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denise) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenance2025-12-31 08:24 pm
Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow
Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)
Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.
I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!
С Новым Годом, and welcome home!
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🎄!
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With all love for Dreamwidth, my fandom home! <3
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Привет, новые русские друзья!
It has been years since I studied Russian so sadly I cannot converse, but welcome. :)
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Maybe if we actually let them email us, we might have gotten an email about their reasoning! (Yes, that's a joke, heh.)
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(Welcome to our new Russian friends)
- Ryn
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What may help, medium term:
>>We will not require identification for you to post or comment.
1. Please consider codifying that pledge into the DW Terms of Service. This may be especially pertinent, given recent proliferation of nefarious Digital ID projects in many far away places.
2. Some Russian residents fleeing LJ may start frequenting DW as readers/lurkers. So it can be anticipated that Russia may then attempt to target, censor and blacklist DW. It may help for DW to do some forward-looking planning soon, on hardening the site. Unfortunately, the state got pretty good at their bad behavior.
Many of this wave of "Russian" folks fleeing LJ to DW may actually be living all over the globe, having previously fled Russia/USSR. So English translation may not be of high priority, especially given that historically the current instrument LJ is abusing is precisely "cyrillic" services - trumpeted initially as a service to this very community.
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We have been fighting "age verification" laws for a long time! We've helped to sue multiple US states over them, tried participating in the UK "consultations" on the implementation of the Online Safety Act and why their proposals would be harmful, etc. I agree with you completely: "nefarious" is exactly the right word. I can't absolutely promise that we'll never require age or ID verification from anyone, because the US is trying to fling itself off the same cliff and we're a US company: if our own idiot politicians pass a nationwide law, instead of just individual states doing it, and if we lose in court enough times, we may eventually have to in some form. But we can promise you three things:
1. We are a US-only company, and we will only ever care about US law. Which is not much consolation, because we have our own idiot politicans, but it means people living in other authoritarian countries only have to worry about our authoritarians, not the ones who have direct control over you.
2. We will fight any US law, federal or state, that tries to force us to identify and deanonymize our users. We will fight it with everything I've got. I've helped to sue seven states over those laws so far (one of them twice!), and we mostly keep winning. Except in Mississippi, where the appellate court overruled the district court (who agreed with us that the law was unconstitutional), but even that fight isn't over yet. We specifically joined Netchoice so that we could fight these laws, and I've helped out every single lawsuit over every single law that we qualify for since. (We were even cited in the latest victory over a law that doesn't even apply to us, that's how hard we're fighting these!)
3. If another country ever does go through the trouble of trying to get a US court to issue a court order saying that we have to turn over information about one of their citizens, and the reason is anything other than "something that is also extremely illegal in the US" like distributing child sex abuse material or something on that level of severity, we will fight that just as hard as we are fighting these US state "age verification" laws. I have many, many, many lawyer friends who have done that kind of international work for years, and they are all just as eager to fight as we are. We might not be rich in money, but we are very, very rich in friends. :)
I see that you made your account seven or eight years ago, so I can give you a story from before you joined to help show that we mean what we say: when we'd been open for about a year, back in 2010, PayPal decided that we would have to remove "adult content" from the site or else they wouldn't process payments for us anymore. We told them to go fuck themselves, went without income at all for three months while we got set up with a payment processor that would allow us to keep allowing users to post what they wanted, and paid outrageous fees to take payments for a decade before we found someone else who would take us at a lower fee structure. It was terrifying! We'd only been open for a year! But we'd planned for it, and we'd made promises to our users that we weren't going to break unless we absolutely had no other choice. We really do mean it when we say we'll fight for you as hard as we possibly can. I know a lot of places say it, but the only people we have to keep happy are our users, so we can genuinely mean it.
Mark and I both started working on ЖЖ back in 2001, so we're both very familiar with the tactics the Russian government uses. We don't talk publicly about our ways of handling them, because it's a bad idea to hand an adversary information about your tactics, but I was there for the entire process of Russian-language ЖЖ becoming such a cultural force. I quit in 2007, just before the sale, and I'm a little bit sorry, because I think me quitting played a big part in Six Apart's decision to sell to СУП in the first place, and we all know what happened there.
But yes, we have been on this ride before, and we know the risks. For the last 20 years, I've been planning my international flights very, very carefully to avoid flying over Russian airspace, or the airspace of Russian-allied countries, if that helps you feel more confident in our risk assessment! The chance of the Russian government doing something to an international flight just to get their hands on the devices belonging to the owner of one tiny website may be pretty low, but given how many Russian users we have, it's not zero. That's how seriously I take my obligation to protect our users.
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Unofficial translation (неофициальный перевод):
Привет и добро пожаловать нашим новым русским друзьям с LiveJournal! Мы рады быть вашим новым домом. Мы не требуем удостоверение личности для того, чтоб публиковать комментарии или посты. Так же, мы не предоставляем российскому государству никакую информацию про ваш аккаунт, если этот запрос не предоставлен через суд в Соединенных Штатах. (И это не случалось уже 16 лет!)
Импорт вашего журнала с ЖЖ может быть медленным. Вас много, с большим количеством постов и комментарий, и мы обязаны ограничивать как быстро мы скачиваем вашу информацию с ЖЖ, чтобы нас не заблокировали. Пожалуйста, будте терпеливы! Мы следим за этим процессом и исправляем ошибки, и опять займемся этим после окончания праздника.
Я очень сожалею, что мы не можем перевести сайт на русский язык и не можем оказывать помощь с сайтом на русском языке. Наша компания на много, много меньше, чем LiveJournal, и мои уроки русского языка в старшей школе были очень давно. :) Но хотя бы мы не принадлежим Сбербанку!
С Новым Годом, и добро пожаловать домой!
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Thanks for being here Denise and all the DW staff!
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I'm sad it necessary but I'm glad you do it we all need a safe place even in the us.
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This scenario is absolutely why we're fighting "age verification" laws in the US as hard as we are! Because people should have the right to criticize their government online without having to worry about being disappeared.
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