Announcing Dreamwidth Studios
synecdochic worked for LJ for seven years, back from the very beginning. She knows what it takes to run it and what's working and what isn't with the way LJ is being run now, both as a business and as a piece of code. She's a very practical girl.

She's also an idealist. She wants to see this whole "social networking/blogging" thing done right. And you know what they say, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

So, she and some other programmers and business people are in the process of putting together Dreamwidth Studios. It's not going to be another LJ-clone; they're taking the LJ programming, updating and modernising it, and adapting it to fit their ideas and fix things that should be fixed. (For example, users will be able to distinguish between "people whose stuff I want to read" and "people who I trust to read my own personal stuff.") There will be no third-party advertising. They will let their users know what's going on, everything from "how much does it take to run this service, anyway?" to business concerns to programming work. They're integrating OpenID and RSS feeds into the core accounts so that you can actually have everything in one place.

And it's tentatively scheduled to be up and running sometime in August.

I am so excited.

Here's what synecdochic has to say: I believe there's a way to sustain an online community, a community made up of smart, intelligent, and creative people, that functions as a community, not as a cash cow. I believe that it's possible to build a site that serves its community, not its board of directors or its venture capitalists or its investors or its advertisers.

I believe it's possible for smart people, creative people, to build a service and understand the people using that service, because they're part of the userbase too. I believe it's possible for a small group of highly motivated, highly experienced people to build a service that accepts it's always going to be a niche market, and I believe it's possible to rock the everliving hell out of that niche.

We're going to give it our best damn shot.