New Journals vs Filters

[gothwalk]

I've been thinking since I set up davonian about the effective difference between filters and new journals/communities. I'm none too keen on filters, and as ye may have noticed, I don't use them much. This is for a few reasons.

The first one is that people have to know me, be added to my friends list, and watch my journal before they can see the stuff in the hypothetical "games" filter, instead of stumbling across it as they may do with an extra journal or community. There may well be people out there some day who watch davonian and have no interest in gothwalk.

The second is that it allows the filtering to be controlled by the end-user, the reader, which is where I believe that filtering belongs. With extra journals/communities, someone can select from, say, my gaming material journal, my gaming commentary journal, my pagan journal, and my day-to-day journal for themselves.

And the third is that I don't much like filters. It says "I only want to talk to these people", when by and large, I want to talk to the whole world - and I don't want to hide what I'm saying. About the only time I use a filter to post something is when I'm posting something for the players in Age of Legends, all of whom use LJ, and for whom it's often a more convenient way to answer questions than email.

So watch out for a few more journals/communities being added...