#dreamwidth

[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.

[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.

[beatrice-otter]

Why AO3 needs to be accountable for reducing fandom racism in its internal culture and the archive

You've probably seen end-otw-racism in the last few days, trying to get people to support their efforts to get the AO3 to actually DO something about the racism problem that AO3 has admitted that it has. Here's their call to action post, with a brief summary of the problems and what they want people to do about it. Basically, there have been problems with racism at AO3 since the beginning, and they did acknowledge the problems in 2020 and promise to fix them, and haven't actually ... done most of the things they said they would. They have started to implement blocking and muting, which is good, because those are vital tools for fans of color to protect themselves from racist harassment, but they haven't updated their TOS or changed their Abuse policies or hired the diversity consultant they said they were going to. And that's a big problem. Among other things the original head of the Abuse team--the one who set it up and developed the policies and procedures still in use today!--was a noted racist who has since been banned from at least one convention and at least one fanwork exchange for making a lot of fans of color uncomfortable. This is not the only problem with a white supremacist culture in the organization, but it is emblematic of the larger issues with the organization's culture that have not been addressed. (That link is from 2020, but nothing substantial has changed since then, alas.) If you think that the AO3 is fine, and people are overstating things, I really encourage you to go read that post and the links in it. And then go read these tweet threads about what the state of things at AO3 is now. Maybe also go read Stitch's excellent essays on racism in fandom (and remember that people have tried to destroy her life--get her fired and get her on terrorist watch lists--for writing them). What sorts of things does end-otw-racism want? Basic stuff that AO3 should already be doing. For example, people should not be allowed to harass people through AO3 using trolling fanworks, harassing tags, and comments. Yet when people use these parts of AO3 infrastructure to harass people of color and create a hostile environment for them, AO3 Abuse says there's nothing they can do and it doesn't count as harassment under the site's TOS. end-otw-racism is not calling for censorship. They are calling for the OTW to realize that AO3 currently has a Nazi Bar Problem. You cannot have a safe that is safe for both nazis and people of color. If you try, the nazis will harass and drive out the people of color. Tolerance is not a moral principle, it is a peace treaty; if one side does not abide by it, asking the other side to abide by it is asking them to lay down and accept their abuse. And free speech is incredibly important, but it has limits; and those limits are where you are using speech to harass people and incite violence, which some people are using AO3 to do! I hope that you will all support end-otw-racism in calling for the AO3 to fulfill its promises and address the issues in question, and I hope the AO3 will listen. comments Comment? https://ift.tt/4BR98XN

[frameacloud]

This is the first page of my comic about therianthropes and otherkin, Theri There, from September 4, 2005.

Next page.

Original notes: "This is the kind of simple pleasure that makes us who we are. Thanks to a couple of dragons: to Kistaro Windrider, for the analogy comparing the experience of bike riding to flying, and permission to use this idea for a strip; and to Baxil, who helped edit my writing so that it wouldn't sound like haiku by Yoda. Thanks also to all my friends for their overwhelming approval and support... You've helped this comic come to be. You all rock! :) "

Some new notes: I posted this first page on September 4, 2005. On September 4, 2023, my comic Theri There has just turned eighteen years old! To celebrate this anniversary, I'm going to start posting old pages of it to Tumblr each day, so that it'll be on here too. The comic's main presence should be on its Dreamwidth. During this September, I'm going to work on making its Dreamwidth look more like how I want.

Talk about this page on the Dreamwidth forum for Theri There.

[batknot]

Tumblr Alternatives

In light of recent news, here are some tumblr alternatives that I am aware of.

Cohost (very much like tumblr, seems to be the most popular alternative)

Bluesky (more like twitter, I find it harder to use)

Pillowfort (nostalgic 2015 tumblr build, doesnt seem to have a lot of users)

Dreamwidth (old internet kind of build like a 2000-2010 website)

Mastodon is also an alternative but I do not personally recommend it since it's not the most user friendly.

Please feel free to add reviews, other websites, or your accounts.

[doomspiral]

Hetalia Kinkmeme

I do not want to talk about how ruined all my centering is <3

Please watch/subscribe to the community but know that only the mods will be members for posting priviledges. If you are 18+ and wish to be a moderator, contact me or @council-of-beetroot

Link to the Community: heta-kink-meme-blog

What is a kinkmeme?

