Tumblr to Dreamwidth

Alt text: A screenshot of a twitter post by bookish_nea. The post reads as follows:

Saw a warning that Russia may decouple from the Worldwide web, meaning LJ will totally disappear soon.

Back up your LJ to DW. Right-click images. Screenshot.

And then…. mourn with me the final passing of the most vibrant fan communities we'll ever know & the archive of an era.

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We've already gone.

Twitter and Discord.

I think twitter is actively malicious and refuse to use it regularly. I certainly could, but I won't because I think this contributes to its supremacy and thus the desirability of bullying people off of it.

Discord I like fine. You have to find the right discords though.

However, either Discord or Twitter could, at any time, decide they have too much "adult" content, and take steps to forbid it or make it harder to access. Or they might "take a stand" against "piracy." And someone new to social media trends online (read: anyone who's only known one digital fandom home) might think "oh, they'll lose a few people, a few communities, but that won't affect everyone else - most people & most servers are vanilla-tame, so a no-explicit-content rule won't affect them."

That's not how it works. A "no explicit content" rule always means an attempt to purge queer content of any sort. (A man and a woman holding hands in a park, leaning in for a kiss, is not considered explicit. Two men doing the same, often is. It depends on which advertisers are footing the bills.) And a crackdown on "piracy" often means a purge of fanworks, because social media devs are not well-versed in copyright law, and besides, their goal isn't "allow all legal content." It's "reduce the chance that we get hit with a lawsuit" - and that's not based on whether the content is legal. If a company with big lawyers decides "fanworks are bad for our public image," they start throwing around C&Ds, and it's easier to ban the fanficcers and fanartists and vidders and so on, than to send someone to court to challenge the copyright claims.

The reason a migration hasn't already started is that there's no obvious next place to go. If you want to catch things early, start talking with your friends - what kind of site do you want for social media? Do you want everyone-sees-everything like Tumblr, or must-get-invited arrangements like Discord? Do you want reblogging like Twitter or threaded discussions like Dreamwidth? Forum-esque discussions like Proboards or BobaBoard, or chatroom-esque like Telegram? (Note that I'm not saying "like instagram" or "like Pinterest" - because I don't participate in those. But they're also options, I suppose.)

How important is image hosting to you - and are you willing to pay for it? How willing are you to give away personal data and privacy in order to get site features?

What kind of moderation are you hoping for? Note that moderation is expensive; the more strict the content control on a site, the fewer active users there can be. (Metafilter is pretty good for moderation - but they pay for 24/7 moderators. And almost everyone who's active is very aware of the mod presence on the site.) If your preference is "I don't want strict content control; just no trolls, no harassers, no nazis" - I have news for you: that's strict content control. Figuring out the difference between shitposting and bigotry requires active, constant moderation.

If you can find 25 friends who agree on the answers to all those questions, you may have the necessary foundation for a social site of your own; start looking for a dev/coder who can help you put it together.

(AO3 was started by a few dozen people who agreed on the features they wanted an archive to have. And the features and policies they didn't want it to have.)

One thing I will note that people often don’t think of and you really really need to is this:

How much are you willing to scale?

We knew AO3 would get “big”, but I think for a lot of us, that was pretty abstract, or we were thinking big like a hundred thousand accounts, not big like eight million. If you want to build a thing for 25 friends, that’s easy. On the technical side, scaling that up to 5,000 friends isn’t too bad (though moderation is exponentially harder).

If, however, your idea is that literal millions of tumblr users are going to migrate to the thing, plan for that from the very start. Pinboard very clearly had no grasp of how to scale for even moderate traffic. Not only were they not ready yet (which can happen to any site), but it didn’t seem to me like they even had the foundation to be ready later. The best way to code for 50 and the best way to code for 50,000,000 are different.

And if you aren’t building something that will eventually scale (and let’s be honest, you probably shouldn’t be because it’s a hell of a lot of work), you’re going to need to eventually turn people away or make it only be attractive to a niche group.

If you can find 25 friends who agree on the answers to all those questions, you may have the necessary foundation for a social site of your own; start looking for a dev/coder who can help you put it together.

If people are more active on Dreamwidth, more people will go there, because there will be more activity. But first we have to be active there. And while there aren't a lot of people to be active for, it can feel a lot like shouting into the void, which gets demoralizing quick. Which means you end up doing less, which means there's less activity overall, which means you end up doing less, which means there's less activity overall, which means.... Well. You get the picture.

[Images two through seven: Example icons. Two: Red text on black background. “welcome back to TORCHWOOD. Help me move a body.” Three: Screenshot of a woman sitting on a bench or curb, slumped over, at night time. Pink text reads, “i am not a pretty girl”. Four: Red background with an angry Toph in her Fire Nation outfit pointing off-screen. “Objection!” she says, making it a Phoenix Wright series reference. Five: Cartoon drawing. The brunet on the right has just pants’d the bespectacled blond on the left, and is “*smug*” about it. Six: Green background with veins of blue shot through. White text in two styles reads, “this is my "Not Speaking To Aubrey” icon". Seven: Screenshot of an action show or movie with a generic white dude sitting at a laptop, the screen on a word processor. In the background is a timer counting down “Time Remaining”; it’s currently at 03:07:20:04. White text reads, “i am the very model of a NaNoWriMo Novelist”. End IDs.]

