Pronoun Trouble

Hello! You may be here because you saw me talking about Dreamwidth on Tumblr, or from my Dreamwidth tutorials at newcomers or the_great_tumblr_purge. Or maybe you here via one of the communities I run: queerly_beloved, moodthemeinayear, or summerofthe69.

I mostly post about a combination of real life foibles, whatever projects I'm working on at a given time, and whatever fandom I'm into at the moment (currently The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, as of April 2025). If you're interested in any of these, feel free to subscribe and stick around! You're welcome to introduce yourself in the comments of this post if you'd like, but feel no obligation; I fully support Lurkers in all of your forms 😉

If you want a quick link to a bunch of Dreamwidth guides, check here at Newcomers or here at The Great Tumblr Purge; my own Tumblr-oriented Dreamwidth guides I'll link below, as well:

What to post about on Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth alternatives to talking in the tags
A quick guide to mood themes
The (beta) Create Entries page
Personal Communities: Dreamwidth's "side blogs"
What do I do instead of reblogging?
Audience on Dreamwidth vs Audience on Tumblr
Cut Tag Basics

I think that's it for now; thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy your time here!

Oh right, I should probably explain why I suddenly switched from posting about specific Dreamwidth communities I run to posting about Dreamwidth in general.

Automattic just laid off 16% of their workforce; 3liza reports:

from my sources adjacent to tumblr–from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector–im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i’m hearing there are about 25 people left.

I know we've claimed that Tumblr's death knell was tolling before, but this sounds really bad.

I've seen people suggesting alternatives, but Dreamwidth is what I know, and I love it here, so Dreamwidth is what I'll be talking about. Expect me to be talking about it more for at least a little while, even if all I'm doing is drafting out posts to make elsewhere.

Last thing I'm going to do tonight and then I'm going to bed for realsies, I swear.

I post a fair amount about Dreamwidth on Tumblr every time things look like they're going to shit there, because I love Dreamwidth and want more people to come hang out here, and I want to archive those posts over here. Tomorrow, I'm planning to go through my various Dreamwidth posts and sort out what's useful here and what's redundant. To that end, I'm going to sort them into what I think of as the categories of Dreamwidth posts I make.

These are the categories of posts I think I make about Dreamwidth; I may discover more in my organizing tomorrow, but I think this is a good start.

1) Love Letters to Dreamwidth
Any time Tumblr seems to be in danger, and sometimes for unrelated reasons, I write a post about why I love Dreamwidth and why I think a lot of people would also love it here. These are posts about that.

2) Links to Dreamwidth guides
Anywhere I collect links to guides other people have written about Dreamwidth. I'll probably just collect the direct links for those, rather than my reblogs of them, though I may also round all those links up into a single post for people to reblog on Tumblr.

3) Dreamwidth guides I've written myself
Sometimes I answer questions about how to do Dreamwidth; this is that

4) Dreamwidth cultural guides
There's some pretty significant cultural differences between Dreamwidth and Tumblr, and I talk about them in these posts. I certainly don't expect Dreamwidth to stay 100% the same with a huge influx of new users who bring their own experiences and posting styles from elseweb, but some of these differences stem from the technological side of things (such as no native reblogging feature, and tags being strictly organizational), so I figure that's important to know.


Okay, bed time now, I promise.

I'd say something about a nefarious plan to get everyone to start using Dreamwidth, but I really don't think that wanting more people here is all that nefarious.

In any case, nefarious or not, I certainly seem to have accidentally gotten some attention.

Migrating 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.)

( This isn't really a how-to, but I'm using the tag anyway for organizational purposes )

I've heard from two separate sources now that Dreamwidth's block feature doesn't forcibly unsubscribe the blocked user from the blocker's journal; it only makes them unable to comment there. The blockee can still view the journal while logged in and will get notices when the journal owner updates. (This is really weird to me, because DW's name change token includes the option to not automatically redirect links, and I was informed this option was in part to protect the name changer from past abusers. Adding the ability to unsubscribe specific users from the name changer's journal feels like a natural step to make that even more secure!)

