rosemirmir reblogged bisexualbaker:
Let me tell you about Dreamwidth
Here's the thing. Dreamwidth is not Tumblr. It will never be Tumblr. Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing is up to you; I mostly consider it just a thing.
There are ways you can make your Dreamwidth experience visually more like Tumblr and/or Discord; @sunlit-skycat did a wonderful breakdown of that process for anyone who wants to learn how.
Dreamwidth does not have a native reblogging feature, though there's a workaround you can learn how to use (brought to you by some of the same people who brought you AO3, even).
There are guides out there for getting used to Dreamwidth as a Tumblr user (including the not-currently-updating @dreamwidth-help), whether you plan to keep using Tumblr or not, and for how to connect to people on Tumblr and find communities for shared interests (shameless self-plug).
But overall, Dreamwidth is simply more work than Tumblr. If you spent regular time on LiveJournal, whether running your own account(s) or just lurking, the setup will be familiar; but for people who got into the internet more in the past ten years or so, it's going to be a bit challenging!
If you're willing to put in the work, though—and there are lots of people who are happy to help with that, including on Dreamwidth itself—it can be very worth it.
rosemirmir reblogged bisexualbaker:
As long as I'm doing this:
I would not say no to some more friends on Dreamwidth!
- My account is here, at soc_puppet; I'm currently into The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, with Miraculous Ladybug being my most recent previous fandom, and otherwise mostly post about either RL stuff or creative stuff
- I run the inclusive queer-positive community Queerly Beloved over there, which these days is mostly a weekly recs post, but I would be delighted to have more activity in general!
- I also run Mood Theme in a Year
- For the fans of the spicy, I run Summer of the 69 from June 9th through September 6th
- Heaven help me, if I get enough interest (new members, new subscribers, new content, whatever), I may even try to commit to making monthly posts at Kittens and Spitefic again!
So there's some stuff to do at Dreamwidth that I personally am in charge of. There's lots of stuff I'm not in charge of as well, but you'll have to do your own looking to find it! I recommend dw_community_promo, followfriday, and fandomcalendar as a start. addme_fandom is also probably a good idea. Oh, and here's my tutorial for finding cool stuff and people on Dreamwidth as well.
Edit: Updated tutorial for finding things to do and meeting people on Dreamwidth!
Some stuff I'm in charge of:
A community with weekly posts to encourage you to do stuff! It's low-key, and the stuff you create can be anything from clean laundry to websites.
Talk about Ursula Vernon/ @tkingfisher 's work and share stuff.
I keep meaning to archive the cyoa she did here like I did the twitter one...
Active comms I regularly see on my f-list:
Talk about comics.
Nature pictures. Often small around the neighborhood things.
Multi-fandom weekly prompt community.
Talking about advice given in advice columns.
Tell us one good thing that happened to you each day.
Multi-fandom all kinds of works rec comm.
Batch two because tumblr is fighting me.
Do you collect dolls? Talk about it here.
Music sharing comm.
Need help with research for a story? Ask here.
Multi-fandom art recs.
General fandom community. Explicitly made to help folks figure out how to use comms.
Place to rec queer and queer adjacent stuff.
Batch three.
Talking about user generated internet stuff and showing off projects.
US politics.
The fandom secret posting and discussion comm.
Oh hey, that's Queerly Beloved! I run that comm 😃 And technically it's for all sorts of general queer stuff, the weekly recs posts are just the most common these days 😅
Here's the suggested post content I wrote in the profile. It's not an exhaustive list, it's just what I came up with at the time and thought might be cool to see there:
* Art (drawings, paintings, edits, crafts, etc)
* Writing (prose, poetry, nonfiction, the works)
* Other various creative things (videos, fanmixes, recipes???, etc)
* Media recommendations featuring characters like us (books, movies, podcasts, fanfics, etc)
* Media reviews of canons that feature or supposedly feature characters like us, with warnings as appropriate
* Character headcanons
* All sorts of creative fandom stuff, in fact
* Introductions (Example with template)
* Friending/following memes for various identities
* Resources for various queer identities
* Resources for various intersectional identities (queer and: disabled, POC, poor, fat, homeless, religious, etc)
* Theme weeks/months for various identities
* Creative challenges and/or prompt sets
* Memes
* Icons
* Product recommendations, promotions, and/or shoutouts ("So-and-so's store offers a whole lot of aromantic pride stuff!")
