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dw_maintenancePer the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.
There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.
denise posting in dw_newsA reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.
The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.
In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.
The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.
Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.
Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.
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hwariumI had two of my fics plagiarised last year, which I found out through a kind reader who DM’d me. Reading the stories, it was clear that they had re-written my fic scene for scene. In the comments, I can see them claim credit for the idea and the story. I submitted the report to ao3 in November 2024 with this gdoc side-by-side, and ao3 got back to me this month saying that there was nothing they can do because text was not copied. It appears that the current AO3 policy allows fanfiction to be re-written and paraphrased, and that counts as “transformative” (try repeating this to any university marker).
...
Since AO3 wouldn't take the fics down, I wanted to comment on the plagirised fics and ask for my work to credited.
Only to realise I have been blocked.
...
A moment of silence please while we all think up nasty adjectives. Thank you, I’m obliged by your sympathy, thank you deeply.
If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you’re also a writer and a creator. I’m very lucky to be friends with many of you, and I know you can imagine how I am feeling. I'm not going to air that laundry, but I want to talk about my philosophy on the integrity of the process. This is not my public stance on plagiarism or AI, or any kind of moral, political, or value judgment what what people can or can't, should or should not do. This is a personal reflection on how I want to live this life.
I noticed that one of the plagiarised fics was marked as incomplete. It's because my original fic was marked as the first of a series and I just never wrote more of it. I had the thought, if I ever continued this story, will they immediately plagiarise it too?
It scared me. But as with most heavy emotions, I thought it through. I thought about the logical extremes. I thought about my reaction, because my reaction is what matters, because that is how I will live this life.
I ran this thought experiment:
If every work that I write from now on, will be immediately stolen and claimed by someone else as theirs, will I continue writing?
And my answer is, I must.
It's terrifying, to know you have been exploited for cheap clout, to know that it may happen again, and with the rise of AI in every-day hands, to know it may happen more often.
But I don't want to stop writing because of a possible negative outcome, no matter how likely it may be. I don't write for the comments or the kudos, no matter how much dopamine that exposure creates.
I write because of the process. That process where I go through my own memories of this life, my unique feelings on a particular story I read, my reaction to a piece of news that touched or broke me. It’s the journey of reflection where I wring myself dry while being both the straining muscle and the wet towel. I alone know the five discarded sentences that lived before the one that survived on the page. The parallel worlds that the characters walked and the infinite forks in their forest is something only I can see.
The act of writing is an act of meditation with the soul. I alone, will reap the true value of the story, because I have sat down with my mind and my memories and worked for it. I have the power to turn a series of facts into a story, and then transform that story, into a narrative. A person who steals a story does not understand how or why it works. In the plagiarised work, that user paraphrases sentences and swaps words for their synonyms, but in doing so destroys the rhythm of the phrase that was designed to ebb with the emotions of the characters. One word swapped for another loses the precious intangible connotations that aligned with the atmosphere of a moment, chosen for a sound that must be whispered rather than talked.
On the level of the narrative, I wonder if they understood how each character embodied the faces of predestination and free will. How their choices and dialogue piece together a portrait of contrasts, of cause-and-effort, of callbacks to motifs and theses. When they rewrote each interaction, did they think about how it served the theme?
Understanding how a sentence becomes a brick in the cornerstone in the house of a story, is a skill that requires a lifetime to learn. And then learning to build that house is an entirely different mountain a writer can only learn by climbing. To write is to climb up that mountain.
Someone who steals a story, a piece of art, or even just a turn of phrase, will never improve as a thinker, and will only cripple themselves because they are unwilling to even try. Eventually, they cannot think at all.
In ten years we will both read the same words, but the story in my mind will be far richer than anything they can imagine because they have not learnt to think. Not just for the plagiarised story, but for any story. When I discuss a common novel between friends, we each have different opinions because of our different lives and reading diets. A story is never quite the words on the page, each reader brings their soul to meet the author halfway, and the union births a new story, existing only in the mind of the reader. Learning to think as a writer has transformed the way I read, and this is but one reason I must keep writing.
But even if my story was stolen and improved. Even if the stories I want to write have already been written and nothing that I can even try to do will ever be original.
And even if there was a parallel world where a better version of myself exists, a healthier hwa, a better (and faster) writer, a wider reader, a kinder daughter, more successful in all the ways of the world and of the heart, even if that hwa exists, will I continue writing?
Should I continue living?
And my answer is, I must.
Because it's not about the outcome. For me, it's about living a good life that I look back and think, I made the most of it. To look at my hands and experience the pride that comes with knowing the hours and days that I have worked.
It’s not just about putting a story out into the world to be read. If I had a clone who could clean my house and reply my emails and listen to my mum yap for 2 hours every Sunday, I would not use the clone. Why watch a volleyball match, instead of googling the score? Why climb Kilimanjaro, if you can find a picture of the summit? Why read when one can ask ChatGPT to summarise 100 books?
A person who relies on the effort of others to simplify their life, does not end up living at all.
This is my personal philosophy. When I revere the process, my soul is nourished and my experience of the world deepens. Even if there a shortcut that will take me to the same outcome, cherishing the slow route can grow me in a way I might not fully apprehend for decades. This is not just about writing, or the modern anxieties around AI, late-stage capitalism and the dopamine apocalypse. For me, it extends to small choices about cooking a meal or buying a hard copy of a book that I’ve already read electronically. I reflect on my own choices when I observe friends hiring house cleaners, ask ChatGPT to write a birthday message or scroll Tik Tok while walking between destinations. The easiest way to reach a destination is to catch a taxi, but if I use public transport, I can enjoy the architecture of the new station, notice the new bakery at the entrance, and learn about the new exhibition at the art gallery. If I cycle, I’ll see the seasons change in the colour of the trees, and maybe I’ll stop at a cafe on a whim and chat to another customer about her perfume.
Life is hard and sometimes we must all make choices for convenience, but I want to be aware of what I am losing by choosing the easy path. Sometimes life is thankless and grim and your hard work gets exploited, but even in times like this I reflect about the choices I’ve made, the memories of a quiet evening, writing at 4am in Berlin in the winter of 2020, and I can feel tenderly proud of that past labour, which no one can ever take away from me.
Note 1: thank you to jess who reached out after ao3's determination and to all moots voiced their support. This started in jess' DMs about my philosophy about the integrity of the process, and got migrated to the notes app.
Note 2: I didn't lock my fics after ao3 got scraped in April 2025 to train generative AI. There's a potluck of reasons, partly because I've already had my work plagirised in 2024 and had the chance to reflect philosophically on why I write. I also read a lot of sci fi and I've reflected on ideas of this kind after reading Peter F Hamilton's A Second Chance at Eden — perhaps to be scraped is a form of immortality, there's a romantic victory in minutely influencing the order of words in the distant future, to be another data point in favour of the em dash. Again, personal philosophy is separate to my opinion about the morality of AI, and I've always been a little nihilistic. I live knowing that I can lose everything I have and I am prepared to be forgotten. I've thought about a post-human world, the heat death of the universe, and I know that the meaning of my life is mine to decide. If the future is an inevitable wave, I am choosing how I want to swim even if I drown.
denise posting in dw_newsI'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.
Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.
Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.
Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)
Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)
Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)
All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.
We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)
If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.
On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.
Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.
girlishpopmocksun talked on twitter about daemon aus, and then after an alterspring ask where we talked again abt the concept i semi-jokingly suggested we do “daemon au december” (for the alliteration). but neither of us wanted to wait that long, so then i prompted “daemon au august” for more alliteration lmao, and now we're here. the goal was to just. finish something, anything, with daemons. floverhaitangkitty
