dw_news | Welcome to Dreamwidth for our new Redditor friends!

Welcome to Dreamwidth for our new Redditor friends!

We've noticed a lot of new folks joining us this week after Reddit changed their API pricing to lock out a lot of third-party clients, and we'd like to say: welcome! Because we're structured so differently than Reddit is, I thought I'd take a moment and give y'all a quick tour to get you oriented.

The first step to finding people is filling out your profile. Add some interests describing what you're into: interests are keywords or tags that people can use to find like-minded people. Clicking on an interest in someone's profile leads to a list of everyone who's listed that interest. (As an example, here's everyone who's listed 'cats' as an interest.) Interests match on the exact text you enter, so the best interests are short words or phrases. Check out the popular interests to get a sense of what people list. (Mind the bug that we haven't been able to find yet that means there are a few listed with a wrong count!)

Communities are probably our closest equivalent to subreddits. You can create a community for anything you'd like, and people can join it and make posts. If you're moving over an entire subreddit, making a community is probably the best way for you all to recreate the experience as much as possible. Looking for an existing community? Search by interests on the directory search page, or check out

dw_community_promo to see what communities are looking for more members. Just like subreddits, communities have their own moderators and their own rules, so check the rules before posting!

You can also subscribe to your favorite off-site RSS or Atom feeds and read them on Dreamwidth. Check out popular feeds, or add a feed that you're interested in. You'll need to know the URL for the RSS or Atom feed to add it.

Once you find some accounts to subscribe to, they'll appear on your Reading Page. Unlike a lot of places, the reading page is always reverse chronological order with no algorithmic reordering or guessing about what you're most interested in. The filter drop-down in the navigation bar at the top of the page lets you filter to personal journals, communities, or syndicated feeds automatically, and you can create additional reading filters -- if you subscribe to a few accounts you want to always be sure to catch up with even if you only have a few minutes, that's a good use of reading filters.

The inbox is where notifications of replies to your comments go, as well as your DMs and a few other things you can be notified of! (For instance, you can get notified by email and inbox every time a friend or a community posts.)

Our site search is where you can search for anything your heart desires! Search results are limited to public posts from accounts that haven't chosen to opt out of the site search (and if you'd like to, it's the Privacy tab of Manage Settings: scroll down to "Site-Wide Search Inclusion") and any locked posts that you've been granted access to see. You can also check the box to search comments: if the journal or community is a paid account, their comments will be included in the search if you check that box. (Comments made in free accounts won't be indexed, only paid accounts.)

The Latest Things page includes all public posts (on a five-minute delay so you have a chance to realize "oh shit, I accidentally made that public") made to the site. There might be anything in there at any given time, so reader beware, but it's a great way to get a sense of what's going on!

We don't have a mobile app, because when you have a mobile app, you have to control the kind of content your users are allowed to post a lot more than we want to do. (Adult content! I'm talking about adult content. The fact we don't accept advertising lets us allow a wide range of adult content most other sites restrict: as long as it's legal in the US, all we ask is that you mark adult content as adult, either on an entry by entry basis or for your entire account if you post a lot of it, so people who don't want to see it don't have to.) We've done a lot of work to make the site display well in mobile browsers (although we're always working to make it better). Our various journal styles are mobile-optimized to various degrees: the one that's specifically designed for mobile is Mobility, but play around with the various base styles to see which one works best for you. (I asked around our volunteer chat and the ones people named as working particularly well for them are Basic Boxes, Brittle, Corinthian, Drifting, Planet Caravan, and Sunday Morning.) Once you've picked a style, you can customize it to your heart's content, which is why none of us remember what the default settings look like anymore, heh.

I think that covers the majority of it! We're glad to have you, and we hope you'll stick around. And, of course, please let me remind you that Dreamwidth is independent social media that has no advertising or advertisers, sells no data, has taken no venture capital, and has no outside investors: on Dreamwidth, unlike so much of the rest of the modern social media landscape, you really are the customer and not the product being sold. If you have it to spare, toss us a few bucks to help keep the place running for everyone: paid accounts start as low as $3 for one month, and every paid account gets access to a number of extra features as our way of saying thank you for subsidizing the site for everyone.

Existing users: what are your favorite tips for new people getting started on DW? List them off in the comments!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Definitely follow

dw_news and

dw_maintenance, so you can keep up with the goings-on of the site. The official news posts always share what's going on in very clear, easy-to-understand ways, and the maintenance posts can keep you up to date with any problems the site may be having.

Something fun you can do is upload a lot of different icons/user pics, and add specific, fun keywords to each. When you hover your mouse over another person's icon, the keywords they used to select it will become visible, adding a potential extra layer of communication!

