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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.)
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
What you should understand is that LJ was very Web 1.0, and while it did make a few vague gestures at modernizing, and DW did change the code some more, some stuff doesn't work like how you'd expect on a modern website. The idea of "tagging" is very Web 2.0. On modern social media, everything is about hashtags. LJ only got tags sometime in the mid to late 00s, and we hardly knew what to do with them when we got them. They're only for organizing your own blog. (And, if memory serves, you get a limited amount of them! Don't waste them keysmashing and tag-noveling.)
I know the idea of public tags has been floated, since tumblr users (of which I certainly count myself as one, I migrated from LJ to tumblr around 2012) are used to them. It might be an interesting experiment, but at least take a moment to learn the LJ/DW model of doing things first. On both platforms, you can follow blogs and see content from that specific creator. On tumblr, if you want to browse content from many creators, you head over to public tags or search. How we used to do this on LJ and DW, though, is with communities.
Communities are accounts that can have one or several mods, and set rules for how people can post to them. Some communities allow anyone to join and post with one click, and are largely public. Others have access to them moderated, and may even require that your posts be approved by a mod before appearing in the community. Literacy in how to use these communities was as common and natural in the LJ era as knowing how to tag your posts so they'd be seen was on tumblr. You can search by interests and filter to communities only. You may see several communities focused on your chosen topic. You can check them all out--usually the biggest one gets you the biggest exposure, as in, the one with the longest list of followers. Those followers are all the people who will see your post on their friendslist (affectionately called "flist," the same concept as the tumblr dash) when you post to them.
A major advantage of communities is that they're moderated. So if it's a community for a certain ship, people who hate that ship and are trying to disrupt that community can simply be banned from it, and trouble its members no more. And what happens when the moderators go bad, you ask? If the community has a beef with how a community is moderated, or if it just seems to be abandoned, any user can create a community of their own! If you don't see communities for your fandoms, make them! The fandom will flock to whichever community is doing the best job of meeting their needs.
A note on crossposting: you may notice that not only are there communities with identical themes, but ones with overlapping themes, such as a community for a ship and a community for the canon coexisting. Can you post to both? Yes, though you should skim that community's rules (I mean, you should anyway, before your first post) and make sure crossposting is okay with the mods. Since lots of people will follow both, and it's a little annoying to scroll past the same post twice, it's considered polite to put somewhere in the post, "x-posted to community1, community2, and community3." I'm not sure why that makes it better, since users still have to scroll a lot, maybe just acknowledging that you know it's a little annoying makes it better? It's rare for anyone to mind unless your post is very long--to that end, any fanfiction should be behind a cut!
Another big difference between tumblr and DW is not everything is public here. Communities may have content that's only visible once you join them. Personal blogs may not have any or all of their content visible--and even once they've granted you access, they may have exclusive content you still can't see!
I wouldn't recommend going through interests to find people. A lot of accounts won't necessarily be active. Friending memes (linked elsewhere in the comments on this post) will show you currently active accounts looking for friends, and what fandoms they're active in. Joining communities will also get you a feel for who's active and what kind of content they post.
Is this a good place for fanfic? Decent, probably. LJ was wonderful for fanfic back in the day, and it retains a lot of the architecture and community that made that possible. We wouldn't have AO3 if not for Livejournal fic culture. Is this a good place for fanart? Eeeeeehhhh...not really. It's gotta rank somewhere behind Twitter, Deviantart, Newgrounds, Pixiv, and Weasyl for that. Posting art is certainly possible, and people likely do it now as they did it back in the LJ days, but no, the site architecture isn't very welcoming to it.
If the userbase were more active, I'd say find the comm just for your character and click on the fanart tag, but as things stand, that likely doesn't exist.
Mind, I'm drawing on my old school LJ memories here. I haven't been active on DW and it's possible some things have changed. But feel free to ask this Fandom Old how things worked in the days of yore--chances are most of it still applies here.
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
Come to think of it, I don't actually remember how it worked on LJ. I think I only ever used it for finding communities. LJ was the happening place, everyone knew each other from their fic, their participation in communities, and through friends.
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
This has been your daily reminder that we are old.
"Though technically LJ was made in 1999. It didn't really go public till the 2000s. It's more twenty years than thirty years," I whisper, gently cradling my Animorphs icons.
Also, while we're at it, moderation is in theory great but banning OpenID accounts is completely useless you ban non-members or anonymous commenters too. I had one person in one of my communities almost never used, at all) continue whinging on about Their Opinions quite offensively some 10-12 comments after they were banned. Which didn't really matter, as no one following was active, but it was super annoying.
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
On the other hand, sometimes I get a bit of a wakeup call and feel quite young. If you check out the account spockslash on tumblr, it belonged to a woman (unfortunately passed away) who was in her 80s, and participated in the original zine and even pre-zine era of Star Trek TOS fandom in the 60s. And at my local art center I meet a lot of artists in their 70s and 80s. Sometimes they complain of failing vision or once-steady hands trembling, and when they look at me, in my 30s, they say, "Oh, you're just a kid--you're around that age when it all starts coming together." And you know what? People in their 70s and 80s are still out there, doing art, writing, fandoming, having no idea what the heck Animorphs are or what Livejournal is or what Web 1.0 is or how code works. xD (I mean, there are older programmers too! As well as my friend's grandpa who spontaneously decided to learn to fly helicopters in his golden years, and has a grand time with it.) So I'm not old, and I dunno, if you're not much older than me, you're probably not that old either.
Also, my mom, who for some reason thinks I'm an actor (I was in one movie! One! 15 years ago!) keeps sending me casting calls for characters who need to look like teenagers and I'm like....Mom...why don't YOU audition? We're both about as realistically teenagers, at this point. But according to my mom, I'm like, thirty-fourteen. So you can be [your age]teen too, with the power of Momvision.
And lol wow at that community trolling. That's surprising dedication! Usually the only comments on dead communities assume you want penis pills or knockoff handbags or something. Imagining the internet as a real space gets weird. You go stand in some dusty, abandoned community center with nothing but the occasional scurrying mouse, and occasionally robots try to sell each other penis pills, but being robots, none of them have need of them. (Whether this is because they have no dicks or because their dicks don't malfunction is up to you to interpret.) Then randomly some drunk barges in and starts telling, and out of nowhere a moderator appears and escorts them out, leaving the robots to their fruitless sales.
Re: Nice, but I have questions...
Your mother sounds adorable, though. I do look really young for my age, for now. I remember three years ago my manager asked me if I was old enough to open a credit card to try and reach their quota.
Me, "... No."
Re: Nice, but I have questions...