#dreamwidth

[witchadam]

i don't believe tumblr is going away this time either but i appreciate all the people making dreamwidths (because dreamwidth is fun) and i think you guys might like some more up-to-date and tumblr-esque themes for your brand new journal

[anghraine]

I got seriously into fandom on livejournal as a teenager, and jumped ship to Dreamwidth almost as soon as it became available (DW honestly remains my favorite platform by a mile). The ways it's unlike LJ are just things I like better about it, like the absolute commitment to no ads or data selling + breaking the "friends" function into "subscribe"/"give access" (basically, separating following people from giving them access to f-lock) + fighting government overreach.

The only major drawback for me is that fandom itself drifted to massive social media platforms/dynamics that basically require heavy corporate investment, so there's not nearly as much interaction was there was on LJ, but still more than it looks like from outside. And f-lock and icon subtext remain treasures (the only reason I'm not on DW more is hitting the maximum of 2000 tags, lol). I only came to Tumblr because fandom was obviously moving here including my friends, and I noticed that a lot of my fanart searches led to Tumblr, and it's been good to me personally (and is obviously better for things like gifsets that are really ideal for Tumblr's design).

I do wish DW had an ask function like Tumblr's (with the ability to turn it off) because it's been a fun way to have conversations that are visible to people who might be interested, but I understand why it's not really in the spirit of the threaded commentariat structure. And I like that there's no likes/kudos mechanic, so if you want to interact, you have to actually use words.

(I absolutely refuse to migrate to anything involving real-time chat like Discord or to use a true microblogging site as the main base of fandom operations, so if Tumblr goes down, I would probably just retreat full-time to DW and finally clean up my tags :P)

Okay, you know what? I must know, because I know many of my LiveJournal friends jumped ship for Facebook and Tumblr and we all have enjoyed Tumblr a lot:

Who here used to be on LiveJournal? Who still has a Dreamwidth account but it's not the same? Who came to Tumblr initially hungry for something that resembled LJ Community but included more visuals?

[bisexualbaker]

Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?

To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:

Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3's abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.

In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)

Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn't sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.

Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.

The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!

The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!

We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.

Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).

So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.

Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.

Finally, we're recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just... not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.

Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.

Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.

Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.

[shinelikethunder]

tumblr trying to make communities happen and adding individual-post-level interaction controls like turning off reblogs 🤝 discord trying to enable publicly-discoverable forum-like servers that still support granular permissions over who can see what 🤝 bluesky custom feeds and multiple ways to view/organize reply threads:

any sufficiently advanced social media site that bothers to listen to its users will eventually convergently evolve back into LiveJournal

[hhimring]

Tolkien100 Drabble Community

Tolkien100 is a long-running drabble community that originated on LiveJournal and is currently maintained on both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth (the first link in this announcement goes to the Dreamwidth community; the Livejournal community is here). The community focusses on fixed-length or "perfect" drabbles (100 words) inspired by any fictional works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including their movie adaptations.

In its current incarnation (since 2018) there are also regular writing prompts. The current prompt is "Green Leaves". 

New participants would be really welcome!

(A Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account is required.)

Please signal-boost even if you do not write fixed-length drabbles yourself! But also, if you feel you might like to try, you may find that fixed-length does more for you than you might expect.

[sakuranightmarez]

FFXV Websites

General FFXV Final Fantasy XV Wiki

FFXV Fan Kit - Official media including game videos/trailers, recorded interviews and information on various campaigns they've launched for the game (JP)

Brotherhood: FINAL FANTASY XV Official Anime Prologue ft backstories of the Noctis and the boys (JP, Subtitled Eng)

Parting Ways - A script of FFXV's immediate prologue ft. stories of Clarus, Cor, Captain Drautos, Iris & the Kingsglaive as well as Noctis & Co saying goodbye

Parting Ways & Dawn of the Future - Internet Archive's copy of both the prologue script and book

Lore, Translations & Analysis Full Lines FFXV - All lines and document files from within the game.