Other than that, just ask questions! Most of the people here are eager to help out, because we love Dreamwidth and want to make using it easy for other people.

if your not sure where to get icons here are come communities;

dreamsheep (the unofficial DW mascot) ,

fandom_icons ,

icons . and some users make/made them too;

isapiens a.k.a

hsapiens ,

magnavox_23 ,

oraclegreen a.k.a

misbegotten .

Edited 2023-06-13 05:50 (UTC)

(reply from suspended user)

If you’re a Redditor that’s interested in fandom roleplaying (as in, say, roleplaying as characters from Star Trek, Steven Universe, and other movies, books, TV shows, webcomics and other canons; as well as OCs [Original Characters]), DW has a specific fandom roleplaying subculture that might be difficult to find simply through searching through Interests.

enablemeplz and dwrpmasterlist are where to go to find games and people to roleplay with. bakerstreet is the most popular roleplay memes comm (roleplay memes are different than memes in the usual Internet sense of the word).

The subculture is complex and old (in Internet terms), and I don’t recall exactly where the guides to it are but I know they’re there, and if you have any questions, I could do my best to answer them. I started DWRPing in 2019 so I know what it’s like to be a noob in this particular subculture.

Also, DW has a handy little button for marking your account as a roleplaying account.

Edited 2023-06-13 04:26 (UTC)

This is one of the guides I was directed to when I was starting DWRP: Guide to DWRP for Tumblr RPers (Google Docs)

There are also some resources linked here on rpanons: RP Resources

I'm still pretty new to DWRP myself but I'm also totally up for helping out in any way I can! 🥰

A few specific terms that you might need defined if you're a roleplayer from elseweb:
Muse: the character you're playing.
Mun: the person playing a muse
PSL: personal/private storyline. When two (or conceivably more) people just want to throw their characters together without inviting anyone else to get involved.
Meme: usually-casual roleplay, where scenarios or other seeds for potential threads are offered and players put their characters up for others to respond to. As mentioned above,

bakerstreet is the big one.

bridgescribble is newer and slower, but focuses on non-shippy memes.
Gen: General, as in non-romantic dynamics between characters.
Shippy: Romantic dynamics between characters.
Smutty: Here there be lemons. Sexual content.
Jamjar: A specific style of game where characters are trapped in a defined setting like a city, a hotel, a cruise ship, and they cannot leave. May be a spooky jamjar or a smutty jamjar or a survival jamjar. The format, rather than the mood, is what makes a jamjar.

Much of the RP we do in DWRP is panfandom - you will regularly see crosscanon threads where (for example) Watson from the Sherlock Holmes books has a conversation with a whole-ass magical girl and is horrified by the child soldier aspect of her life. Or where Superman and Goku fight a bad guy together.

Edited 2023-06-13 17:06 (UTC)

my hot tips come down to: once you find a few neat folks personal journals to follow

a) read the comments, because there will probably be more neat people in them! (I know this goes against everything about the rest of the internet, but if you're a refugee from reddit probably you are used to reading the comments?)

b) surf your network page (https://YOURDWUSERNAME.dreamwidth.org/network) to find more cool people! The cool people you are following are fairly likely to follow other cool people. (the network page is basically all the posts you have access to see of all the people that you subscribe to subscribe to!)

Welcome to Dreamwidth! <3

To avoid confusion, the Network page is a paid account feature, though it's worthwhile checking it out for anyone deciding to support Dreamwidth :) The Network page for other interesting users you're subscribed to can also be a good start in the meantime.

And yes to reading comments! Conversations are the best part of Dreamwidth :D

If you don't have a paid account and can't access Network page, you could also check out the Latest Things tab. I've found quite a few interesting journals through there.

You can also, if you don't have access to the Network page, just read the Reading Page of any cool people you come across. (Basically, a manual version of what Network does automatically.) Depending on whose journal you're looking at, it's a bit less drink-from-the-firehose than Network can sometimes be.

It's been such a long time since I've done Livejournal/Dreamdwidth (I think I did Insane Journal, too, who can even remember?).

Do people still use their main DW as a blog, or has that morphed into something else now?

Plenty of people still use it as a blog.

Oh, yes. Plenty of people still do this.

I do.

Count me in too as someone who uses Dw as a blog. Tbh I never knew there was a difference between "blog" and "journal". I guess a "journal" or "diary" is more private. Like for jotting down notes or something. I do this too on here, and it has worked great. Not for talk therapy because I don't have that, but for other things which I wish to remain private.

If you find a conversation interesting, you can track it so you get the notifications for any new comment in your inbox (and email, if you want!) by clicking the Bell/'Track this' icon on any post. You could start by doing it on this one, so you get everyone's tips right into your inbox :)

Welcome!

