suavemente, bass boosted

let’s talk alternatives

I’m sure by now, some of you may have heard of the site Dreamwidth when some people talk about Livejournal and old sites they wish they had. Maybe you’ve become a bit curious about how this place works or why people are so interested in it anyway. To answer that, I’m going to give you a little primer on Dreamwidth and what you need to know when converting from Tumblr!

So what is Dreamwidth?

Dreamwidth is a Livejournal code fork and like Livejournal it is an old social networking blog. How is that different from Tumblr? Well to clarify, Tumblr is a content aggregation site, not a content creation site. This means that Tumblr’s purpose is to spread things for other people to see, and these things do not even have to be something you made. It is not intended for feedback and communication, it is only intended to be looked at. That’s why any comment and communication features are so lackluster, the creators genuinely did not want it to work like a blog, and they continue to fight that.

Dreamwidth is a blog with features centered around content and comment management. How you use it is up to you, but it is a more or less static site with each post self contained, no reblogs or sharing apart from manually linking to the post themselves and the only things you see on your feed are the blogs and communities you’ve personally added to your watch. While the format is well suited for medium to long-posts, you’re never obligated to post at any specific length. Post as little or as much as you want with as little or as much content as you want. Comments are threaded which makes them easy to keep up with, and easy to read and it’s possible to edit your comments.

Dreamwidth is, above all else, a site dedicated to freedom of expression and is one of the few places left that genuinely cares about that.

Dreamwidth Terms You Should Know

Cutting You’ll see this term used a lot, and it’s a really huge important feature of the blog. Cutting is like the ‘read more’ feature you can find on tumblr. The difference is that you can choose exactly which portion of the entry is behind a cut and which one isn’t. You can also have more than one cut if you like! This is especially useful for long, informative posts to help people jump to the exact spot they want.

Cuts can also have their own titles, so you can inform people briefly of what’s behind the cut in the link itself. Good knowledge of how cuts work is super important and super helpful! https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=88

Access Filters A term you’ll see show up when composing an entry is what access filter is applied to the post you’re about to make, (sometimes this is referred to as ‘locking’ the post). When you create a post you are given the choice to either make the entry public, make it available to only those who have general access to your blog or choose a specific access filter which you have a pre-determined group of people on a list that are the only ones permitted to see those posts. You can set up as many access filters as you want and change them at any time, and none of the members are notified of these changes so you don’t need to worry about that when making changes. You can even make a post entirely private so that only you can see it, and you can modify the access settings on any entry at any time. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=21 https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=22

Paid Accounts Unlike tumblr, Dreamwidth does have paid accounts. The entire site is ad-free and they support themselves entirely on those people that purchase paid accounts. The free accounts give you more than you need to enjoy and interact with the site, but paid accounts give you extra features such as the ability to add custom mood icons, journal customization options and more user pics. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=4

Sticky Posts You can sticky an entry on your Dreamwidth, this can be useful to use as a means of introducing people to your journal and what to expect. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=199

General Dreamwidth Etiquette

Tags You will find that on Dreamwidth no one ‘talks in tags’. This is because each journal keeps a record of every single tag used on a page both yourself and everyone else can see and has a limit to the total amount of tags you can use. Tags in Dreamwidth are seen as a means of organization, not as a means of subtext, you’ll have to add the subtext in text formatting separately. You can of course, edit and delete any of the tags in the list at any time so you’re never stuck with the tags you’ve used if you ever change your mind.

Images While this is a holdover from the old days when bandwidth was not as accessible as it is now, generally speaking, images posted are kept around 800px in width if posted without a cut. This is to prevent stretching and just general friends page tidy-ness. Similarly, when posting several images, they are either done by way of small thumbnails, or they are posted behind a cut.

Cutting It is seen common etiquette to cut overly-long entries or entries that contain a large number of images, or entries that could contain sensitive information. This was both to keep the friend reading list trim and tidy, as well as warn people before they read potentially triggering material or something just generally distressing (especially in the case of images). Of course it may be worth it to set up an access group if you find yourself talking about a subject some of your audience has conflict with but cuts are always a good choice when you’re not quite sure.

Response Speed As a note, Dreamwidth and other blogging systems are naturally slower than Tumblr. This is not a bad thing! But don’t be surprised if some people don’t comment on an entry till a week later. People on Dreamwidth are far more likely to pay attention to entries and read all their backlog so there isn’t a need to constantly remind or repost the same thing. Dreamwidth generally slower pace can be jarring to some people, but you’ll find it has it’s own benefits even if it doesn’t offer instant gratification.

