Mirror community on Dreamwidth...?

[mrs-leary.livejournal.com]

Hello, everyone, and happy new year! I trust that your 2017 is peaceful and preposterous.

Given the move of LiveJournal content to servers in Russia (not exactly known for being LGBTQ-friendly!) and with the thought that it would be wise to have a back-up / mirror site anyway, I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts about me creating a Merlin RPF community on Dreamwidth and importing our content there.

I have to say that while I have a mrs_leary account over there, I don't really know my way around. But better to get used to something extra than run the risk of losing everything...?

I had a quick look around, but couldn't find an exisitng community along the same lines. I might have completely missed it, though, so feel free to tell me if so!

Also, feel free to tell me if there's a better alternative... It's times like this that I wish AO3 wasn't only an archive!

ETA: clo makes a fair point. It's probable that I'll do this, and at some point import all our content. There is no way to really filter content in an import - it's either all posts or none. Which includes all fic posted directly to the community. If any authors have a problem with that, please contact me via the comments or a message. We're all about preserving the content, but I realise that might not suit everyone. 

Comments

[mssdare.livejournal.com]

I hear everyone making a backup accounts on DW, so I think it might be a good idea as ppl might want to move there completly.
While I'm not very active in Merlin fandom anymore I'd be devastated to see my favorite stories and authors deleted without any backup.

[archaeologist-d.livejournal.com]

Yes please. I only heard about the LJ thing while on my cruise so I need to update my dw account. I think I have the same name as LJ but will check.

[thalialunacy.livejournal.com]

So the fear is that LJ will start deleting content now that it's physically in Russia?

[narlth.livejournal.com]

From my point of view, no (though people may disagree) They won't go around randomly deleting peoples accounts. The problem as I see it is instead this:

The mass exit Cyrillic users have been making since the move was discovered.

Wherever the host servers are located determines what laws apply to a website. So we've lost the protected right to free speech, which is why many Cyrillic users where here in the first place.

It allowed them to do things such as criticise the government or find a lgbt friendly space, etc. now however their government is free to track them down, and potentially persecute them.

But as more then half of LJ users are Cyrillic ones, if they all leave LJ would almost certainly go broke, which would mean a total lights out.

These was longer then I thought it would be, oop.

[thalialunacy.livejournal.com]

Interesting! That's more of an explanation than anyone else has given, and it makes sense, so thank you!

[clo.livejournal.com]

I imported my LJ content over to DW yesterday (DW's Import Content function is fantastically easy) and I'd love to see more going on over there. The only way DW is ever going to compare to what LJ's community used to be is if enough people use it and fic backups are so important -- half my memoried fics are links to purged journals now and it's very frustrating.

The only thing I'd think about is, should fic that was actually posted here imported without the author's okay on it? Importing LJ content to DW does assign comments to the right people by OpenID but I don't know how that works with communities and fic posts, and reposting other author's fic even by importing can be a bit be dubious. It may be worth making it clear that you'll take the crosspost of it down if anyone objects, or give people a notice period if they wanted to delete beforehand.

Most posts seem to be AO3/personal LJ links though so it'll probably be fine; I just wanted to flag it to think about. :)