Some folks and I put together a few tips during a convention panel a few years ago, such as:

You can reply to comments via email.
To just look at the access-locked entries on someone's journal (assuming you have been granted access), append ?security=access to the URL, as in: http://username.dreamwidth.org/?security=access.
Dreamwidth has flexible tagging for your posts -- see rosefox or 50books_poc for some examples.

Welcome!

Reddit refugees should know that people really are usually polite here.

I've been using DW longer than I've been using Reddit and I can attest to this. I've had quite a few great conversations on Reddit but DW is generally more laid back.

Agreed, there's not a lot of "you're just dumb then" talk here. I never left DW - it's a very different, kinder space.

Hi! Not a reddit refugee, but just wanted to comment to say your username makes me ridiculously happy.

Aw, thanks! :)

I pulled the trigger on DW after researching ethical social media sites earlier this year. I used to have LJ when I was a teen, so the familiarity here is nice. I didn't discover Reddit until well after I graduated university, and did it ever turn into a time sink! In retrospect, I'm glad that I didn't have Reddit back then as a time waster.

I am very late in replying to comments because I had another one of my goddamn week-long disability flares, but I wanted to say thank you for this in particular because "ethical" is one of the things we try hardest to hit and it's lovely to hear that we hit the mark for you!

Cheers! I appreciate you taking the time to reply to me. I took a peek at your profile, and I could not believe the amount of usernames on there! That's a lot to keep up with. Thank you for everything that you do.

In the future, can we pull together as a community to get some RSS feeds together to replace Reddit as a news aggregator? I'm still learning how those work, and it's going to take some time.

There's the popular feeds page, and the full list of the top 1000 most popular!

Cheers! What if the topics we're looking for aren't on that list? Are any of the feeds bot controlled to save from manual updates?

I'm picturing adding the news site urls to an RSS feed, and then it just auto populates as stories are published. I'm not sure how any of this works.

You can add new feeds from this page, if you know the URL of the RSS/Atom feed itself.

However, feed entries are only saved on Dreamwidth for two weeks, after which point they're removed. If you're looking for discussion of links like on Reddit, you'd probably be better off manually posting entries to a community centered around the relevant interests.

I'm just spitballing here, since I don't use it myself, but maybe something like IFTTT could automagically make a Dreamwidth entry when it detects a new feed item?

Thanks for your reply. I think it's going to take a lot of humanpower and dedication to get something as efficient as Reddit. I think part of the answer is trying to get user numbers up, because it's a lot to take on for a handful of people. I think just the temporary RSS feed that you described would be sufficient enough for now, since people don't usually go back to review a news article after it's over.

My favorite paid account feature is getting emails with all of my own comments, so if I say something that I realize I'd like to remember later, I can go through my email and dig it out.

...and I realize that I'm on last year's "Hi, Reddit" update, not this year's "Hi, Cohost"!

Agreed, it’s quite the tonal shift between Reddit and DW 😑

Good news! Thank you! We love you!

I'm not inviting anybody, but from time to time I make my post visible by just keeping it public.

Tags are good for attracting people, I think, but one has to handle them properly.

If you belong, as I do, to a social minority it's worth using a sticky intro post to say what it is and what you will and will not find acceptable about how people might react.

It's a good way of introducing yourself even without that necessity! :o)

Absolutely this.

I am a really big fan of finding communities to join, and then posting there or replying to comments, and learning who the great people are, and following them. That's how I met my best friend over 20 years ago and it seems to still work these days :)

Yes, this is the best way to get around the fact that individual journals are much more decentralized than Reddit threads.

Thank you for explaining why there's no mobile app. I've often wondered.

Yes, this.

You're welcome! It is technically possible to have an app approved for a user-generated content site like social media even if you allow "incidental" 18+ content, but the line of "things they want you to fully remove" is drawn way further over than where we'd want it, plus they require you to age-gate all 18+ content and only have the option to turn off the age-gating on the website, not in the app. That plus the fact their definition of "incidental" is ever-shifting and vague, plus them requiring you to proactively moderate all the content on your site to make sure all 18+ content is properly age-gated even if the user didn't choose to age-gate it, would just make the whole thing a giant headache and entirely too much work.

Other social media sites have to have huge teams of full-time employees whose only job it is to respond to Apple and Google's concerns about content on the site in order to keep the app in the app stores, and we just don't have the resources to do that (and we don't want to restrict all the stuff they'd want us to restrict!) Trying to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements would lose us all the benefit we get from not having advertisers (and therefore not having to keep advertisers happy about what kind of content their ads appear next to), so even though so much of our traffic comes from mobile devices, it's just not worth the headache of trying to have mobile apps. There's always stuff we can do to make the site display better in mobile browsers, and it's a top dev priority for us to keep fixing that, but not having apps gives us so much more freedom in what we can let people do on the site.