*unsubtle cough* So Dreamwidth has a default of fifteen icons for free accounts, and while the area size remains 100x100 pixels, the file size has been increased from 40 to 60 whatevers. So for everyone who liked gif icons, you can make them 50% longer for Dreamwidth.

Another super fun thing was/is, if you hovered your mouse over someone’s icon? You could see the keywords they used to select the icon. (Basically: You have a drop-down menu of text to pick your icon from. You can also select directly from a menu of images, but the text option can be more fun, and I’m about to tell you why.) These could include a secret extra layer of communication! Kinda like the tags on Tumblr, but there’s a set number you have to pick from. So the Torchwood icon up there might have keywords like, “Queer besties” or “Let’s do crime!”, and you can add a little extra nuance to your conversation depending on which keywords you picked.

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Wattpad's long, slow slide into suck, maybe?

Ohhh. Right.

I always forget people are idiotic enough to post their fics to a site that deletes shit constantly and that’s impossible to search. (Why, guys? Why? AO3 is full of half-baked first drafts! There is no formality or quality bar you need to clear.)

as always i’m starry-eyed at the concept of building a new fandom experience, but will you actually USE DREAMWIDTH THO

at this point i think the only way that dw (or pillowfort, for that matter) will start crawling with activity is if like 5+ thousand users (preferably more) all agree to give it their best shot for at least a month, all at the same time rather than staggered out, and if the participation is fannish and collaborative in some way rather than primarily personal-journal based. maybe with like dedicated recruitment, prompts, and metrics to keep everyone hype

otherwise, most people experience the same old story - they show up, nothing is happening, the vast majority of fandom tags are dead, the personal journal posts they come across are written by strangers they’re not emotionally invested in, they go home to tumblr where things are bustling, fun, image-based, and you never know what entertaining new meme is going to smack you across the face next whether you go looking for it or not.

dopamine and serotonin-wise, dw has very little to offer

LiveJournal Strikethrough and Boldthrough

Dreamwidth

The really big move to Dreamwidth and away from LiveJournal happened when LJ borked some of its code in an update and accidentally ended up giving a lot of its users migraines, but their meaningless attempts to get rid of smut and lots of other "icky" things (and getting rid of a lot of survivor support communities in the process) were no help, either.

Checking through the interests, there's the_great_tumblr_purge and tumblrmigration as extant communities, but they've been quiet for a good while (most recent post on either is from half a year ago), and a new community couldn't hurt. There might be more out there as well you could mine from; I remember there was at least an attempt to move to Dreamwidth in the 2018 purge, which is what I'm pulling most of my resources from.

Dreamwidth accounts are now completely open and free, instead of requiring invite codes!

Why Dreamwidth is good:

- You have FOUR different privacy levels to choose from with EVERY post: Public, Private, My Access List Only, A Specific Special Access List Only. You can make as many special access lists as you want. You can 'f-lock' your whole journal if you want. Privacy is good!

- All comments stay on your OP, there is no reblogging. No more posts suddenly getting out of hand and running away from you, it all stays central on the OP, and replies are nested into threads! It's like having a little mini message board on every post!

- Tiered privacy--you can subscribe to someone, and you can also grant them access. Separately. This means you can read someone's journal without having to let them read posts you have locked.

- Put your interests in a linked list, if they light up as a link you can click and suddenly see everyone--and every community--that has that interest listed! Make friends! Join communities (comms, as we call them)!

- Communities! Which can also be locked to members only! Communities also have moderators (and rules the moderators may or may not have!), which makes them safer.

- Lots of customisation options for how your journal looks. Back in the day we used to match journal themes with our bffs or lovers!

- Multiple icons! We used to use this feature to have different icons to indicate moods/tones. Fun! Let's bring that back. You can have 15 with a free account, and more with a paid account.

- 100x100 icons! So big! Gifs allowed! Like on AO3!

- MOOD ICONS. This is an extra icon on your posts that has a mood attached. People with paid accounts have custom themes! Mine is Great Mouse Detective.

- Paid accounts are subscriptions but if they lapse you just go back down to a free account, you don't get your account's functionality taken away! And likewise, the extra icons and custom mood theme are still there; all that changes is if you change your mood theme you can't go back to the custom one until you get a paid account again. Paid accounts just give you extra customisation for how your journal looks, and help support the site, because...

- THERE ARE NO ADS. THERE IS NO ALGORITHM. THERE ARE NO SUGGESTED POSTS. NOTHING IS SPYING ON YOU.

- Please join Dreamwidth!!!

Come check out Dreamwidth, it's pretty awesome there! And if you have any questions, I am happy to do my best to answer them!