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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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Quick question: Is there any chance of Dreamwidth ever shutting down/changing policies? Should I back up what little I've posted on Dreamwidth onto AO3, as well?
I know Dreamwidth was created specifically as a response to things like this, but the whole Tumblr debacle has made me paranoid. I don't know where my fannish content is going to be safe.
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* The site (and its associated LLC) is owned by me and
* We have two part time contractors to back us up: Jen is my backup, and Robby is Mark's. That increases the chance that progress will not grind *completely* to a halt when we're both held up, and -- more importantly -- it means that there's much better chances that somebody will be available to fix an urgent problem if it happens. Or, let's face it, "when" it happens, because there's no such thing as an uncrashable system.
* All of us (me and Mark, and Jen and Robby) have been working in tech for a long time. (Over twenty years in my case, actually, which blows my freaking mind sometimes.) So, even though it's just us, "it's just us" encompasses a lot of professional and technical experience, and we put that experience -- and, more importantly, the knowledge of "what not to do because it caused problems last time" -- into our work here, on both technical and social levels. In short: you can pretty much have confidence that we know what we're doing.
* When Mark and I started DW, we had a number of very (*very*) long talks about how we wanted to run the site, what we wanted it to be like, and -- most importantly for your questions -- whether or not we were on the same page about things like content policies, development philosophy, core ethical principles, etc. We agreed then, and most importantly, we still agree even after ten years of doing this. We believe that DW should remain independent, should never accept advertising and venture capital because it changes the entire dynamic of a site and what a site's acceptable content policies should be, and should only place restrictions on what users could post if those restrictions were required by US law, and neither of us forsee those beliefs changing in the future!
* Part of those pre-launch (and even pre-announcement) talks involved our commitment to radical business transparency -- that we should always explain what we're doing and why, and that anybody can ask questions and get an answer. We've tried our best to uphold that over the last decade, and while we aren't always perfect at it, we try our absolute hardest. We wrote down our guiding principles back then at the beginning, and while you'll have to check with people who've been here for a while to see how well we've been able to uphold them, they still apply today.
* We do have some evidence of walking the walk, though -- back when we were first starting, PayPal suspended our ability to accept user payments until and unless we implemented additional content restrictions such as disallowing "adult content" (they meant sex, people always mean sex when they use that phrase). Instead of doing that, we went without any income at all for 3 months while we set up an alternative, and we'd be prepared to do that again if we had to.
I can't promise we'll never change policies -- we may have to, for any one of a number of reasons. I can promise that if we do, we'll tell you with as much notice as we can give, solicit feedback ahead of time if it's not an urgent change stemming from some outside factors, and tell you the reasoning behind why we have to make changes instead of waving around some bullshit like "making these changes to empower the vibrant community blah blah blah" (and that we'll listen to your feelings about the changes, carefully think about any problems that people foresee, and change anything that we can change if you convince us we got it wrong). You can read back through
Likewise, I won't promise that we'll never shut down -- I can think of a few scenarios where we would have to, unlikely though they might be. Mark and I have our backups in Robby and Jen, and we discussed ahead of time what we'd do if one of us had to step back from day-to-day operations of the site for a while; we have a really strong volunteer community who helps with things like support, and we're open source and our volunteers contribute a lot to site development. But even if we've tried to reduce the chances, we are as vulnerable to the good old "what if both your company principals get hit by a bus at the same time" hypothetical as any two-person LLC would be, and progress does slow when both he and I have less time and energy to put to things.
We're also entirely user-funded, and while it hasn't been a problem in the last ten years (or rather, it was only a problem when we had three months of not being able to take payments due to PayPal fuckery), it's certainly possible that someday, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep the site running. If that should ever happen, though, we've got a number of contingency plans that we could activate, none of which involve "sell user data and/or the site to some big conglomerate". If it ever comes down to "sell out or shut down", which I fiercely hope it won't, we would choose "shut down in an orderly fashion with tons of notice and have the world's biggest farewell party with as much time as possible for people to make their plans and pack their stuff." Barring that, well, I've been saying for the last decade that we're keeping this place open until the eventual heat death of the universe, and I fully plan to be writing tl;dr news comments in another 40 years. :)
Mirroring important content or stuff you'd be devastated if you lost in multiple places is always smart, because there's always a chance of disaster, even only of the "shit I deleted the wrong post" kind. (We have backups! But our backups are server-wide and can't be used to restore individual posts or accounts.) We've planned around things like disk failure and servers suddenly deciding not to work anymore as much as we can (and y'all generally don't even notice when stuff fails unless it's a failure in one of the systems that we don't control), and we've tried to reduce single points of failure as much as possible, but there's an extent to how much we can failure-proof everything. But in terms of stuff we can control like major changes to the site philosophy or our plans for the future, I can pretty confidently assure you that we ain't going nowhere.
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And neither you nor Mark are, last I checked, among nature's runners. You guys might get to, like, the c store with everyone's data trailing merrily behind you...and then you'd buy a diet soda and go home.
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This is one of my absolute favourite parts about Dreamwidth, and a huge contributor to why I've been continually paying for it even in the years I wasn't using it a lot. You guys rock. ♥
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thank you <3
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