It makes a lot of sense. I always figured that given how occasionally buggy Eljay was, it was something to do with the API, and that y'all just did not have the time to go spelunking into it. This makes a lot more sense.

Thank you!

I don’t think it’s necessary, but just curious: would a progressive web app be a middle ground, or honestly just too much hassle all around?

Sorry for the belated comment as I catch up on comment backlog: We're trying to eliminate the necessity for it by making the native site work just as well on mobile views as it does on desktop views (because the browser support for PWAs is not as great as we'd like), we just have a lot of modernization work we need to do first because there's so much technical debt built up that we have to tackle first. That work is ongoing and has been for quite a while!

FWIW, I'm totally satisfied with the way DW is showing up on my phone.

thanks for posting this comment explaining-- similar statements about 18+ content have been made over on tumblr from staff/ex-staff but the userbase there really doesn't want to believe it, bc "bringing back the porn should just be super easy right? just say it's allowed again!" w/o really considering the other external pressures and the fact that a lot of the time apps make money from ads you can't block.

< totally not a user putting feelers out on different social medias after tumblr made their new user interface so insufferable i couldn't deal anymore nope

Yeah, we can get by without an app because of the no-advertising, no-VC thing (and we don't have to worry about recouping purchase price like Automattic does with Tumblr) and that gives us a huge advantage, even though it also has its detriments in not having the same resources they do. I really feel for them in particular because they are on Apple's radar in a huge way, more so than a lot of similar places.

Hey, thank you for letting me (just another user, sometimes volunteer) know that's a thing that needs to be amplified! I appreciate it!

Haha, you're welcome, I suppose? Though to be fair, I've often wondered about it, but then never gone to look for an answer, haha! So that's a bit on me to do the footwork.

Edited 2023-06-13 15:21 (UTC)

Me too.

I’m the same, I always wondered.

I should probably write a FAQ for it!

You're welcome! We try to remember to explain it occasionally, but I always forget it's not one of the things everybody knows. There's another factor in that we have a lot of work that needs to be done on the API (like many software projects, we have two APIs right now, "the one that's completely ancient" and "the one that's not finished yet") but historically we haven't made "finishing the new API" a top priority, because the biggest reason to need an updated, modern API is for making mobile apps, and there's just no way we'd pass app store review, like, ever. Technically, it's okay to have "incidental" 18+ content on your user-generated-content site and still have an app approved, but there are a lot of restrictions about how you have to handle it -- you need to default all accounts to "don't show 18+ content" and only allow people to access the preference to toggle that off on the website, not inside the app -- and their definitions of "incidental" are very fuzzy and change extremely often.

Other social media services like us (Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, etc) have whole teams whose full-time jobs is dealing with complaints from Apple and Google about 18+ content on the site, moderation efforts to make sure all 18+ content is properly labeled, etc, etc, and we just don't have the resources to do that, plus they also want you to completely remove (not just age-gate) a lot of stuff that we'd rather be able to leave up. Trying to keep them happy would just be too much effort, so we've been putting all of that effort into making the site display better in mobile browsers instead so we can just give them the middle finger and say fuck it, we're setting our content policy, not you.

(And then I read further down and discover that my other hypothesis was *also* correct, and that yes, the API is part of the problem. Hah.)

Ha, yes, the API was also very old and not at all feature-complete, and we are in the process (sloooooowly) of fixing it, but it's been a lower priority because there's no point in doing a mobile app because we'd never be able to keep it in the app stores.

Very informative and comprehensive indeed, though I never actually wondered about the absence of an app for DW because the way the site is displayed on mobile devices is very good and I don't miss an app. As a matter of fact, I prefer using my social media accounts in the browser app even for accounts I check regularly because I am not fond of clogging my mobile phone with too many different apps.

While I agree with you that the website is one of the best on mobile devices, the text and buttons tend to be very small on my phone and I'm already near-sighted, haha. An app often makes navigating on a smaller screen easier, so I have wondered why there isn't one.

It varies by country but in the US the average person has around 7 social media accounts. I have fewer than that, so I guess the space on my phone didn't occur to me as a priority. There's also sometimes a loss of functionality in an app compared to a webpage that can be really annoying as well. But like you said, it's a pretty good website on a mobile device, and I appreciate their reasoning for not having an app!

We are slowly improving the code so we can make it possible for people to have different font sizes between mobile and desktop views, but as someone who has 47-year-old eyes that were terrible even before hitting her 40s, let me know if you would like some tips on how to improve the mobile display experience for "argh I can't see anything"! The biggest one I'd suggest is giving the Celerity site skin a try at the display settings -- the font size is larger. (Because of conflicting accessibility reasons, the default site skin sets the font size to 75% of browser default, but Celerity leaves it at 100%.)

