#or Dreamwidth

[riftclaw]

love that the new interface looking so much like twitter makes me actively want to avoid spending time on the site, like twitter

[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.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Is it just me, or is Tumblr sidling up to the idea of being more like Dreamwidth?

First, they introduced a poll feature (though Dreamwidth's polls are a lot more versatile: you can ask more than one question per poll, and you can also have different ways to answer).

And now, they've got a "Communities" feature in active Beta testing.

I ordinarily wouldn't even consider a "Community" feature, 'cause I already have my Tumblr Mutuals Gang, so starting a community just seems a bit redundant ...

However --

I am thinking of creating a Dreamwidth community for my Alternative To NaNoWriMo Idea (Tentative details spelled out here; I'm thinking of calling it either "Writers' Resolution Revolution," or "Writer's Block Busting Party").

And if Tumblr Communities are at all similar to Dreamwidth communities, it may make sense to create one, in order to expand the reach to more people.

I don't know, though. I may just make a Dreamwidth community at first, and wait until next year for Tumblr (Especially if it's still in beta come January).

[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

[simstationdance]

out of curiosity, if tumblr was going to shut down in the near future, where would those of us on simblr - particularly the sims 2 side of simblr - go, exactly? just curious. like what's the plan here.

i ask because matt mullenweg has fired half of the remaining tumblr staff, leaving 25 people left to run this hell site and things are not looking good for us.

[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

[china-shop]

Sign-ups are now open for the 520 Day Guardian Reverse Exchange 2025!

As the name says, this is a reverse exchange:

You sign up with the kinds of things you enjoy creating.

You choose three writers/artists/fanwork creators via anonymised ads, and make requests of each of them based on what they enjoy creating.

You are assigned one request to create for, based on your offer.

You receive a gift from one of the creators you chose.

Rules/Info | Sign-ups part 1 (offers) NOW OPEN

This year’s schedule

Sign-ups part 1 - offers: closes 11:59PM UTC on Friday 28 March (What time is that for me?)

Sign-ups part 2 - requests: Saturday 29 March - Friday 4 April

Assignments out: Wednesday 9 April at the latest

Deadline: Tuesday 13 May

Work reveals: Tuesday 20 May (there is no anon period)

Sign-ups are on Dreamwidth, but you don’t need a Dreamwidth account to participate. Assignments will be sent by email. Your gift must be posted to the AO3 collection.

[andhumanslovedstories]

How do people find out fic exchanges and auctions and stuff are happening? Is it discords? I’ll simply never use a discord. Fandoms need to bring back newsletters, I’m tired of finding out about big bangs because people start posting their completed works.

[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

[uglygirlstatus]

i'm gonna be here until this site's dying breath. but i will never return to twitter for as long as i live and i cannot go on instagram anymore for my health (short form video content addiction) and i just don't think i have it in me to migrate to bluesky or mastodon or whatever other twitter clones there are these days. but i did just make a dreamwidth as my tumblr replacement back up option because it looks cute and fun so feel free to add me on there in the event this site tanks it later

[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.

[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.

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Here's the discussion thread for this page.

[devoutjunk]

"In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the figure of the departed Faerie king John Uskglass is both self and other; English and UnEnglish; Faerie and Human. He is one of Strange’s enchanted mirrors, about to dissolve into a road: he reflects back not just his own image, but the gaze of all those who look for him still. John Uskglass is the tide Norrell can’t entirely tame; he’s the dark dreaming wood drowning the city of Venice. He’s the harsh, biting blade of Empire, a conquering King. But he was a nameless slave first.

He speaks for those in the North who’d welcome a different King, fly a different flag, claim a different country (“Other countries,” Sir Walter sighs at one point “have stories of kings who will return at times of great need. Only in England is it part of the constitution.”). The King in the North is the living cypher of all deep, local knowledge and history that cannot be tamed or killed by Kingship or country: rebellion, language, and memory passed down secretly and sideways through nursery rhyme and sleight of hand. The darkness belongs to John Uskglass,  Norrell says, and he fears his magic as much as he longs for it. John Uskglass rode out of England and took the deep magic—the true magic—with him.  He abandoned us, Norrell says. And this is why Norrell hates him, why he calls him dangerous—is it not dangerous to give the past so much power? To believe any golden age long-gone and lost? Is it not dangerous to say: It was better then, and not also ask: better for who? Or maybe the danger of the Raven King is not just of a national myth swallowing a nation and a people whole, but the danger of any belief—that it can be taken away."

--"On Not Looking Back: Some Notes on History and Country in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" ,Caroline Shea

[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!