakablehorror]

I was mostly a lurker online for a long time and wasn't really following what was going on with blogging when that started happening, so that's interesting background! I remember when I first heard about blogging, I found it kind of mystifying. I did eventually get interested in blogs focusing on hobbies I shared but I think that was not too long before social media started to push them more out of the public consciousness. Its nice to still find them around today.

I think blogs are great for more public journalling, which is what I mostly use social media for, though when I was younger I was definitely not into that sort of thing. Like, what I talk about now on social media would have been sharing way too much personal information (which some people probably think me a bit paranoid to restrict to the degree I still do). I think many people still kind of have that 'security by obscurity' mindset even on sites like Tumblr where you can restrict posts to the intimate group of just the many millions of other site users, and it makes me a little twitchy thinking about treating a site-locked post as 'private' in any sense of the term. But I think I probably just have more anxiety about that than average--which is maybe not always merited, but I don't think is simply jumping at shadows either.