not here, bye

For people who want to use Dreamwidth, but are totally confused about how it works!

What is Dreamwidth?

Dreamwidth is a social media platform founded in 2009 after Strikethrough

It’s made out of a heavily-modified version of Livejournal code

It’s based around producing your own original content, and seeing original content other people post

The site is owned and run by fans and aims to provide creative people with an Internet home

Getting around your account

Your journal is like your “home”. It’s where you keep your stuff. It’s got different parts:

Recent Entries: View your posts in chronological order

(yourusername.dreamwidth.org)

Profile: Your “about” page

(yourusername.dreamwidth.org/profile)

Archive: See your posts as a calendar

(yourusername.dreamwidth.org/archive)

Tags: See all the tags you’ve used and go to their posts

(yourusername.dreamwidth.org/tag)

Memories: Like the “Likes” feature on Tumblr

You also have a “Reading” page (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/read)

This is like your Tumblr dash

It’s where you read entries from your “circle”, the people and communities you’re subscribed to

You can customize it a lot with filters and control who you see when

You also have a “Network” page (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/network)

This is where you see posts from everyone that everyone in your circle subscribes to

It’s a great way to discover new stuff and also learn what awful taste some of your circle members have

Finding new things

Listing an Interest in your profile is like getting listed in the phonebook. This is opt-in, choosing to say, “Yes! I’m really into this thing! Consider me a person who blogs about it!

Content Search is the more powerful way to search through the blog of everyone who’s opted into it, so you can look for everyone who’s posting about a certain thing right now. However, you’ll have to wade through a lot more junk.

Communities are Dreamwidth’s social hubs. They’re places where a lot of people can share content they’re interested in and talk to each other. Unlike Tumblr tags, they’re managed by specific people and have rules, so people behaving badly can get kicked out.

Latest Things is a direct firehose of EVERYTHING PUBLICLY POSTED TO THE SITE, HOMG

Privacy controls?! That’s a thing?!

You get to choose who sees your posts! You can make your posts public, private, or “locked”, which means only people you’ve added to your access list can read them

When you add a new person to your circle you can choose to subscribe to them, to make their posts show up on your Reading page, and/or to grant access, which lets them see your locked posts. You can do one, the other, or both!

Likewise, communities can make posts viewable to members only.

You can also create custom access filters, to allow only some of your access list to see a post.

Banning someone means they cannot leave you comments or send you messages. There are more advanced tweaks to make sure they never show up on your reading page if they post to a community you subscribe to, or remove them from the comments on a post.

Comments

The comments to a post are where the real fun happens.

Comments are sent to the email of whoever you’re replying to. They’re a real conversation. You’re not shouting into the void–you’re talking back directly to the post’s originator and other commenters.

You can edit your comment so long as it hasn’t been replied to, and you can delete your own comments.

The originator of the post, and administrators if it’s a community, can delete threads, or “freeze” them, leaving them intact but preventing anyone from replying to them.

You will add new skills to your resume

Dreamwidth leaves a lot more “backend” open so you can customize your experience to a huge degree. However, this means learning or using coding languages like HTML and CSS

The comment box on entries does not have a built-in text editor, so you will have to add your own HTML if you want to add <i>italic</i>, <b>bold</b>, or <a href=“http://websiteurl.com”>links</a>.

Dreamwidth has been my main active posting platform for a year and a half now, and I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers talking about jumping ship over to DW with tumblr’s uhhhhhh current state of affairs.

But DW is kinda bland and boring if you’re too young to have been of the LiveJournal generation, and therefore don’t know where to look or start in order to build your friends list and find communities, so I’m going to do some of the legwork for you.

the_great_tumblr_purge: I made a dw community specifically for people jumping ship from tumblr to reconnect with each other.

addme: a friending community where you pimp yourself out and find other people with similar interests that you might want to see on your reading page.

addme_fandom: similar to above, only with a stronger emphasis on finding people based on your fandoms.

fandomcalendar: a community where you can find fandom events, such as big bangs, exchanges, challenges, bingos, etc. and other fandom communities that might suit your interests.

questionoftheday: for when you don’t know what to post.

If anybody else has communities they want to add, go right ahead and add them in a reblog.