Dreamwidth Propoganda
Jan. 12th, 2024 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetMigrating another Dreamwidth post from Tumblr! This time it's "Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?" (Written in early November '23, when that letter Staff got was leaked about how Automattic is putting Tumblr on the backburner and we all thought that meant Tumblr was shutting down ASAP. Luckily(?), Tumblr is still going to be around a good while, but I wanted to make sure I backed the post up over here anyway.)
To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking in a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:
- Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3’s abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.
- In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)
- Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn’t sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
- No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.
- Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.
- The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that’s only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!
- The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!
- We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.
- Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).
So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.
Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.
Finally, we’re recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just… not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.
Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.
Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.
Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.
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Date: 2024-01-14 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-14 06:24 am (UTC)I originally wrote this back in November, when that letter to Tumblr staff go leaked about how Automattic is putting Tumblr on the backburner and a bunch of us interpreted it as "Tumblr is going away ASAP". Turns out it's not, and we're basically all relieved, but it did kinda kickstart me into "Explaining Dreamawidth for Tumblrites" mode 😅
Sorry for the confusion!
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Date: 2024-01-14 08:59 pm (UTC)Did you manage to actually convince anyone to get on here? As much of a dreamwidth evangelist I've been, it still feels a bit like a ghost town, haha.
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Date: 2024-01-14 10:39 pm (UTC)twothree posts that should sum things up: This is basically the inciting post; this is a post with more of a breakdown of how some long-term fen were approaching the information, including a link to that first post and a couple of branches off of it; and this is a post explaining the basics of what we should really expect from Tumblr's existence going forward.Shortest version: Tumblr is going into "maintenance mode"; Automattic is going to stop dedicating much time or effort to massive new projects on Tumblr, like Tumblr Live (which they are also shutting down on Jan 24th, incidentally) and are reducing Tumblr staff down to a bare minimum. They are no longer actively trying to get Tumblr to make money. Tumblr can and is expected to trundle on until such a time as it breaks in a way that staff can't fix it (or doesn't have the budget to fix it), but that's expected to be a ways away yet.
There were at least a few days between the initial post and the clarification, so the post that I replicated here extolling the virtues of Dreamwidth did get a decent amount of traction! Some 4k-ish notes all told, and it's still getting a few likes and/or reblogs here and there. Some people did create accounts, a number of which are now following me (Hello to any of you reading this comment!), others decided to try dusting off old accounts, and still others are still considering it, but probably won't jump over until Tumblr actually starts to meaningfully decline.
A lot of image-focused Tumblr users aren't happy with Dreamwidth's very limited image hosting space, let alone the interface; I would say that the next most common complaints I saw were about lack of reblogging ability (I linked to the third-party workaround for that one) and the inability to "like" posts (I linked to Denise's explanation for why that's a feature Dreamwidth will probably never have). The most significant complaints to me were a couple of people who absolutely adore Dreamwidth, but have stalkers here, and Dreamwidth's ability to block users is.... extremely limited, to put it lightly. (You can stop someone from commenting on your posts, but you can't force them to unfollow/unsubscribe to your journal unless you buy a name change token, and force everyone at once to unfollow/unsubscribe. IIRC the explanation is that Dreamwidth doesn't want to give people a false sense of security, since there is no way to prevent any given person from finding a way to view posts that are accessible to the public at large. I personally feel like having the ability to yeet unwanted followers/subscribers even temporarily wouldn't be useless, since forcing people to jump through even one extra hoop would probably cut down on a not insignificant number of bad actors, and Dreamwidth could also make block-dodging a sitewide bannable offense, but it's not up to me, and I don't expect to make any headway with any arguments along those lines until after the old LJ code is replaced at the earliest.)
Anyway, I did get some traction, and I expect to get more if/when Tumblr starts crumbling around the edges, but beyond that I don't expect to have a huge influx of new users until or unless Tumblr starts to actually look like it's circling the drain. At that point, though, we just might get some fresh users, which is why I'm trying to make more Dreamwidth guides for Tumblr users and to consolidate my About Dreamwidth posts over here. Fandom will settle where it settles, I'm just trying to make Dreamwidth into as attractive an option as I can for when the time comes 👍
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Date: 2024-01-14 11:31 pm (UTC)I get the image thing, and one thing I have really enjoyed about the modern internet is the 'aesthetic' stuff, though from a consumer perspective it has its own problems, but Tumblr is really the most happy medium between the two because it still has more user-input options than, say, Instagram or Pinterest. This sort of stuff would be really hard to take onto DW, but at the same time, I guess I view Tumblr and Dreamwidth as very different places for very different things! But because of the way people behave it definitely seems like they want one social media site to be all things to all people, but also for it not to suck -- an impossible order, really.
My stupid thought was "with all of this retro-computing retro-internet nostalgia, Dreamwidth should be poppin'!" But it's that aesthetic people like, not functionality. There's a reason most people moved on.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-15 04:46 am (UTC)Tumblr and Dreamwidth definitely have very distinct cultures from each other. I ultimately prefer it on Dreamwidth, but Tumblr is where fandom largely ended up, so I got an account there and ended up more invested than I'd really like.
The lack of an app is another reason why Dreamwidth isn't very popular; I'm firmly on Team Dreamwidth about it, though. Apps may not be entirely why Tumblr took away NSFW, but the various app stores definitely contributed to that. Luckily, Dreamwidth is getting some quality-of-life updates that are making the site easier to navigate on mobile in general, and while that won't win everyone over, it'll definitely help.