I am a 38 year old with terrible eyes who doesn't want to think about what my lens prescription will be in ten years! I really appreciate your recommendation for Celerity and if you do have other tips I am all ears (...eyes?)

I hope I'm not coming across as complaining, btw. I just have occasionally wondered when I've been scrolling on my phone, but I am normally on this site while I'm at a computer so it's not a hardship! Lol. I do appreciate the explanation of why there's no app, because it scratches that curiosity itch I've had.

Don't be afraid to check our help resources or ask for help. We don't bite.

Edited 2023-06-13 14:56 (UTC)

A good starting point for finding fandom communities or promoting any you might create yourself is

fandom_on_dw. Anything from general fandom communities to writing/icon challenges get promoted there.

If you're not sure about communities and want to try out using one,

fictional_fans was created specifically as a starter community where people new to dreamwidth can try out communities in a low-stakes way. (Posts are supposed to be related to "fandom" in some way but we have an extremely expansive definition of fandom.) It's a place to both ask questions and try out your own posts in a living community.

This is really just an excellent post, both for newbies AND for those of us who've been around long enough to forget some things.
Thanks so much!

Thank you! I know that we're often hard to figure out on first glance because we're a whole different generation of internet; I should remember to do things like this more often!

Yes, what

tabaqui says in the comment right above this one!

<3 you, DW!

Howdy! I make icons at

fancylittleboxes if anyone would like free candy.

DW is a much more chill place than other social media sites.

Icons are not an addictive substance.

Really.

*cue semi-hysterical laughter and counting of remaining free icon slots*

I don't have an icon addiction! Nope! Not me! -laughs in 500+ icons-

*joins in

havocthecat's laughter and icon-counting*

i have a paid account (until july something) with 150 slots. i "only" have 82 of them filled because i didn't want to get a bunch i would end up not using.

I uh. "Only" have 170 of 300 filled. I don't use all of them, but they're there if I want them, which is the important thing!

Icons may be slightly less addicting than cocaine. Maybe.

Possibly.

The thing that completely cracks me up is that neither Mark nor I ever remember to change our icon from the default, heh. (That doesn't stop me from keeping a gallery of icons! But I never remember to use them!)

*side-eyes her 390 icons*

TYK for your icon-sharing!

You are welcome!

Oh wow those are some gorgeous icons!

Thank you very much! 💗💗💗 [also thank you for what you do here]

I grabbed a couple pretties, thank you!

You're welcome!

As a user who has returned recently after quite a hiatus, this is all very useful info!

For redditors looking to make friends/follow other users, I've found some great people via

addme

And if that's your sort of thing there's also

addme_fandom and

findingfriends.

If you feel like it, you can post an entry in your own journal to introduce yourself to the people you are adding to your circle. Some possible topics:

* The name you go by on the internet, which might or might not be related to your username and/or display name. For example, my username is azurelunatic but friends call me Azz; only Betty gets to call me Al.

* What your username on Reddit is/was, if you care to make that association.

* What you think you're going to use your journal for (at least right now): are you trying to stay in touch with your Reddit peeps, do you post collections of interesting links, do you mostly lurk and/or participate in communities, do you write about your daily life, do you write themed essays, do you share recipes? Something else?

* What are/were some of your favorite subreddits, and what do you like about them?

....only Betty gets to call me Al.

if that's a reference to the song you can call me al by paul simon, very nice work.

1. This is counter-intuitive if you're used to places like Twitter and Tumblr, but mentioning someone's username with @ in front of it in a post or comment here will NOT send them a notification.

So if you're @ mentioning people but you're puzzled that they aren't leaving a reply, it's not necessarily unfriendliness: they just won't automatically know you've mentioned them.

2. But people can get notifications to Dreamwidth's on-site inbox and to their email inbox when you reply to their posts or comments, or when you make a post, if they've got those options enabled. So make sure you enable notifications yourself to make sure you don't miss people interacting with you around the site!

I think it often throws people that the notifications page has two sets of checkboxes, and the first (leftmost) one is for your inbox on Dreamwidth. So if people don't check the site, they'll miss notifications there unless they also check in the right-hand column, which gets you email notifications.

Edited (accidentally tagged in another user while giving an example of code) 2023-06-13 23:37 (UTC)

You can sometimes also use site search to search for your username, although that's harder if your username is a common word and sometimes the search's fuzzy matching is a bit irritating, heh.

*throws themself at your icon* 😍

Welcome Redditors!!!

While there are no upvotes/downvotes here, if like me you sometimes look at your own /u/ page to ~~check your imaginary internet points~~ remember what conversations you've been involved in, Read > Recent Comments from the main menu will get you some of that information here on DW. https://www.dreamwidth.org/comments/recent

Paid accounts have access to a longer comment history.