I sent a support ticket asking about this, and haven't heard back yet; understandable, the most recent news post and related stuff is probably taking up a lot of time and attention. I still want to hear it "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak, but in the mean time:

Does anyone know about any third party scripts that can forcibly unsubscribe a user from one's journal, or anything like that? I figure it's worth asking here before I go hunting elsewhere.

(Originally posted to Tumblr on August 8th.)

Today I'm going to take a moment to talk about a major cultural difference between Tumbr and Dreamwidth, and that is Audience.

( More detail here )

(Cross-posted from Tumblr, so you don't have to look at that one during the log-off!)

Boy is finding cool stuff and people super easy to do on Tumblr! People reblogging cool stuff, and then you can go back through the reblog chain and find out who else is interested, and bam! Instant cool people, who post more cool stuff.

It’s a little trickier on Dreamwidth, I’ll admit.There’s also the question of how to share cool stuff if you can’t just click to reblog it. Here’s a few options:

Search Interests - So, when you create a journal or community on Dreamwidth, you’re encouraged to list a bunch of interests in its profile. The cool thing is, once you have those interests saved, they turn into links you can click on. Or you can type a specific interest into the search box I liked above. Either option will take you to a page that lists all the other journals - individuals and communities alike - that also list that thing as an interest. Default is to list everything, but you can also sort them out to just journals or just communities, just OpenID accounts (which will link to other places off-site) and just people you already have in your reading circle. Any person or community that lists that thing as one of their interests may post about it, or welcome posts about it.

Communities - So I mentioned communities in the previous point. I’m sure you’re familiar with Tumblr accounts that work primarily through Submissions. Communities work in pretty much the same way; the moderator(s) of the community decide the level of posting access (open to members, open to everyone, open to just select members, there’s a lot of options), and then those with posting access make content. You can update a community either through your regular update page, where there’s a drop-down menu to select where to post, or directly from the community page. Everyone who is following the community will then be able to see the post you made, unless it’s locked to community members (which is an option for privacy and/or security). So if you’re interested in a specific fandom, you can find a community dedicated to that fandom, and there will be people there posting about it: Making cool things to share or discussing things. If someone in particular posts a lot of stuff that you like, you can add their journal to your reading circle and sometimes see things that are unrelated to the community where you met them. I’ve followed a lot of people from fandom to fandom in much this way.

The Latest Things Page - This is the closet Dreamwidth has to how Tumblr’s public tag system currently operates, and it can be seriously addictive. Dreamwidth does have a selection of the most popular tags at the top of the post that you can click on to see a selection of posts featuring those tags, but it’s hit or miss whether anything will actually show up. There is no screening in place on the Latest Things page aside from what is in place on individual posts (which is to say, things that are locked from the public won’t show up there, but triggery stuff that isn’t under a cut might show up). Also, things will show up whether or not you tag them, but they won’t show up when you click the Most Popular Tags if they don’t have that tag on them.

The Explore Tab - Really, this can help you find a lot of stuff and people you’re interested in. In addition to the Interests and Latest Things Page, which I already mentioned, there’s links to take you to a random journal or community and search engines for specific journals, as well as a directory. It is totally possible to find interesting people and content on Dreamwidth; the methods are just a little different.

metaquotes - You know that thing on Tumblr with the viral posts that get 10k likes and reblogs and stuff, because you loved them and are adamant that everyone you know should also see them because they would love them too? That's Metaquotes. If it’s the kind of thing you would reblog on Tumblr because of how awesome it is, it might belong on Metaquotes. It’s not a perfect match, but it is reasonably close to the whole mess of popular posts you might find on your Dash, IMO. Or rather, it has the potential to be with more traffic. As with a lot of DW communities, it needs more momentum. It’ll take work to get it there, but the Tumblr community wasn’t built in a day, either.


Bonus introductory posts:

potofsoup's Dreamwidth for Tumblrites Masterpost (may contain Tumblr links)

aniamra's Tumblr User's Guide to Dreamwidth

The official dw_news post from when Tumblr instituted the pr0n ban (yes, do read the comments!)

Dreamwidth's official stance on Nazis, etc