Basic Dreamwidth for Tumblr users
For people who want to use Dreamwidth, but are totally confused about how it works!
- 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
- 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.
- Paid members can see the Network page, which shows entries from everything 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
- 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.
- 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>.
- There are lots of cheat sheets and informative guides around, like HTML on Dreamwidth and Dreamwidth-specific markup tags