Comment Subjects You’ll notice when replying to an entry there will be an option to add a subject to your comment, this is not a requirement, only an option. In general, this is rarely used and can sometimes be considered disruptive if it is filled out without serving any specific purpose. Ways it is more often used are for specific community activities, specific content warnings, meta data or something otherwise specific to the format. Be aware that comment subjects work similarly to email subjects in such that replying to any comment with content in the subject line will copy the subject line into your own comment with “re:” prefacing it.

Userpics Many of you have not grown up with the ability to change the icon you can use at any time but it’s something that’s been an essential part of communication with DW and other lj-likes. All accounts get 15 userpics that you can use on your account, they’re 100x100 images and you can choose between any of them when you make a post or comment. They can be used to display mood, expressions, fandoms, events, in-jokes, all sorts of things and can be used to help convey tone or mood in the post/comment you’re trying to make. (a lot of people even made <3 or THIS icons and reply with a blank comment with just the icon to convey a ‘like’ of sorts) It’s not perfect by any means, but thoughtful userpic choices can help a lot in trying to convey what you want when text alone can be difficult to interpret.

Q&A

Can I make multiple journals on the same account? No. While this is a feature many RPers would like, and it has been talked about, there is no system that creates Parent/Child journal accounts. If you want a second journal, you would have to make a whole new account, and log in and log out whenever you want to change.

Can I reblog other people’s entries? No. Everyone’s blog and posts are static, there is no way to share another’s post on your own blog other than manually linking their post.

How can I meet people if I can’t reblog? Meeting people on Dreamwidth does take more work, it’s not as easy to stumble across new blogs casually in the day without putting effort into it. Communities are a large social component of Dreamwidth and there are communities for just about any fandom, hobby, craft type and even small niches, and you can start your own communities at any time. There is also an 'interest’ section in every user profile, which can be used to help find people of similar interests. And then there’s always meeting people through friends of friends in the comments of one’s entires. This post in particular has a much more through break down on socialization and how to find people https://bisexualbaker.tumblr.com/post/147873750806/how-the-heck-do-i-find-cool-stuff-and-people-on

Where can I host my images? This is of course, the biggest pitfall in Dreamwidth. As it stands right now, there is a small image hosting option however it only can store up to 500MB in size. For anything significant you would have to use a service like Imgur, Flickr, Sta.sh, Google Drive, or other storage services. https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=248

(Mirrored on Dreamwidth and Hubzilla)

Fandom is, once again, in flux. Anyone who’s been around for more than a few years knows the signs have been building: deleted accounts and new terms of service, followed by talk of moving elsewhere, fracturing communities over multiple platforms, sometimes breaking communities entirely. It’s a common pattern a lot of us have come to see as an inevitability, just something that happens every five or ten years. But of course there is a cost, archival as well as communal. That chatfic you loved gets deleted. The old homepage of your favorite vidder goes down. Entire fandoms’ discussions disappear forever.

We’ve all been there at least once, Or we’re about to be there, because again: it’s happening with Tumblr. People won’t all leave at once. The demise of LJ was measured in years, not days. But eventually, even if it’s still up, it won’t be what it was. Content will slowly degrade - image hosting, external links, even the posts themselves deleted due to inactivity or changes in management. Link rot, in other words.

So. It’s happening. What can be done about it?

There have been a lot of really good discussions so far. Consensus so far appears to be some combination of the following: the new platform must allow photo/text/video sharing as well as conversations; the new platform must allow NSFW content and have robust filtering; the new platform must be resistant to the kind of profit-driven vicissitudinous behavior most tech companies embrace.

I agree with all of this. I also agree with the problem statement, which I’ve seen repeated again and again, that fandom should be more distributed - that no single (especially not corporate-owned) social network should be the point of failure.

So. Let’s talk about server federation.

The most well-known federated technology right now is probably Mastadon. In simple terms, Mastadon is a Twitter-like social network. However, one huge difference between it and Twitter is federation.

What is federation? Well, once upon a time, the internet was much more distributed. One of the backbones of that distribution was mailing lists - which were email-based. Imagine a world where you can only send emails to other Gmail users! That’s basically how Twitter functions right now. Email, fortunately, is protocol-based; any technology that uses the protocol can send and receive emails. What matters for communication is the <em>protocol</em>, not the website or brand or company or framework. Federated social networks, wikis, and media hosting aims to bring that pattern back.