We used to have these all the time in fandom, and some stragglers are still bravely pushing onward in the face of fandom splintering and attempts at censorship, bullying, and flaming. This is where you go to request an idea anonymously and get an anonymous response, both according to community rules. An example below:

[alexseanchai]

[shinelikethunder]

inspired by @not-supernatural's TWOP fandom-history deep dive, i did some drive-by gifting of paid-account time to old SPN livejournal communities that have been imported to dreamwidth - namely, ones with thousands upon thousands of prompt/fill comments that live beyond the reach of any built-in tagging system

behold, now with ✨ full-text comment search ✨

SPN Masquerade (anonymous kink meme that runs in brief rounds; fills manually archived and tagged on the spn_masquerade pinboard)

hoodie_time (general community for dean-centric hurt/comfort; in addition to regular tagged posts, has ten comment-meme rounds with manually compiled masterlists of fills)

ohsam (general community for sam-centric hurt/comfort; in addition to regular tagged posts, has a variety of comment memes listed under the '&' prefix in the tag list, with fill masterlists)

btw, hat tip to the insane manual curation work that's gone into maintaining those masterlists and external pinboard archives over the years. y'all are the real fandom-history MVPs and the only reason The Good Stuff is still findable a decade later. comment search is just a supplement for people who really want to dig.

[anghraine]

Speaking of Dreamwidth, it has some pretty terrible journal styles and it can be a pain to find the nicer ones. I did go through virtually all of them awhile ago and picked the ones I personally like best, though!

I mentioned these in a different post, but they were buried below the cut and I thought I'd give them their own post (apropos of nothing >_>):

My journal's style, Dark Blue by ninetydegrees—

Neutral Good by timeasmymeasure for Practicality—

Simplicity by timeasmymeasure—

Too Much Wine by ninetydegrees—

A similar one, Atlantic by ninetydegrees

I nearly picked this one, Prose by timeasmymeasure for Five AM—

Právda by krja for 5 AM—

Pigeon Blue by dancing_serpent for Blanket—

Marble IV by dancing_serpent—

[ungrateful-cyborg]

Social media comparison

Alright. I've tried different new/alternative platforms lately in hope to find something I really liked, and there are very promising ones. I didn't try everything, of course, but this is a kind of overview of my journey so far? Or just my thoughts on the matter.

I've tried Pillowfort, Bluesky, Mastodon (didn't last long enough to have much of an opinion, it simply didn't click), Dreamwidth and Cohost (as of today, can't post there yet).

My comparison under the cut:

► I appreciate that they're algorithm free, whether it's because they truly believe in an Internet rid of the most invasive of them or because it's too expensive to implement on a brand new platform or some other reason. Only the future can tell, but for now it's nice.

► Pillowfort: beside the post formatting that I find extremely comfortable, my favourite thing is probably communities. I feel like this is the strongest "pro" in favor of Pillowfort because this is where they truly distinguish themselves from other social media.

Communities, in a way, remind me of forums. They're however easier to take in hand since you don't have to deal with as many options and choices. In my opinion, communities on Pillowfort are a bit lacking in functionalities though. I think more tools to easily organize them would help, like a widget or something to link stuff so you can create and animate events within said communities.

(I also feel like Pillowfort would gain from not being dark blue. We have more than enough dark blue websites, and it doesn't go well with the warmth invoked by its name in my opinion, but that's a minor detail and just a matter of taste.)

► Bluesky: basically Twitter but better. No algorithm, for a start. The curated feeds are nice. They're a bit like communities on Pillowfort since they can be moderated but from a non-mod user, it's even easier to post in them: you just have to use the right keyword for your post to appear there. Well, if the mod left it open to all rather than chose to vet who can or cannot post in it. Lots of flexibility and control over your timeline overall.

I don't like the 300 characters limit, however. Never liked it with Twitter either. It's not really conductive to conversations, and the general design tends to make the website feel rather impersonal. It's really more like parallel talking than community building.

Overall I think it's a good tool to promote your (visual) art or website, etc. but not great for hosting conversations past commenting briefly what others are doing. I mean, you can make threads but it'll never be as good as Pillowfort or Tumblr for this.

