I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently. I started my LJ when I was 17 and, as teenagers are wont to be, a bit naive and ignorant. Luckily I veered towards the extremely private end of naive rather than the "my dirty laundry, let me show you it" end, but I still managed my privacy in a way that now makes me feel uncomfortable.

This thing is that LJ-like sites are difficult in terms of identity and privacy. On one hand, I want to have conversations with sensible, intelligent people which makes a level of privacy appealing - a way of excluding those who aren't interested in or will disrupt such conversations. On the other, I want to attract the sort of people who can have those kinds of conversation, and locking down most of my content is not a good way to go about that. It means I have to go "hi, you're cool, I'm adding you" and I'm actually a shy person who hates making the first move.

Dreamwidth changes the terms of those interactions; I can subscribe to people without having to let them see my locked content, but at the same time, if I manage my content in the same way as I do on LJ, there won't be much unlocked content that people who subscribe to me but to whom I haven't given access will be able to see.

I have an over-elaborate system of filters on LJ, but one of the things I've come to realise is that there's a dynamic to these. Giving someone access to locked content subtly changes the ecosystem that is my journal - the presence of a new person means that there might be things I'm less comfortable talking about. With filters, I initially set them up in terms of how comfortable I felt with people - an inner circle and an outer circle, to name two - but I realised that I was using the outer circle filter to discuss things like anti-racism, feminism and queerness. So I started calling it my sensible people filter and started adding the people I didn't know well, but had interacted with during debates and discussion. Unfortunately, this means that they also have access to some personal stuff to which I'm not entirely sure I want them to have access. It's all a bit late in the day to reorganise it.

I will be separating access filters into privacy and content filters (again - I did once have a university filter and so on but then I realised that most of my writing was about university and so the filter was a bit pointless) but I'm not sure how to manage public and private identities. How do other people manage this?

Okay, I go now to gatecrash a lecture and then read some critical discourse analysis.