Oh, I've got a new one! So the way to include someone's username here is this code:

Something fun Dreamwidth set up is that you can link to someone's username on other websites this way! So here I'm

soc_puppet, but I'm also

socchan and

bisexualbaker. You do that by adding site=examplesite after the user name in the code, like so: It's super useful!

To create a cut that shortens posts, like a readmore on Tumblr, use the tag "cut" between carrots; "/cut" closes it. You can nest cuts, but you won't be able to tell unless you're reading the topmost cut by opening it via side triangle.

Some fun spoiler-hiding code:

When you click this triangle, you'll find some example text

Example text

Dreamwidth has some really fun features 😃

Ooooh, those are some good tips I totally forgot about! Thank you!

My pleasure! You're probably the better person to ask for which sites the username thing works with than I am, though 😂

oh god I never remember it either, but there's a list in the FAQ!

You may not remember it, but you do know where to point people who want to learn more, and that's still more than I did, so you still get points 😉👍

>Some fun spoiler-hiding code
......well, I've been on here since the beginning, and I learned a thing. Thanks!

Yeah, it's actually a pretty new one! Only in the past year or so, I think? So you haven't been missing it for long 😉

Fun fact! <details> and <summary> aren't Dreamwidth-specific features. They're part of modern HTML, and can be used on any site that both accepts raw HTML and doesn't filter out those tags.

Accordionly ... 🕶️🙂

😎 Yeeeeaaaahhhh!

Oh, fun! My turn to learn things today, I guess 😉 Hashtag Today's Lucky 10k etc

thank you so so much for that 'details' one!

we've been wanting a way to keep our dw readers safe from potentially triggering content even when they click through to the entry page itself, or in comments, for a literal decade. since cuts automatically open if you click through to the entry itself, and don't work in comments. this is SO SO HELPFUL. thankyou-thankyou! <3 <3 <3

My pleasure! I've been relying on that pretty hard for a community I run, and it is so useful. Honestly, I wouldn't even know about it myself if someone in my circle hadn't posted about it when the HTML went live, so I think it's only fair that I spread it around myself when I can!

yeah, it's so hard to find out about new HTML changes, at least for everyday internet users. we didn't even realise at first that it wasn't a dreamwidth-specific thing, haha.

thankyou so much for sharing it around, we really appreciate it. we've made a post ourselves about it, in case any of our readers don't know yet, too. it's such a useful feature! we only wish it showed up as a visibly clickable element, but that might just be our accessibility settings, they make things display much more simply than usual.

we also wanted to say thankyou for what you said further down about the comment hierarchy indicators being so important for screenreader users! most of our best friends on here use screenreaders, and we care a lot about understanding what's helpful vs what's not.

if you have the spoons to answer a question about making sure it shows up for our readers, we'd super appreciate it, but we realise you're not a help desk and it's not your job, so this part is entirely optional.

we're guessing that since it's an account settings option rather than a journal style one, it should be site-wide and show up on our journal for our readers if they have it turned on in their own settings, and we don't need to enable it in ours? we usually have it off because it's very visually overwhelming to us (our brain can't process numbers very well), but if we need to turn it on for it to display to our readers we'll happily deal with a little bit of visual confusion to do so!

either way, thanks again, and we hope your day/night treats you well!

Re: Comment hierarchy markers: Yes, they show up sitewide, regardless of if an individual has them enabled for their own journal/viewing or not. It's kinda like the "view in my style" setting in that respect, so you shouldn't need to turn it on yourselves if it's confusing for you!

And best wishes to y'all as well 😊

thankyou so much! that's great to hear.

it was lovely to meet you! 😊💜

Likewise! And feel free to stop by

queerly_beloved or my other communities/my own journal any time ✌

oh that's such a gorgeous community name and icon! we love intersectional inclusionist spaces! ^_^

we're usually very reclusive online these days due to a combo of severely low spoons, high social anxiety, and the fact most of our identities & experiences require content warnings and/or are discriminated against even within our own marginalised communities as a whole. so we're pretty unlikely to interact much (if at all), but we will totally still follow and read along to hear what people have to say, and check out your other communities.

thankyou very much for the invite! 💜💗💜

Thank you! I'm very proud of the flag(?) design ♥ The community itself is pretty quiet overall; it's rare for there to be any posts aside from my weekly recs posts, but they do happen. I keep meaning to do more, but, well, spoons. And the other two communities I'm trying to keep active. Maybe one day I'll manage to get "Post by email" set up and can schedule things on Good Executive Function days...