Under the hood, Mastadon implements protocols like ActivityPub to exchange information. These protocols are standardized so that different Mastadon servers can replicate data, and so that different <em>platforms</em> can communicate and <em>exchange</em> data. What this means in practical terms is that the following scenarios are possible:

- On Mastadon.one, A makes a post. On Mastadon.two, B enters “[email protected]” in the search bar. B then follows A, and can see user A’s posts, even though they are on totally different servers run by completely different people. - On Mastadon.one, A follows [email protected]. Hubzilla is a totally different, Tumblr-esque platform. But because Hubzilla <em>also</em> implements the ActivityPub protocol, A can see B’s posts in A’s Mastadon feed. - A is on Mastadon.one. On Mastadon.one, NSFW content is required to be flagged. B is on Mastadon.two. There are no content controls on Mastadon.two. Despite very different priorities and values, A can still follow B and vice versa, while remaining within their own communities.

This sort of setup is also fairly future-proofed: what matters is the protocol. You don’t have to worry about someone’s hobby framework going under, for example. Hubzilla takes this idea one step further and implements what they call “nomadic identity”. The basic idea is that you can log into different Hubzilla servers with the same credentials, and each account is equivalent, so even if your original account dies, your identity persists on all other servers.

Federation would solve a lot of fandom’s current problems. For starters, there is a huge variety of roll-your-own federated services out there. There’s Peertube, which is focused on video hosting; Pixelfed, focused on image hosting; Mastadon and other microblogging frameworks; Friendica and Osana, which are focused on social networking; Hubzilla, which is focused on all-purpose social networking, file storage, and wiki management; and Nextcloud, which is focused on file storage. This network of frameworks is incredibly powerful, and some of them are very easy to set up. I’ve run a Nextcloud instance for several years. It has my calendar, my files, a chat platform, an audio streamer, a Trello-esque project management app, and an e-reader. Hubzilla can be used as a wiki, a forum, a personal blog, a Reddit-esque community, or some unholy combination of all of the above. All of these platforms can communicate within separate instances of the same framework (Nextcloud to Nextcloud, or Friendica to Friendica), and many can communicate between frameworks too.

So: there are frameworks to do basically every fannish activity you could imagine, and a few of them even encompass Tumblr’s functionality. But also, because these frameworks were built by privacy-focused nerds, there are often a LOT of privacy and filtering controls. The idea behind federated communities is partially that even groups of decent people aren’t always going to get along, and a group of 100k+ people is likely to be incredibly hard to manage and no longer a true community. Federation gives you the ability to exist in online communities without being completely isolated from one another. Mastadon takes this idea so far that it shows health as green/yellow/red, with larger instances being less healthy.

Federation allows for data replication, so that data’s more resistant to takedowns. All of the above frameworks are open source, which means that fandom-specific extensions can be built without having to build the whole framework. Fandom has tons of technologically capable people who’d be capable of installing instances, and tons of data science people who could help ensure they don’t disappear.

- Because federated networks are decentralized, they are resistant to both actual censorship and people losing their hub host because of RL or money stuff. Hubzilla has robust channel data import features as well as the “nomadic identity” concept mentioned above. Fandom would need to work a bit at data backup strategies and stuff like that, but as long as you have a login on a single Hubzilla server somewhere, you have a login on other servers too. That’s a huge, huge thing!

- With federation, we no longer have to fight over whether microblogging or video-based stuff or longform blogging is better. Hubzilla alone has microblogging, longform blogging, wikis, chats, and web pages. This has huge implications for fandom - we can stay distributed and off in our own corners, but we’re also not silo’d. 

- Federation could be fandom-specific, ship-specific, or even your-ship-opinion specific. Most frameworks have really advanced privacy controls; you can (and should, in the case of shit like pedos and neo-nazis) ban whole servers, but you can also configure privacy groups down to individual users, and you can filter posts from users you’re connected to. This means a vastly more curated experience than is possible on twitter OR tumblr right now

- Because federated social networks are modern applications, they can host external files. This means it’s possible to embed stuff from YouTube, Vimeo, Imgur, etc. However, Hubzilla also has INTERNAL file storage, so if you want to run a Hubzilla exclusively to be your fanart archive? YOU CAN.

The absolute core and most important part of what I am talking about is that there is no management. Yes, if you join mastadon.social, your “management” will be the creator of Mastadon. But I can also spin up my own Mastadon instance, and then the Mastadon code is on my server, and members of my server are equal in validity to members of mastadon.social. That is the point of federated networks!