Spelldaggers - Eng & Jpn Scripts and Translations

The Lifestream FFXV - Lore, Translations and archived Fantheories

Calling4Glaives Deep Dives - Analysis, Lore and general Deep Dives

Artist Resources FFXV Official Art - Official artwork, screenshots and character references (JP)

Fansites LOKTON - A FFXV/Prompto Argentum Fanblog

THAT'S IT! THE UNOFFICIAL FFXV COMMUNITY COOKBOOK - 111 Recipes fans worked together to compile into a google site

Honey & Toast FFXV Cookbook - A cookbook compiled by fan 'Honey&Toast' (pdf form here)

Discords FFXV Book Club - A Server dedicated to hanging out, sharing and geeking out over FFXV fanworks https://discord.gg/95VQB6fgPb

For Hearth & Home - A Kingsglaive Server https://discord.gg/VZkhXV2

FFXV Official Discord - The Official Unofficial FFXV Server

Promptis - A Discord for Prompto & Noctis Shippers

Other Dreamwidth Communities ffxv - Previous FFXV Fan-Community (Possibly Inactive, If given CPR ff15 will become a resources journal that anyone can post to)

ffxv_kinkmeme - A community for anonymously suggesting FFXV writing prompts that others may find appealing to write (Despite the name these prompts can be gen and not ship related at all)

Can anybody think of any missing fansites or lore resource websites which may be missing from this list? The full constantly updated list is located here and if you don't want to comment on tumblr feel free to leave a logged in or anonymous comment on that post

[sunshine304]

Signal Boost for Writers: Research & Fact-checking comm on Dreamwidth

There used to be a great Livejournal community called "Little Details" that helped all kinds of fiction writers (fanfiction, original works, DMs etc.) with their research and fact-checking.

That comm no longer exists, but it has now opened again on Dreamwidth!

It's also possible to ask a question anonymously, the moderator has made an extra post for that; it's explained in the rules and guidelines post at the top of the page.

[frameacloud]

This is page number 12 of Theri There, originally posted on November 14, 2005. The image description is in the alt text. Here's the discussion thread for this page.

Notes from when I originally posted it in 2005: "Today’s comic was inspired by a certain thread where Kyoudai mentioned having had an experience of receiving sensory feedback from a phantom limb, as shown. This could be called a rather odd way of having ESP, Extra Sensory Perception. Kitsune are a kind of Japanese mythological creature. They’re shapeshifting fox-spirits, cunning magical tricksters. While I could have shown the kitsune in this comic as being like a real-world fox, I preferred kitsune as depicted in Hiroshige’s prints."

Notes from posting this again in 2025: When I was younger, phantom limbs were one of many things that I thought of within a framework of paranormal phenomena. Though it is common for people to think of their phantoms in a spiritual way, that isn't necessary for having them. Even for people who don't think of them that way, sometimes folks do tend to feel more alert about obstacles near their phantom. It's all part of the range of how people experience phantom limb phenomena, and some of it can seem strange.

first page | previous page | newest page

Here's the discussion thread for this page.

[emmalylis]

I’m doing it. Tonight is the night I figure out Dreamwidth.

I’m about a decade too young to remember the version of the internet it hearkens back to, which has tripped me up in the past. But I keep wanting to do exchanges hosted there, and that means I need to buckle down and learn at least enough features to keep up with a few communities there.

It’s me, my laptop, an armload of tutorials (shoutout @bisexualbaker and the kind folks in the Battleship Exchange discord) and whatever god will take up my cause against the universe.

Wahoo!

[otherkinnews]

Mississippi and Oklahoma propose laws against students who identify as nonhuman animals

This article was originally written by Orion Scribner @frameacloud on January 18, 2025 on the Otherkin News blog on DreamWidth: https://otherkinnews.dreamwidth.org/95979.html

For the third year running, Republicans in the US have once again continued to write "anti-furry bills." On January 17, Republicans introduced Mississippi House Bill 1060 (MS HB 1060), which you can see for yourself on the state government's site, though you may need to enable Javascript if your web browser doesn't display it properly: https://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/2025/pdf/history/HB/HB1060.xml Currently, this is the bill's official description, as written by its sponsors:

"Gender dysphoria; require school personnel to notify parents of student who request to be referred to as different gender or nonhuman."

Emphasis added. Furthermore, the sponsors wrote it with this summary:

"An Act To Require School Administrators, Teachers, Counselors Or Other Personnel Of The School To Provide Written Notification To The Parent Or Legal Guardian Of Any Student Identifying At School As A Gender Or Pronoun That Does Not Align With The Child's Sex On Their Birth Certificate, Sex Assigned At Birth Or Using Sex-segregated School Programs And Activities Or School Facilities That Do Not Align With The Child's Sex Assignment At Birth, Within Three Days Of Becoming Aware Of Such Conduct Or Request By The Affected Student; To Provide That No School Personnel Shall Be Disciplined Or Suffer Any Unlawful Reprisal For Refusing To Acknowledge A Student By A Preferred Gender, Pronoun Or Animal Species That Is Inconsistent With The Child's Sex Assignment At Birth; To Prescribe The Legislative Intent; And For Related Purposes."