And this also served as a reminder to me to make sure that Plural got into the community identity list, so thank you for that 👍

it's a lovely flag design! we always loved the queer chevrons and the Gilbert Baker flag, and seeing the POC-inclusion stripes from the philly flag is so reassuring! you did a great job rearranging the stripes and merging into the chevrons, it was instantly recognisable to us as a combo of those 3 flags.

oof, yeah, we feel you on the spoons. we rarely have enough to do any more than bare minimum survival tasks these days honestly, lol. scheduled email posts sound much easier! just a matter of getting the spoons/focus/etc to be able to set it up... x3

don't worry though, we're in a bunch of super quiet/slow-moving communities and honestly it's a nice pace for us, since we're usually slow creatures ourselves. it's comfy and relaxing.

oh thankyou very much for making sure plural is included! ^_^ that means a lot to us. 💜

Edited (remembered the words we were looking for, for something) 2023-06-15 05:29 (UTC)

I'll admit, part of it came from me being bothered by the color order in the original Philly pride flag 😅 Keeping red between brown and orange just seemed slightly visually jarring to me, whereas if you move things around a bit and put orange and brown next to each other, the transition is much more natural feeling/harmonious, IMO. I ended up really lucking out when I looked up the original Gilbert Baker flag and found out that the orange stripe stands for "Healing"; if that wasn't a sign to keep the black and brown stripes next to it, I don't know what would be!

Absolutely! I've got lots of other not-strictly-queer identities listed as well, because I want to mean what I say when it came to making Queerly Beloved intersectional ♥

Oh! These are great tips. To expand a little:

If you choose Markdown as your primary mode of text formatting, you can achieve the same thing by typing @USERNAME, which will display as username. If you want to link to an account on another service, you can do the same thing in Markdown by typing @USERNAME.twitter which will display as USERNAME.

Dreamwidth doesn't validate the usernames even if you're just linking a Dreamwidth user, so if you typo a username and it's not one that, it's not going to catch that and let you know that, it's just going to link to what that account's profile would be if it did exist.

Oh, nice! I've been working in basic HTML for close to two decades now, so I didn't know the other method. Thanks for sharing it!

A couple other features!

"Expand all" for comment sections: I think this is only a paid feature? But when a post gets over fifty comments, Dreamwidth automatically collapses a lot of threads, especially longer ones; when that happens, you can check up at the bottom of the post, and the option to "Expand All Comments" will appear as a viewing option right next to the links showing how many comments there are, inviting you to post a new comment, etc.

Another one I really love is a vital accessibility feature for people who rely on screenreaders: You can turn on a special comment hierarchy thing, which makes it easier to figure out which comment is in reply to which. So a comment thread might look like:

Click the triangle to see an example comment thread

1 (first comment)
1a (reply to first comment)
1b (reply to first comment)
1b1 (reply to second reply)
1b1a (reply to previous reply)
1c (reply to first comment

2 (second comment)
2a (reply to second comment)
2a1 (reply to first reply of second comment)
2b (reply to second comment)

And so forth. It's pretty nifty!

Overall, Dreamwidth dedicates a lot of time and effort to making the site as accessible as possible. Sometimes things still happen, and an update may bork the site in a way that the accessibility team wasn't able to find before the code went live, but the Dreamwidth team always does their best to get things fixed as soon as possible, and to expand their tester base in the aftermath to hopefully prevent that sort of thing from happening again.

Thank you for this! I had forgotten about the 'expand' option, and was just opening endless browser tabs to read the comments.

😂 Considering how widespread Too Many Tabs is, I am pleased to have contributed to its reduction in at least one case!

Also re: expanding long threads, sometimes they get too long to all expand even when you hit "expand all comments" BUT a kind person made a nifty bookmarklet that will do it for you. Code and instructions here:
https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/259401.html?thread=1456181577#cmt1456181577

For those of us who like to post long-form things, manifestos, or other thousands-words long posts as a general rule, there's no automatic "read more" cutoff point to a post. Instead, you can manually decide where to put the "Read More" spot in your entries using the <cut> tag in your entry. (It's called that because it's a holdover from LiveJournal which used <lj-cut> to do it.)

The standard cut tag will default to "Read More", but you can customize the text of what you want to display there with <cut text=text>

This only works for entries, and it creates a link to the spot on the entry when you click on the cut link. <details>, mentioned above, works on both entries and comments, so it's up to you to choose which one you want to use for your entries.

I have been on DW for years and I did not know about

thank you!

It's a very new addition to the HTML spec, not DW-specific! So don't feel bad :)

If you're going to customize the text of your cut tag, and you intend to include more than one word, you should put "quotes" around the text. Edit: And I believe the same goes for tagging and stuff like that.

Edited 2023-06-14 09:29 (UTC)

Thank you, I'd forgotten at which points you wanted quotes and which ones you could sneak by without needing them with.