There are, obviously, potential issues. That’s why so many of the federated social networks implement robust blocking protocols. You might wind up on a server with a terrible mod - but then, you can always either start your own or join a different server. Open-source, federated platforms allow us more control compared to AO3 or Dreamwidth, not less. They are customizable in terms of rules and source code on a server-by-server basis.

Social platforms/blogging

Mastadon (can connect to Hubzilla) ( microblogging framework)

Hubzilla (can connect to  Mastadon) (all-purpose social networking, file storage, and wiki management)

Friendica and Osana ( social networking)(can they connect with other frameworks?)

Platforms focusing on a single media

PeerTube (video)

Pixelfed (image hosting)

Nextcloud (file hosting)

I realize these are broad strokes because there are elements of social networking inside all of them). Just wanted to simplify the map for us newbies.

Plume is an open-source, federated, user-run blogging platform. There are no ads, no data harvesting, posts come to you in chronological order, NSFW is and always will be allowed (depending on the instance), and it has a lot of tumblr-like features other sites lack: no character limit, a rich text editor with bold/italic/hyperlinks/etc, inline pictures, headers, tags at the bottom that can be used to organize posts on your blog, comments, likes, sideblogs, and so on. It’s still under very active development too, meaning more features are on their way!

But what about the userbase? You may ask. I’ve never even heard of Plume - is it completely dead? The answer is yes and no - there aren’t that many people on Plume, true, but that doesn’t matter. Plume uses ActivityPub, the same standard used by Mastodon and the other sites on the fediverse - what that means is people on Mastodon can follow you, see your posts, and like/comment them from Mastodon. Same with other platforms like WriteFreely, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Diaspora, Pleroma, Friendica, etc, etc. And I can tell you from experience, the fediverse is bumpin’; you won’t have to worry about your audience

The problems with tumblr are inherent with centralized corporate social media, and switching to another corporate master won’t solve them. What you need to do is stop giving power to profit-motivated companies to control your experience. Take that power back yourself on the fediverse! Join Plume!!!

Everyone is panicking over TOS-es right now as they find a new home as Tumblr gets flushed down the toilet. I don’t like those random TOS breakdowns because the analysis is always wrong. 

Anyway this is what people pay me to do and I will now do it for $0 because I’m tired of everyone spreading misinformation. This post is not a substitute for legal advice etc. Reblogs are appreciated because I literally see TOS nonsense on my dash every day. 

Any more experienced copyright lawyers please feel free to weigh in - it’s part of my field yes, but my wheelhouse is more film production COT rather than derivative works.

Google Drive (TOS)

Google doesn’t have rights to do whatever they want to files you upload to Google Drive

Their TOSes are annoyingly broad in drafting but essentially boilerplate clauses that they need to host your work, use google translate on it, make it searchable etc. They cannot steal your fanfic. They cannot modify your art and use it for whatever.

Your work MAY be threatened (that is, deleted) thanks to FOSTA/SESTA, which imo is a clown provision signed by a clown that sent safe harbour down the toilet. This and this has more information (I’ve skimmed but not perused both), but the tl;dr is: similar to Tumblr, there was a ham-fisted attempt to protect victims of sex trafficking and all it really did was make cloud based services start deleting user files whether relevant or not. 

deviantART (Submission Policy) (TOS)

Uploading work to dA doesn’t give them a license to sell it to Hot Topic. This post is incorrect. Debunked here and corrected by the artist himself here. Your art is safe. 

There’s a breakdown of the TOS in there that’s pretty much wrong on most points, if someone wants me to do a not-wrong version, ask. This may help.

All you really need to know is that like Google, I checked it over and nothing in there puts you at risk for dA asserting ownership over your work or selling it - they need those rights for thumbnails, search functions, resizing etc. 

Sexually explicit fanart is not allowed, as well as “obscenity”, which is an oddly broad term covering things like “sexually orientated commercial telephone messages”. 

I’m not aware of any content purges.

AO3 (TOS)

Yum. I like this one. Easy to read and clearly explained for most people with basic reading comprehension. Section G - What We Do With Content will tell you everything you need to know.

Basically, they have the same clauses about you granting AO3 a license to modify/etc your work, but they take the trouble to explain to you exactly what that means, and how they use it to improve accessibility etc. 