Emphasis added. Despite what the description and summary says, the bill text itself doesn't mention either of the topics that I emphasized here. This leaves it an ordinary example of legislature proposed to discriminate against transgender students in public schools. This is a common pattern in anti-furry bills, where an early version of the bill mentions students who identify as nonhuman animal species, to try to attract attention, and then the sponsors delete that part later so that the bill can focus on their real intentions against transgender students. Republicans mean for the temporary inclusion of that topic to satirize transgender students and make a comparison that they see as absurd. It's a reference to an urban legend that Republicans circulate, where supposedly schools that let transgender students use the restrooms they want are also providing litter boxes in classrooms for students who are furries. That urban legend has been debunked by the fact-checking sites Snopes and Reuters.

The bill was sponsored by these eleven Republican Representatives: Charles Blackwell, William Arnold, Randy Boyd, Larry Byrd, Carolyn Crawford, Jim Estrada, Greg Haney, Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes, Donnie Scoggin, Joseph Tubb, and Beth Waldo. These are some of the same authors as a similar anti-furry bill from last year, Mississippi House Bill 176, which was also written by the same Blackwell, Arnold, Boyd, Byrd, and Scoggin, plus Dan Eubanks and Jimmy Fondren.

[Edited to add] Another new one is Oklahoma House Bill 1327, by sole sponsor Justin Humphrey. This is basically the same as his bill from last year, Oklahoma House Bill 3084, still proposing that students who identify as animals should get picked up from school by animal control. He specializes in introducing bills that sound bizarre to attract attention, and later he cleans them up so they'll pass into law. He prefiled it on December 30th so that it will be introduced on February 3.

Anti-furry bills similar to this one began in 2023 with North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, Indiana Statehouse Bill 380, and a proposed amendment to Montana Senate Bill 544. 2024 had Oklahoma House Bill 3084, Mississippi House Bill 176, and Missouri House Bill 2678. No anti-furry bills have yet passed into law as such. Fellow volunteers and I have been reporting on these in the Otherkin News blog all along, which you can read in the tag for that purpose. Don't like this bill? If you're a US citizen, voting is only one of your powers to shape the laws that you live under. In the recording of my polycule's panel about anti-furry bills, skip to the timestamp 23:44 to hear what ordinary citizens can do. In the written script of our lecture, see Slides 21 through 25.

[musette22]

Where you can find me:

Because nothing is certain anymore these days, and because of the recent posts I've seen going around about this subject, I've decided to make some accounts on other social media websites, strictly for fandom purposes. Let's hope Tumblr isn't going anywhere for a long, long time, but just in case, here are the places you can find me should anything happen:

Dreamwidth

Bluesky

Pillowfort

I'm "musette22" on all of them.

I'm not sure if I'll be using any of them as long as Tumblr is still around (and I'm not thrilled that none of these are image hosting sites, so if anyone has a better alternative, let me know). But do feel free to follow me there, or let me know who if I can find you on any of those platforms! The main thing for me is making sure that we don't lose track of each other should anything happen to Tumblr. It would suck, there's no doubt about it, but as long as we know where to find each other, I'm sure we'd be able to build a community anywhere! ❤️ We (Stuckies etc.) are notoriously hard to get rid of, after all...

I'm also thinking about creating a public spreadsheet of some kind for the Stucky fandom, where everyone who wants to can note down their details / usernames on other platforms so that it's easier to find each other again should anything happen.

[rattusrattus3]

have you ever looked into the platform Dreamwidth? i know you've talked in your videos about being into blogs and classic internet social media sites, there's not a whole lot of activity on Dreamwidth right now but I would love to see more especially in the genres of alternative culture, diy, and the ethical web. i guess forgive me for using your platform to spread this promotion... i promise i'm not affiliated with them :P , i just like what that site has to offer! love your videos :D

I have not looked into / heard of this so thank you for the rec! And also thanks for the kind words that sounds like a really fun platform - will have to look into this!!! :O

[bisexualbaker]

So it seems like some of you might be interested in learning more about Dreamwidth.

