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Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!
With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it's legal under US law, it's okay to post here. We're 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we're here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.
Tumblr's definition of "adult content" seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It's definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr's, I won't lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it'll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that's small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.
For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don't at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we've been working on but haven't yet finished, because we're dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced -- it's looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr's content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content -- so even once we have one, it's even odds on how long it'll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We've been trying to improve the website's experience on small screens in the meantime, and that's an ongoing project that we'll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.
Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you're here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we're happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!
(Comment notification emails may be delayed for an hour or two, due to the high volume of emails generated by a![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_news post. This was posted at 2105/9:05PM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notification emails until at least two hours after that. I also apologize to anyone who gets a notification for this post twice; we're trying to figure that one out.)
Tumblr's definition of "adult content" seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It's definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr's, I won't lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it'll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that's small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.
For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don't at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we've been working on but haven't yet finished, because we're dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced -- it's looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr's content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content -- so even once we have one, it's even odds on how long it'll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We've been trying to improve the website's experience on small screens in the meantime, and that's an ongoing project that we'll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.
Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you're here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we're happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!
(Comment notification emails may be delayed for an hour or two, due to the high volume of emails generated by a
dw_news post. This was posted at 2105/9:05PM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notification emails until at least two hours after that. I also apologize to anyone who gets a notification for this post twice; we're trying to figure that one out.)
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I'm also curious about Dreamwidth's stance on reblogging. I don't think it's necessary if people actually use communities like they used to, but even after a short amount of time on tumblr, I'm finding that coming back, it's harder to make decisions about what belongs on my personal journal, and what to post in a community. Having the ability to reblog certain posts (determined by the OP, like pillowfort is doing) might bridge the gap a little, although it would also fundamentally change the way some people use the site, I'm sure.
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Of the two examples you mentioned, we've talked about both before, but to varying levels of resolution. Since we don't really have site-wide tagging in the way Tumblr does, where using a tag puts your post into the global, browsable feed for that particular tag, we haven't put tag-blacklisting (or similar concepts -- when I talk about it I tend to use the word "killfile", because I am Old and cut my teeth on Usenet) super-high up the priority list.
Generally, the best workaround-for-now to "needing to not see this particular content" is to not subscribe to people who post the content, or asking your friends who post the content to stick things behind a cut tag (our version of the "read more" link, for passersby). I know it's not 100% a solution, though. Something more robust to deal with "I need to not see this thing" is lower down the priority list for now, because it is harder to be exposed to content from random people and you need to proactively seek it out, but if we work on better site-wide content discovery features, and we do want to work on better site-wide content discovery features (and it's becoming more of a priority now), we'll absolutely include content blocking as part of the package; I'm not a regular Tumblr user myself but I do use the site occasionally and I know all the "failure modes", so to speak.
(There is some rudimentary sort of filtering you can do site-wide via CSS, but it doesn't let you target entry tags. (For a lot of long boring technical reasons.) It also only works on your reading page, not site-wide, so if you're reading a community directly or looking at someone else's journal directly, it won't activate (unless you're looking at the community/journal in your own journal style). I think there are also third-party userscripts that might do content filtering/blacklisting but I'm less sure about that; I purposely don't install third-party userscripts, because I don't want to forget what part is the script and what part is the site! Maybe somebody who comes across this thread can add more info.)
Reblogging: insert me making a long drawn-out indecisive urgggggghhhhhhh noise here. There are serious upsides to reblogging, and I know the value it has! It also comes with a lot of downsides, and I'm still on the fence about whether it would change the site culture for the better or not. LJ introduced reblogs after we forked from them, and although I kind of hated their implementation from a UI standpoint, it didn't have too much of a detrimental effect (although, given the various ways LJ was imploding at the time, I'm not sure how much of that could be credited to the people for whom reblogging would be a detriment having moved out already.)
The major thing that I hesitate over with adding reblogs to DW in particular (in a way that I wouldn't necessarily hesitate over with a different site paradigm) is that I suspect the combination of DW's content-distribution model and reblogging would open up some harassment/pile-on vectors that I'm not 100% confident we could mitigate to my satisfaction -- think Twitter, and how a retweeted tweet that makes its way outside your usual audience can make your mentions an unusable flaming garbage pit for days and weeks. I'm not saying the problem isn't solvable, but it's something we would really, really need to sit down and think through, especially as something to add after so long of not having it. We haven't had the chance to do so yet, because it's not a feature that our existing userbase has really been clamoring for, but that's open to change as the composition of the site's userbase changes.
(That's the short answer, believe it or not. I can give you the long answer about how the site design of DW mitigates many if not all of the harassment vectors that exist on other sites due to DW having a much, MUCH stronger delineation around "your space" and how you can control it, but it's ... kind of a mini-thesis and I don't want to dump it on you if you're not interested.)
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/chinhands
...I mean, so, yeah, I kinda am, should you be so inclined?
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DW has better privacy/moderation tools than tumblr or twitter, though, so i'm not personally worried about pile-ons and harassment in that mode?
It was a feature of Tumblr that allowed me to find people with shared interests really easily (and people who post actual content related to that interest, not just people who listed it as something they like in their profile), and to share my posts with other interested parties. It had its problems but I feel like they were more due to the overall way tumblr worked and the culture it developed rather than inherent in the concept, if that makes sense.
Of course, I am not a developer, so I don't know if I'm totally off base here?
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That having been said, of course there are ways it was beneficial for users! Discovery is a major problem in any network and Tumblr is great for discovery. It's just that sometimes it's *too* great...
