Hi all, just making a quick public post:

1. A PSA for those who don't track Dreamwidth's support tickets, some change in Dreamwidth code a couple of months back has created a bunch of new bugs. Some of these are fairly minor and merely annoying (like the inability to update subscription settings and your circles from the Manage Circles page), but there is one feature that is broken in quite a bad way: customizing journal styles on Dreamwidth communities. Basically, if you try to change your community's layout, it will instead change your journal's layout (I tested this out and it let me change my community layout ONCE, but then all subsequent changes were applied to my user account) (see below). I believe this means it is possible (although rare) to permanently lose customizations on your journal's layout if your community and personal account share the same style but with different customizations applied. And also, community layouts currently can't be updated properly (see below) (although you can still freely switch your main layout). So be careful!

I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been announced anywhere to the general Dreamwidth population either through email or on dw_news... This seems like something you'd want to give people a heads up on, especially since people have been waiting on a bug fix for something like two months now...

Edit: Okay, actually, I found a workaround to setting community layouts to the one you want. If you browse through all the themes and find which page (out of 128) the theme you want to switch to is on, then you just need to manually enter a URL like this into the search bar (if it's already in the search bar, you need to press enter to reload the page): https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/?authas=examplecomm&cat=all&page=52
This will take you to page 52 where you should see your community's (examplecomm) current theme listed on the right and then be able to select a new theme below. This should set the layout of the community rather than your personal journal. However, if you click on any other links while in the Select Style pages before clicking on the Apply Theme button, the theme will be applied to your journal instead.

2. For personal reasons, I had to do a minor cleanup of my access and subscriptions. But while I was doing that, I decided to remove some people who I friended through friending memes and I just didn't click with. (Note: Even though the manage circle page is NOT working (as mentioned above), you can can still change access settings by going to individual profiles and changing your settings from there.) As a result, this might be a generally good time to let me know if you would like to change our access settings (like want to (continue to) be friends, or are in a similar situation where we haven't clicked and you'd like to take this chance to revoke access and unsubscribe).

3. I'm taking icon and meta requests over at promptmepromptly. I would especially appreciate lots of icon requests!

4. Photobucket has actually... NOT failed me for the last time...? Basically, I got an email from Photobucket saying that they would like to sell public photos of people uploaded to their website to third parties for the purpose of AI training. Opting out of this policy requires account deletion. This seems... like a truly insane business decision from Photobucket, and that's really saying something given their history of insane business decisions. But well, I don't care -- I am no longer able to access my Photobucket accounts anyway as they are unpaid, and seeing this new policy made me decide it's time to call it and just delete all the accounts I can still log into. Surprisingly, when I did this, Photobucket offered me the chance to download all my photos, which is something I gave up trying to do years ago. ??? So now I have the full collection of images for my main Photobucket and also for wd_lims, which I forgot I once modded. (I have not been able to download the photos for the finalfantasyland Photobucket, though, because it is tied to the finalfantasylandmod@gmail.com account that I no longer have access to because I handed it off to a different set of mods who should have changed the password and also the recovery email.) Anyway, thus ends my relationship to Photobucket... on a weirdly bad/good note.

Mainly just crossposting a rant here: Basically, DeviantArt is revamping their groups to match their new "Eclipse" style. Eclipse has gradually gotten more usable over the years so I was tentatively hopeful, until I found out that group Favorite galleries are no longer a thing in the new group pages. This is very annoying because the whole reason I made my Quark-x-Odo dA group this year and have been maintaining it so diligently is because Tumblr was pissing me off with the inability to find older art on the site through tag searches.

DeviantArt kept on looking like a better and better alternative because of the neutral group spaces that allow you to feature art with artist permission in the group Galleries, and to feature art even without artist permission in the group Favorites. Getting rid of group Favorites means I no longer have any ability to highlight the art of artists who are inactive on the website.

So basically, with this one change, dA has managed to (1) partly nullify months of my work, and (2) turn one of the few things that made them a preferable art site over Tumblr back into a non-advantage. Great job. Getting real tired of this social media bullshit. At this point I am wondering if I should just shutter the dA group, and try to create an art archive using a more conventional personal website like Neocities.

That's the main thing I had to say. I hope everyone is having a good holiday! Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. I'm currently, like, furiously trying to finish up a fic and some media reviews, plus my annual writing round up post, before the new year comes around. Wish me luck!

I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!

( Social media lifecycle )