No history of content purges as far as I know. Explicit content is allowed with limits eg. no child porn. 

Wordpress (TOS)

Same deal - you’re looking for 1. Wordpress - Responsibility of Contributors, with the exact same thing as everybody else. They also do a decent job of explaining what they use the license for (though once again, it’s standard), albeit not as beautifully as AO3. 

However, images of sexual acts (including fanart) are against TOS.

I found no history of content purges.

Dreamwidth (TOS)

Same old standard licensing clause, again doesn’t let them steal your stuff.

Incredibly…open content policies…you can basically do whatever you want so long as you don’t break laws or commit fraud it seems? If I’m wrong, feel free to correct.

credit artists

link to their current media/platforms to the best of your ability

with artist’s permission, share their credited work on whatever fandom platforms you end up moving to if it’s not a site that they have migrated to

help others keep track of where their favorite artists are now

if you’re using discord to look at art, remember to check out the actual link and maybe give feedback there, because telling your friend that you like the art they linked does nothing for keeping the artist arting

Erotic text is still currently allowed under tumblr’s new policy, but it might not be later, so keep these things in mind for fic authors too. 

And just in general, it’s not just content creators that need support and security. Look around at the friends you’ve made here. Think about how you’ll keep in touch with them. Think about how you might reminisce and be sad if the “next tumblr” comes along and they felt too lost to have stayed in fandom long enough to meet you there. Be kind; show love. Everyone’s a little scared and sad now - creators, rebloggers, and lurkers. We’re all looking forward at December 17th with uncertainty and indecision, and that’s okay. 

We’re not scared because we loved the blue background or the activity page design, we’re scared because of the people, friends, heroes, admirers, peers, validation, love, and happiness that we feel slipping away. And so long as we hold onto the bonds that matter most to us, this will all pass a lot less painfully than we fear. 

If you’ve been meaning to get in touch with someone, but have been putting it off or feeling shy, now’s probably the time. If you wanted to make friends, note down someone’s accounts, form a discord or mailing-list with your buddies, now’s the time.

As we sit on the cusp of changes to the Internet, after your other activities to support Internet freedom, archive your fandom stuff.

Save the electronic files of your favorite online fandom works. Consider print-outs of your favorite online material. And save paper ephemera from fandom events.

Why save? Because you put the effort into a fanwork. Because you may be surprised when a fandom stays alive for years, or gets revived, or when an academic asks to cite your work. Because it’s stupidly hard to find items on Tumblr. Because, lo, in ages past, many fandom archives have risen and fallen, taking favorite fics off the ‘Net. Because it made you happy, makes you remember. Because you never know.

What can you save?

Fanart

Stories you wrote

Epic comments on stories you wrote

Stories you love that other people wrote

Meta and meta-related discussions

Translations others did of your works

Physical items: paper ephemera, clothing, accessories, art prints and drawings.

Behind the cut…saving from Tumblr and AO3, delving into lost web sites, how to save computer files for the long term, and why I’m glad I saved physical fandom items from 10+ years ago.

https://github.com/bbolli/tumblr-utils/blob/master/tumblr_backup_for_beginners.md

Hopefully him doing a quick walk through solves some of the issues you were having:

the more friends ask me about dreamwidth, the more i realize i know a lot about this site that isn’t super obvious at first glance. so here is a primer for those of you thinking about making a dreamwidth account. this post ranges from your really basic starter tips to the completely esoteric things that come from using it for a decade.

a what now? dreamwho?

Dreamwidth is a code fork of LiveJournal. A code fork means that they took LJ’s code (which used to be open source) and went their own direction with it. They still use the basic ideas behind LJ’s codebase, but have changed and improved upon it in various ways.

The core difference between DW and other websites is privacy isn’t an afterthought, but the central feature. You can lock posts, filter them to a select group, or make them visible to only you. I recommend reading through this section of DW’s FAQ for more on this.

When you make an account, you can subscribe (ie follow) and grant access to other users. Both of these are one-way – if A subscribes to B, that doesn’t automatically grant B access to all of A’s locked posts. Here’s more on this.

DW in general can be kind of confusing for people who have only used tumblr, but their FAQs are pretty good on the whole, and they’re searchable. If a website feature is confusing, start there.

okay, i have a journal. now what?

Customize it! DW doesn’t have all the latest and greatest features, but you can still make it your own. Here are some useful tips.

