Dreamwidth

carmentalis:

There’s been talk about alternatives to Tumblr lately, so I’ve put together 7 basic little bits about Dreamwidth to help anyone who’s completely new to it get started. It’s by no means a complete list (see the FAQ for that), but it might help with your first steps and to get a general idea if you decide to sign up.

The big plus of Dreamwidth is that it’s been created by fans, and there’s some overlap between the DW and the AO3 teams. So for fannish content, it’s probably the safest space we can get at the moment. And the people in charge understand fandom and care about it in a way a corporation like Yahoo (who owns Tumblr) never will.

Anyway, here are a few bits and pieces to get you started:

1. Privacy options
In your journal you can decide who gets to see your posts:

• Public – everyone can see the entry, even if they don’t have a DW account
• Access List – Only those users you’ve granted access can see this post. This is a good option if you want to share something with friends, but not the entire world. 
• Private – only you can see this entry

2. Reading List
Your reading list contains the entries from all journals you’re subscribed to. Depending on the access you’ve been given, you’ll see only their public posts or also their access-restricted content.

3. Circles
Every journal has a circle. This is the collection of journals connected to you in various ways:

• you’re subscribed to them, so their entries appear on your reading list
• they’ve subscribed to you, so they read your entries
• you’ve given them access to your locked content
• they’ve given you access to their locked content

On your circle page you can administrate these settings.

4. Filters
If you’re subscribed to a lot of journals and communities, your reading page can turn overwhelming. You can create filters to group those journals, so you can choose between having your reading page display all journals or only the ones in this particular filter.
You can also filter for personal journals, communities and feeds in this way:

• P (personal journals only): https://youraccountname.dreamwidth.org/read?show=P
• C (communities only): https://youraccountname.dreamwidth.org/read?show=C
• F (feeds only): https://youraccountname.dreamwidth.org/read?show=F

5. Communities
Dreamwidth has a special kind of journal – communities. More than one user can post here, so it’s a great way to share posts and discussions. Every community has administrators, who control who can join, who can post entries and what the community’s journal looks like. Anyone can create a community.
Comms are one of the things that made LJ so central to fandom, back when it wasn’t broken yet – they’re an incredibly easy way to keep track of shared interests and meet people who’re into the same topics as you. In this they’re similar to tags on Tumblr, only with admins to curate the content, keep it safe and keep out the false positives.

6. Feeds
Feeds let you subscribe to content from another site that has an RSS or Atom feed available. Good news – Tumblr does! So if you want to follow someone’s posts on Tumblr in your Dreamwidth account, you can add them as a feed and not miss anything.

7. Tags
Tags on Dreamwidth work a little differently from those on Tumblr. Here they’re mainly a way to organize your own entries and make it easier for visitors to your journal to find older content you’ve posted on this topic. You cannot subscribe to a tag.

Dreamwidth is different from Tumblr in some ways, and you’ll spend some time in the beginning to figure it out. But there are far more options for customisation and you get much tigther control over your content and who you want to share with. 

(I’m at carmenta.dreamwidth.org over there; feel free to say hi!)