Welcome Redditors! It can be hard to meet people at first here because a lot of the communities aren't as easy to navigate here as subs and the pace is generally slower, but I promise it's worth it. I don't have anything to add to the great tips but I just wanted to say hi.

I'm a new convert from Reddit/Twitter and I just wanted to thank you all--both for this post and for the warm welcome and tips in the comments. Looking forward to meeting the community here! :-)

Edited 2023-06-14 18:31 (UTC)

Welcome home! I hope you enjoy it here :)

Went to upvote, realized there was no upvote button, realized I probably spend too much time on Reddit. :-D

Welcome! Hopefully you'll have more luck finding active communities here on Dreamwidth. I will say that I've struggled to find what I'm looking for, though that may be because I can't figure out the right tags to use. I'm sure you'll figure it out. Have fun!

Thank you!! (I appreciate the invisible upvote, too 😌)

You're absolutely right in that it's harder to find communities here--and a lot of my friends have *not* migrated over from Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr etc. But that doesn't mean I think DW is terrible, either! As you said, quite correctly: I'm working it out. :-D

I think my biggest struggle has been the fact that very few of my friends are here, and that those who are rarely (if ever) update their journals. I'm hoping that changes over time, especially as Big Social continues on its downswing. I'm originally from LiveJournal, but left when all of my friends fled it for Facebook. I'm hoping we'll see a migration back toward Dreamwidth and similar services. One can dream, right?

For whatever it's worth, I'm aligned with you on that dream! :') I really hope that there's a move back towards longer-formed and more privacy-oriented online interaction... but only time can tell. With Twitter's interesting, uh, choice yesterday, I hope that people make the leap and stay over here!!

I think we're headed for a real reckoning in the next few years as people really realize that a lot of the features they've come to expect from social media are completely unsustainable without massive injections of VC and ad money (unlimited photo and video hosting) or are designed to manipulate the user and keep them on the site for longer to view more ads (most search and discovery options, most of the "number go up" type feedback mechanisms). A lot of the worst of social media isn't inherent to social media, it's an artifact of the funding and monetization method that we've wound up with, but the things that cause that "worst of social media" are often very compelling for people and asking them to move to a site that doesn't do those things is difficult! Like, we often get feedback that DW feels slow and is hard for a new person to get into, because it doesn't have the dopamine-button instant reward mechanisms of likes and reposts, and I am deeply sympathetic (I, too, am massively susceptible to the dopamine-button instant reward mechanism of likes and reposts) but have been very, very reluctant to add those kinds of dopamine-button mechanisms to DW because of how much they warp the behavior of the service as a whole. I don't know if there even is an ethical way to design them and I've been brainstorming on it for the entire time DW has existed! And sure, some of those dopamine-button mechanisms can be both beneficial and harmful at the same time, and people definitely notice that they're not there and it's a lot of the reason DW isn't as "sticky" to people who find themselves just drifting away and using other services instead so it would probably be 'better' for us to add them just in terms of retention factor, but I just keep wrestling and wrestling and wrestling with the ethics of it and not coming up with any good solutions.

The next few years are going to be really interesting as we start to see the consequences of all the easy VC money that was sloshing around in the system starting to dry up and the legal, regulatory, and social backlash against "big tech" gaining momentum, that's for sure.

Just reading through the comments on this post again for various reasons, and damned if this doesn't address a few things I've been wondering about for a while. Not to mention give me more food for thought. Thanks for writing this out!

You're welcome! We definitely know people are missing a lot of the dopamine generator features, and I keep trying to sketch out a way to do them, but I can't even get to "semi-ethically" for most of them and it's hard to justify spending dev time to experiment when the answer may be "actually, no, this is going to warp the social fabric of the site so badly we're going to have to kill the project" partway through.

Between this and an observation you made in a previous News or Maintenance post about how content aggregation sites work by prioritizing the most controversial shit, I am just. In awe here. You have given me so much to think about, and a desire to learn more of... social media theory? Is that what it'd be called? Either way, I'm definitely going to have to figure out how exactly to do said learning, cuz holy shit.

Very very belatedly (sorry!) but: The TSPA and the Stanford Internet Observatory (and especially their Journal of Online Trust and Safety) are two good starting points! They have their biases and they're both fairly geared towards large sites, but they've got a lot of great scholarship.

i am brand new to dreamwidth, got here yesterday morning i think. and for me it's very dopamine-y for now. but perhaps that'll decrease over time. part of it is the novelty i think

i have been recommending it to my friends, who are largely tumblr users, and some will never go here because of the lack of reblogs. which i do sort of miss and i will be staying on tumblr as well. but i really like the more personal feel and the effort you have to put in

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