Friends Policy

[yrieithydd]

Mmmm. I've been meaning to make this post for a long while. I noticed that at some point (around the time of atreic's Great God Debate and the Anglo-Saxon Vespers) three people friended me. Since then I've been meaning to post about my friends policy. Until those three people friended me, my friends had all been people that I know to some extent IRL and even in the case of those I first met online that was on the ship not LJ and I know now them IRL. These three were not people I've really met (serenasnape sang at the A-S Vespers but I'm not sure I'd recognise her again) and in the case of one, I hadn't even noticed him commenting on friends journals. This resulted in me not reciprocating the friending and thinking, `I must post about this'. So now, I finally get round to this!

Part of my problem is that LJ conflates two things under friends: those whose posts appear on your friends page; and those who can read your friends only posts. I would have no qualms about adding people I don't know that well to my friends page (and then in reading that I might feel I knew them better). I am far less comfortable with the idea of allowing them to read my f-locked posts. I should have stuck to my initial impulse of filtering things rather than just posting the f-locked but at some point I got bored of this and so there are back posts which are visible to all my friends which I'm not sure about letting people I know less well see. I could go back and change the security level, but that's faff!

Comments from my current friends about how they've managed this are welcome as are introductions (and thoughts) from those who friended me back then. Who are you and what prompted you to friend me?

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Hi! I think I may be one of the people concerned, although I'm not actually very good at remembering when I friended people. I'm a friend of robert_jones and a former worshipper at LSM. I think in your case what prompted me to add you was that I was tickled by the idea of the Anglo-Saxon vespers you mentioned, and enjoyed your entries about it. We have some other interests in common, too.

I agree with you it is a shame that LJ conflates the two functions. I have no problem at all with your not adding me back.

[yrieithydd.livejournal.com]

You were indeed one of the people concerned. Were you every in CCMS? Some of your userpics remind me of the person who played the author in the Musical Amy Arthur wrote, but this could be me being random. I saw that once 2 years ago so I probably shouldn't trust my visual memory (because it's generally not good).

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

No, that wouldn't have been me. I left Cambridge in 1991. I did do a bit of singing while I was there, but with MagSoc.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I'm in the same boat. I tend to friend most people who arn't my parents or my supervisor (no, I don't think they know about my LJ, but...) Then I use a few filters to post anything that I don't want to be too generally known. I don't let myself make "not-so-and-so" groups; although I have sometimes been tempted it's obviously a bad idea! I have "everyone", "people I would invite to a party" and "very close friends" to a first approximation

Then I have a quick read filter, which bears very little resemblence to the above filtering (except I think all the close friends are on it) - there are people whose LJs are really interesting who I wouldn't want to be able to know my private thoughts!

Yes, I didn't follow this policy from the start, and I'm sure people reading the first few months of my LJ get a very strange view of me, but then I was very confused about what it was sensible to put on the internet at all then, and I think people accept that the me of 2 years ago is only vaguely related to the me of today. I got into a bit of trouble when Queens' people started to get LJs, as I'd used LJ to vent about them quite a lot, but in the end I just friended them with an email "Look, everyone pisses people off sometimes, and everyone needs to talk about it. If you go reading anything before now on your own head be it, just know that I'm over everything and perfectly OK about it now!" If Susan ever gets an LJ I'm dead meat though...

I keep meaning to print my LJ out (I don't believe in the internet) and hope to set up more sane filters when I do that. Hasn't happened yet though!