Welcome to Dreamwidth for our new Redditor friends!

[denise]

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!

Comments

Fandom Roleplaying on Dreamwidth

[unknown20troper]

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.

Re: Fandom Roleplaying on Dreamwidth

[yudil]

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! 🥰

Re: Fandom Roleplaying on Dreamwidth

[businessorlibation]

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.