You can change your layout from Organize > Select Style. Mobile support is hit or miss, unfortunately, but there are some nice default layouts that work with it. You can also use this style for Practicality which makes DW fully mobile-friendly. If you’d rather design it yourself, Tabula Rasa is completely stripped down.

You can get premade DW layouts at the dreamwidthlayouts community. If you have trouble with your code, ask over at style_system.

Edit your profile! This is where you put your usernames for other social media sites, tell people a bit about yourself, and mention your interests. Your interests will be part of the interest search; it’s one way to find people.

Upload icons! Free accounts get 15 icons; paid accounts get 100 icons, premium accounts get 250 icons. You can use one icon in each entry and commment you make. It’s good form to put the maker of the icon in the comment section if you didn’t make it. If you got it from someone on tumblr, you can even link their blog using the code <user name=username site=tumblr>. (This works all across DW!)

While you can’t make pages, you can set a post to stick at the top of your journal, much like Twitter’s pinned tweets. Here’s how to do it.

You can also change how Dreamwidth itself looks, if you don’t like the red. Go to Account Settings > Display. Most other site display preferences are on that page.

While you’re here, look through the Account Settings > Privacy page. By default, your public entries will be included in site searches. You can turn it off at the bottom of the page if you want. You can also set it so your entries are automatically access-locked or private as well.

This got very long so the rest is behind the cut. (Now you really know I’m legit.)

So those of you who are backing up your blog may have noticed that it’s taking ages to actually work.  For me, it took over 48 hours for my backup to be completed.  This is due in part to the servers likely being flooded with backup requests and in part because lol tumblr programming

So I highly recommend using TumblThree:

HERE is a link to the releases page.

HERE is the how to use section on the program.

Basically, download and extract the .zip to wherever you want.  Open the .exe file.

The program will automatically read your clipboard, so if you copy a tumblr url to it, it will automatically add it to the blog list.  When you select a blog, the ‘details’ tab on the right will have some options that you can change, like if you want only images, video, audio, text, conversation, link, answer, quote, and various metadata.  You can also look for specific tags.

I would recommend that you select all the boxes like I have above.  

BY DEFAULT, the program downloads all of your posts, including reblogs.  This could increase the number of files downloaded by a factor of 10.  If you do not want reblogs downloaded, untick that box.  

I would also recommend setting a download location.

Each of these settings can be set on a per blog basis.  You do not need to be the owner of the blog to do this.  

If your blog is protected, there are some additional settings you will have to change.  Read through the how to use link above for more details.

To star the process, you need to add your blog to the queue, and also hit the crawl button down below.  Crawl tells the program to begin the content search on a given blog, but only on the blogs added to the queue. 

(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)

i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work

A General Rule

on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this

that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’

Tumblr

just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags

i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss

now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest

Dreamwidth

use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

WordPress

if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url

if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url

i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed

ArtStation

use username.artstation.com/rss

i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss

Mastodon

just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url

i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss

deviantART

use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername

i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis

YouTube

this one’s a goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first

in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit

you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit

i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w

Tapas

this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.

the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed

LINE Webtoons

ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button

the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed

Twitter & Instagram

these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason

twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.

right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username

i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne

So I made a tweet about how Maciej Ceglowski (aka Pinboard guy) should consult with fandom on how to build a new fandom platform inclusive of not just text, but images and multimedia. 

You get one personal blog (think of this like your tumblr main). Rather than sideblogs, you have communities. These are separate pages where multiple users can discuss, create, and blog about a specific subject.

Community pages function like group sideblogs. They also offer a discussion/forum feature, in addition to their blogging feature.

Posts you make in a community don’t appear on your personal blog, or vice versa.

However, if you want to crosspost, you can reblog a post from a community to your personal, or from your personal to a community.

What you can do is just set up a “community” where you just post your sideblog content, if you like.

For example, my “main” is Xenolalia. It’s mostly full of furry art.

I’m a member of the Digimon community. When I want to look at digimon art, discuss episodes or theories, etc, I look at that community page, or post to it.

And if I want to maintain my own personal collection of digimon art, I could make my own community called “XenolaliaDigimon” to reblog digimon content to. I would probably be reblogging content from the Digimon community to this XenolaliaDigimon community.

And if I wanted to start doing original writing again, I could make a community called “ZiziWrites” and post all of my fiction to it.

In terms of keeping your various identities separate. As far as I am aware, and this may be wrong so take it with a grain of salt. There doesn’t seem to be a way for people to identify what communities you are in, other than you telling them directly.