► Dreamwidth: I'll start with saying that Dreamwidth isn't a social media, it's a journaling platform and I haven't used it much yet. Had in plan to post my headcanons about my muses there and stuff like that so I did spend some time trying to figure out how it works.

First, there is a lot of options to let you have complete control over who can see what. Like, a lot.

You can entirely personalize what your journal will look like. It's a bit easier than having your own website—since I reblogged a post about that yesterday—because you don't start from 0, so it might be a good option if you don't feel comfortable jumping into Notepad++ to start coding. You can just change a thing here and there, or nothing at all, or almost everything. It's pretty old school though, so for those completely unfamiliar with early/pre-web 2.0, it might not look very appealing at first. However, I'd say don't let that stop you! If anything, it's a good opportunity to learn a bit of code without pressure.

You can also create communities, which as you might have guessed is very important to me. When creating one, you can set up whether everyone can join, everyone can ask to join but has to be approved by a community admin or to limit the access to those you have personally invited. Like for your own journal, communities are completely customizable, and Dreamwidth allows adult content.

I'm not sure you can top DW communities in terms of functionalities—aside from making a forum—but it's not as intuitive as Pillowfort (though in exchange you get more customization). You're also more limited regarding image hosting (see here). That said, hosting services exist, many are free, and that's without mentioning that you can post on Twitter and the like and use the picture link in your DW posts. I don't think many will only use Dreamwidth anyway.

► Cohost: I was expecting nothing when I registered earlier today, but this is an overall good surprise: it's Tumblr, but better.

More control of what you see. More user-friendly UI. It's not fucking blue. Adult content allowed. You can change your main blog page and make it private.

The only two downsides I'd mention here would be that you can't customize your blog page appearance and you have to wait for one or two days before being able to post. Although if it means less bots, I'd rather wait.

And this ends my rather non-exhaustive tour of the social media/blogging/journaling platforms. If you catch any mistakes let me know. I didn't dive deep, this was just me sharing my thoughts.

(As far as I know, they all allow adult content and give you tools to not see it if you don't want to.)

[bisexualbaker]

Dreamwidth and privacy, Dreamwidth and apps

I got an ask about Dreamwidth that has since completely vanished from my inbox and my activity feed, but it had some important questions that I wanted to answer, so I'm going to try and address them anyway:

"How's Dreamwidth on privacy? Do they data mine?"

They only take as much information as they are legally obligated to and/or is needed to make the site actually function. You are the only one who gets to decide how much of that you share with the public, or how little.

Dreamwidth makes the money it needs to run the site entirely through its userbase. They do not sell our data and do not want to.

"Do they have a mobile app too?"

No, and they probably never will. I know this is a disappointment for a lot of Tumblr users, but it's one of the primary ways that Dreamwidth can ensure that it's free to use for all users, and that we can post as much NSFW stuff there as we want.

That said, the Dreamwidth team has done everything they can to make the site friendly to mobile browsing! IIRC there are even some layouts that are particularly friendly to mobile browsing. Install Firefox/Mozilla on your phone, or a clone of it you particularly like, and log in through that, and you should be able to use the site just as well as you could from a desktop computer.

[gravitasmalfunction]

Ooh there is an active Dreamwidth community for cdramas (and c-ent generally) and I recognise a mutual over there already (*waves*)

If you are also on Dreamwidth feel free to add me, I am also gravitasmalfunction there.

[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

[sharpestasp]

Fandom Things

So you want a stable, not going anywhere place to just kind of collect your thoughts and ficlets and links that are important without fighting tumblr's search?

Check out Dreamwidth, where you control who sees your posts via subscriptions and privacy level access tools. I've even got a rec-your-places post going on to help find ways to connect or get started.

Star Trek fan? Com see us on Ad Astra Archive, a fork of the AO3 code being very personally watched over by mod @sl-walker.

General fan creator, looking for something to have as a back up or new home? Come see SquidgeWorld Archive, ran by a fan that's been around a long damn time.

Reblogs appreciated, and if you know of other sites out there, to give as potential back ups, primary usages, or just because, FEEL FREE to add them on!

[frameacloud]

This is page number 11 of Theri There, from November 7, 2005. The image description is in the alt text.

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Here’s the Dreamwidth discussion thread for this page.