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

[niqaeli]

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

[vriddy]

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

[scissorsevered]

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.

[lizvogel]

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.

[cora]

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?

[cesy]

Plenty of people still use it as a blog.

[greerwatson]

Oh, yes. Plenty of people still do this.

[yamamanama]

I do.

[jazzyjj]

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.