| With posts, there is a completely different set of assumptions.
| Personally, when I post somewhere, I assume that I own that post.
Really? I don't, and I don't think I'm alone. I think a lot of other people
also operate with the understanding that when you go to play in someone else's
sandbox, you've ceded some of that control for the sake of a wider audience.
| Community maintainers may have some rights to come in and manage their
| community, but I have rights over my post. If you take that and push
| it off to another site, there is a distinct loss of control which we
| have to address before we can even consider doing that.
I can't keep a community mod from choosing not to post my content, if it's a
moderated community. I can't keep a maintainer from deleting my posts. Nor can
I keep them from removing my posting access to a community. Or banning me
outright. Or deleting their entire community, lock, stock, and barrel. Not to
mention all the control maintainers have over comments to "my" posts.
There *are* a few circumstances under which community maintainers establish
rules for specific behaviors regarding particular content (e.g., the very
common stipulation that all comments to community suggestion/complaint boxes
will be screened and will be kept screened unless the original commenter gives
explicit permission to unscreen it), but that's still contingent upon the
maintainers acting in good faith.
Complete, persistent control over one's content may be what *some* would like
to think is the case, or what they wish was true, but it's not.
It's one of the reasons a lot of people who post things like stories or icons
to communities are really just posting headers with links back to their own
journals: if at some point they want to limit access, they don't have to chase
down old posts all over LJ, they just have to lock up or delete the material
from its homebase on their own journal.
| Denise didn't say that community imports WILL NOT happen, just that
| they probably won't. If we (communal we here, not Denise and I
| specifically) can figure out a way to address the
| copyright/ownership/control issues satisfactorily, then we (Denise and
| I) would be quite happy to make the importer work on communities.
To any maintainers of communities of size who might have been thinking about
switching to Dreamwidth, "probably won't" is as good as never, based on the
past several years' worth of experiences with LJ. I know Dreamwidth is striving
to be different, but there's the whole devil-you-know problem to overcome. If
you don't offer maintainers something concrete to better the life of their
community, what incentive do they have to switch?
| Let's redirect the conversation a bit, try to get people who are
| uncomfortable with their content being imported (wrt communities) to
| speak up, and figure out how we can try to address those concerns.
Honest question: if the maintainers of communities held polls, formulated
specifically by Dreamwidth so there is no variance in the language, and a
majority (or even a super-majority, just to be safe), of their current
membership agreed to allow their content to be imported to Dreamwidth, would
that suffice as proof that the will of a given community as a whole and thus
allow a given community to import its content to Dreamwidth?
Thanks,
Alexis Carpenter
principia at Dreamwidth
principia_coh at LiveJournal
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