Anyway, yeah, it's something we've thought about. Just not to the point of being able to solve the dozen most obvious problems, much less the lurking ones.
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For one that requires you to know ahead of time which of your posts you don't want spread far and wide, so it does nothing about the ones where you may have thought it was fine but next thing you know people way outside your circle who don't know the context are all piling on to tell you how very wrong you are. I know there's more privacy options here, but I just worry it could get out of hand, since it often does on Tumblr and Twitter.
Second, it makes it harder to control the content you see. If you subscribe to someone because you like their content you're making sure you see what you want to see but if they start grabbing other people's content it makes it harder. If you like a person's original entries but they keep reblogging stuff you don't, I worry it raises the chances of conflict as people lose patience with these posts from people they didn't sign up to hear from in the first place. I definitely support allowing all legal content but the issue is if people can't avoid the things they don't want to see due to the platform, they'll try to make it so those things just don't exist so they don't have to see it, or at least it seems to me that's what's been happening.
I mean rather than reblogs, people can already simply copy the link to the entry they want to share and make an entry of their own telling their circle what it is and that they should check it out. It isn't as pretty or as easy but I personally prefer that since the extra effort may discourage people from using it to dog pile on each other. I'm sure some people still will try, but less, which makes for a more reasonable volume to handle with moderation.
In the end though I trust Dreamwidth, you've shown that you care about your user base, and I could be wrong and this could help bring more users in. I am definitely not an expert, I just have concerns, is all. And for what it's worth, I would be very interested in that mini-thesis, haha.
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I am also in the camp that wouldn't want to see reblogs on Dreamwidth. I wasn't a fan of Livejournal's interpretation of the idea, either.
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BUT...... if reblogs will keep tumblr folks on DW (which = more paying users, more vibrant community etc) then I'd be happy with a compromise of having a 'do not reblog' option- i think this option should, just like our journal settings of being public or access-list only etc, should be something we can set for the journal as a whole, or change for specific posts. This way, people like you and me can set our journal as a whole to non-rebloggable and not have to worry about the issue every time we post something. OTOH, if we have a really really important post that we WANT the masses to see and pass around in anyway easiest / most familiar to them, then we could make that one single post re-bloggable.
Right now, due to fanlore's (and other people's) use of archive.is and other archives that think they are above international laws and hide behind the places neonazi and incel groups do (eg cloudflare), I've set my journal to access list only, with only a few PA posts made public. I was taken aback to be congratulated for taking control of 'my space', because it ws that expectation of privacy on a platofrm like LJ back in the day, when we made many posts public (how else could meta-news roundup lists exist - I learned so much and met so many new people, and miss that greatly. (Another feature I'd like on DW is the ability to have posts be "public" but ONLY to logged in users after they do a quick CAPTCHA (If you want to know more, you can read the thread here: https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html?thread=5933329#cmt5933329 )
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they also don't allow comments on reblogs, on the theory that it reduces harassment (if you can only reblog posts that you 100% agree with, then people are less likely to dogpile or whatever) but I'm less sure of that one working on a longform content platform like DW
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A tutorial post here https://kore.dreamwidth.org/1321059.html takes you through it. I used it for the first time yesterday, although when I followed along I hadn't yet created a Default filter, so I did so, and threw all my currentsubscribe list into it, then added the specific tag from the specific user that I wanted to block.
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I agree Tumblr reblogs can do a lot of damage to human community boundaries. But on the other hand, the ability to reblog content so you can let people in on the context of a conversation you're involved in and would like to invite them in on CAN be a useful tool--one I've been feeling the lack of since I came back over here.
On Tumblr, when a post is reblogged, the original content of the post is frozen, but the OP loses control of it for purposes of editing, access, or deletion. They're unable to erase the presence of that post or break their own role in the conversation. Awesome for artists wanting attentio for their art, but bad for a meta writer who finds themselves embroiled in a controversy, targeted by abuse or just regrets what they posted.
On Pillowfort, the post remains forever and only in control of the OP, with the sole exception of who might see it, but they can also choose whether to reblog it or not to begin with. Awesome for the OP, bad for people wanting to engage in any kind of conversation - but also bad for bad actors who want to use it as an opportunity for abuse.
On LJ, as I recall, reblogging actually reposted the post, with a copy back to the original. But the reposter had the ability to edit their copy of the original post--which has the potential to create cases of misrepresentation in a heated debate, or diversion of attention/traffic from an artist who just wants proper credit.
What worked well for me on Tumblr, though, was that if you included a read-more in a post, then even if it was reblogged, that read-more acted as a cut back to the original post. Thus, anything I put under it stayed under my control for editing and deletion, but anything I put outside it was preserved and traveled with the reblogs.
A setup like this, with the added ability to control permission to reblog, could solve all the issues possibly?
* The OP could decide whether or not to set their content free to begin with
* The OP could decide how much of their content to protect or expose
* The OP would retain the ability to edit/amend/delete core content, and to remove themselves from the conversation
* The reblogger wouldn't face the threat of losing the context or content of any conversations that might build up around it
* Potential rebloggers would have the information they need to assess their risk and interest in reblogging
* AND it creates a context of its own--one that disavows the reblogger's ultimate responsibiilty for the content under the read-more, and adds a layer of protection against immediate, unwilling exposure to altered content--thus addressing concerns I've seen about "what if someone makes a widely circulated post on Pillowfort and then changes it to bestiality or something?"