Listen, here's the thing: Dreamwidth is not slick. It is not fancy. Its base code was originally put together some two decades ago or more, and it looks like it. It can't do much with images and definitely not with video—like, I think there's some way to embed video, but I have no idea how to do it, and hosting it on Dreamwidth is, uh...

The point is! Dreamwidth is a lot different from Tumblr. It's closer to Tumblr than it is to Facebook or Instagram, but it's a lot more old-school internet than Tumblr is. And that means that, for anyone who wasn't on the internet some ten, fifteen years ago, there's probably going to be a steep learning curve. It can take more effort to post things there, and more effort to find your people, its image hosting capacity can charitably be described as both "limited" and "poorly organized", and overall it may still never be the kind of website where you, personally, will want to spend a lot of time or do a lot of things. Dreamwidth does not and will never have an app, for pretty much the same reasons as AO3.

But there is one thing I can guarantee, and that is that Dreamwidth is willing to fight for us and our rights. They're already doing so.

[beatrice-otter]

Time Travel killing Jesus and the religion of empire

There's a post about time travel going around tumblr, and somebody tagged that they would kill Mary before the birth of Jesus, so that Christianity wouldn't exist. Problem is, while that might indeed kill Christianity, it would probably just mean that Constantine would slot Mithraism into his Imperial domination schemes instead. In the late 200s AD there were two mostly-underground monotheistic mystery cults rapidly gaining adherents in the Roman Empire. There were a lot of similarities between the two, at least superficially. For example, there was a lot of emphasis on communal ritual meals. One was Christianity. The other was Mithraism. Constantine was intrigued by both. We know he was involved in Mithraism in his youth. But what Constantine really liked the idea of using religion to unify the Roman Empire. By the 300s, the Roman Empire was beginning to fragment, with regular civil wars. Constantine came to power in one of those civil wars. He thought that if everyone worshiped the same god (instead of different gods worshiped in different places, with the Roman pantheon and emperors as a thin veneer of unity), it would help keep the whole ramshackle edifice together. (Spoiler alert: it did not.) So he picked one of the two monotheistic religions that was rapidly gaining in popularity, and encouraged people to convert to it, heaping power and wealth on (some of) them. And that's how Christianity became an imperial religion. Christianity changed rapidly in response to that. Major parts of the religion were changed or dropped entirely. For example, until Constantine, the vast majority of Christians were strict pacifists. In most communities, soldiers were required to leave the army and find a new trade before they could be baptized. Obviously, this was unacceptable if Christianity was going to become the religion of the Roman Empire. In a straight-up choice between pacifism and Imperial power, the Christian church as a whole dropped the pacifism like a hot potato. 100 years after Constantine you have St. Augustine laying out the "Just War" theory where war is fine as long as you have a good reason for it. That's a complete 180 from everything the early Christians believed. There are many other examples of things that got dropped or changed in Christianity to make it more palatable to Imperial might. There are a lot of toxic things in Christianity as we know it. But the thing is ... many of them come from this process of adapting their beliefs and practices to fit what Constantine (and later Emperors, and the entire power structure of the Empire) wanted Christianity to be. Namely, something tame that affirmed and enforced the existing Imperial power structure. And Christianity has been a partner and tool of the power structures of the dominant culture ever since. This is one of the reasons there's so much difference between Jesus' teachings and Christian teachings, in so many cases. In a straight-up choice between faithfulness and power ... a majority of Christians in the last two thousand years have most often chosen power. But here's the thing. If Christianity didn't exist, that doesn't mean none of this would have happened. It just means that Constantine would probably have chosen Mithraism instead. Do you think the Mithraists would have been any less willing to take the power and wealth on offer to them, in exchange for becoming a lackey of empire? Do you think Christianity was uniquely corruptible? I don't.

comments Comment? https://ift.tt/uspfvE9

[senmutthebuilder]

So tomorrow would have been Anne McCaffrey's 99th birthday. I had, last year, come up with the idea of generating a community solely for the works of Anne McCaffrey. Love or hate her, she had an interesting impact on the face of Science Fiction, and was groundbreaking as a woman writer.

The reason for the idea? A year long celebration leading up to the 100th birthday, much as we Heinlein fans had activities planned for his 100th. It seems a good way to honor the amount of imagination Anne McCaffrey threw at her worlds.

(more at post)