* General fun, supportive, and pride related stuff
* Discussions of news, links, and roundups/links to discussions happening elsewhereWe've had people talking about the books they've written, a fic-in-the-comments meme, and I did a couple of giveaways in the early days.
That said, I've got a couple of other communities I run, so the Thursday Recs posts are about all I can keep up with, but I'd love to have more and varied content over there. But in the mean time, I know that the weekly recs posts mean a lot to some people, so I'm happy to keep them going!
(If anyone else is interested in being a mod and running some of these things, I would happily take applications!)
rosemirmir reblogged bisexualbaker:
What to post about on Dreamwidth
There's a question that may be on a lot of minds right now, that some people may be afraid to ask. Or you might not even think to ask it until after you're in deep enough that you'll feel silly for doing so! So let's get it out of the way ASAP.
"But what do I even post on Dreamwidth? Don't all posts there need to be super long and thoughtful?"
Not even a little bit! As with any social media site, posting is the blood that keeps social interactions going. You can get into comments, yes, but those happen best with posts! But with the (I'm sorry to say) sub-par image hosting interface on Dreamwidth (that will hopefully be fixed someday, but probably is at least several years out, I'm even sorrier to say), people who are used to an image-heavy social media site might be a bit daunted by Dreamwidth's text-heavy interface. So here's some ideas of things you can post:
- Shitposts. It is entirely fine, okay, and even wonderful to make shitposts on Dreamwidth! Since Dreamwidth isn't a content aggregation site and doesn't have built-in reblogging, you probably shouldn't expect them to go very far (unless a member of metaquotes sees them and wants to share), but they're still welcome 👍
- GIPs, or, Gratuitous Icon Posts! Free users get a total of 15 icons to use like reaction images and gifs, and sometimes when you upload one, you just want to share it with everyone right away! That's when you make a Gratuitous Icon Post. You can literally just make a post using that icon, and then put GIP in the text field, and boom! You're done.
- Steal some prompts from sunshine_challenge, snowflake_challenge, or thefridayfive. While you can also do any of these challenges in real time, there's nothing stopping you from doing them whenever you want, and The Friday Five has a huge number of back-posts to dig through. Just go back a few pages on the main community page, pick a day with questions you like the look of, and post those (with your answers) to your journal!
- Do you have a pet? Or more than one? Post about what they're doing right this second. Someone's bound to be interested in that!
- To-do lists. Not only can it be helpful to have these actually written out, some of your followers may chime in to root for you to do them!
- Media reviews in three sentences or less. Of course you can make them longer if you want, but if you're just looking to get a quick post out, this one might be pretty fun.
- Something you're looking forward to! It doesn't have to be a big thing, even something like, "I can't wait for my next afternoon nap!" or "I just bought a new book and I'm really looking forward to reading it!" or "I wanna go home so I can pet my dog so bad!" Any of those would be a fine post.
- Three (or more) Things Make a List: If you've got at least three things you've been meaning to post about, but don't have a lot to say about any of them, jumble them all together in the same post! Pretty sure this tradition dates back farther than Dreamwidth, though damned if I could say where it started.
It may not seem like these ideas have a lot in common, but one thing they're all good for is starting a conversation with your followers. And that's at least half the fun of Dreamwidth, IMO.
There's more ideas out there, but these should at least get you started. And if you keep it up, you'll have the hang of Dreamwidth in no time 😉
rosemirmir reblogged ellierenae:
hey you're doing a great job, just remember: a semicolon can be used to combine two sentences where you might otherwise use a period; this allows you to create longer and longer run-on sentences
Quick update, babes: semicolons are also for if you want to make a list of things but items in the list contain commas. You can divide your list items with semicolons.
As proof of gratitude please send a lawn-white shirt; a braided, beaded, bronze and leather belt; a pair of boots that strides the sea; and a new iphone.
I need this for when I’m tutoring kids…so many college students have no idea how to use semicolons
