soc_puppet | Entries tagged with dreamwidth how to

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!

If anyone would like me to make a tutorial about something Dreamwidth related, or how it compares to Tumblr, I've got request posts up on Newcomers and The Great Tumblr Purge. Also on Dreamwidth Sharing on Tumblr. Leave a comment at one of those places or direct message me, and I'll see what I can do!

Current planned tutorials include cut tags, icons in general, and image uploading/sharing on Dreamwidth.

Current Mood: tired

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.

Current Mood: shrug emoji

Well, Dreamwidth post organizing didn't really happen today, but I did post an updated version of "What to post about on Dreamwidth" a few places!

I also thought of a couple more About Dreamwidth posts I want to make, with some points I want to touch on:

Commenting on Dreamwidth, and specifically how the comment section is where our "Yes, And" stuff happens on "silly" posts.

Icons on Dreamwidth, and specifically the comparison I made to reaction images. Information on where to get icons and/or how to make icons is a must (I only know the most basic of basics myself, so I'll have some looking up to do!), but I also plan to cover the fun that can be had with icon keywords.

Both of these I'd say fall under the "Dreamwidth Culture" umbrella, with the icons post potentially also covering "How To" basics.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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.

Current Mood: exhausted

Putting together a post for Tumblr, but I figure I'll probably want to back it up here, so I'm typing it here first to make copy-pasting easier 😂

[Edit] Now rebloggable on Tumblr! [/Edit]

[Edit 2] Added a few more things to this version! I'll be copy-pasting it to

newcomers,

the_great_tumblr_purge, and the new Dreamwidth Sharing community on Tumblr shortly. [/edit]

----

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. Comments are also vital, but they don't happen without posts to comment on. Unfortunately, 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!

Another good place to steal some prompts is Questions and Questionnaires for

3weeks4dreamwidth; Three Weeks for Dreamwidth is the annual celebration of Dreamwidth's birthday, and a lot of people come up with fun things to do for it that you can do at any time.

Check out

allbingo as well! While a lot of the bingo cards are made with fests in mind, there's no reason you can't pick or make a random bingo card and use the squares to come up with topics to post about. Money says the community would be down to celebrate a posting bingo with you, too!

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.

Reoccurring posts are great for if you want to share something regularly and prompt discussion. Just come up with a few quick lines that you can copy-paste and share whenever, and boom! Solid posting strategy right there. There's a number of communities where this approach is fairly common, in addition to individual users.

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 😉

(With thanks to

ysabetwordsmith for some of these suggestions 💖)

Current Mood: you can do it!

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.

Current Mood: nostalgic

This post is intended for Tumblr, and as a general info thing for Tumblrites, but I want to keep it here as well, and typing it up here first means I won't have to go through the tedium of find-and-replacing all the curly quotes and apostrophes or manually entering italics tags after the fact (as opposed to as I go). I mean, yes, technically, I can keep the curly quotes and apostrophes, but a long time ago they were showing up as unreadable symbols in my inbox-at-the-time, so now I have an Unreasonable Grudge against them. Edit: Tumblr link /Edit

Anyway, essay time!

There's a number of technological and cultural shifts Tumblr users would have to make when switching to Dreamwidth; image hosting (and the lack thereof) is probably the biggest technological switch, but the one I anticipate giving people the most trouble is tagging.

On Tumblr, you can add pretty much whatever you want to the tags, in any order you want; there is no limit to them, and they're essentially used as a secondary comment system.

Not so for Dreamwidth! Dreamwidth has a hard limit on the number of tags any journal or community can register; it's 1,000 for free users, 1,500 for basic paid accounts, and 2,000 for premium paid accounts, and they're basically entirely for organizational purposes. One of the ways that Dreamwidth's code reflects this is that it lists tags alphabetically in posts, not in the order that they were written or added. If you want to include a stream of consciousness in your tags and have them make sense, your best bet is to find a way to make them alphabetical. There's also a hard limit of 40 characters per tag for everyone, regardless of account type (paid or free).

There are other organizational options, Memories chief among them, but it's not really possible to opt out of tags being organizational and switch them to being communication. So what, if anything, can you do instead?

( Option One: Icons )

( Option Two: Titles )

( Option three: Currents )

So there you have it. Dreamwidth may not have "talking in the tags" the way Tumblr does, but it does have some other forms of communication that you can still have fun with.

(Side note: You might also be able to do fun stuff similar to the "Currents" options with the Age Restriction section, but I haven't tried that one, and honestly it might be heavily dependent on the registered age of who's viewing it. If you're making a fun joke that you don't want people to miss out on, maybe stick to the other options.)

Current Mood: 30 character limit
Current Location: 80 character limit
Current Music: 74 character limit

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 made a post on Tumblr a little over a month ago about the differences in lurking between there and here, and decided it's finally time I copy it over here properly! The Tumblr version is over here, for anyone who cares to reblog it.

( Dreamwith and Lurking )

So that's that post! Up next I may copy my "Why is everyone recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative when they're so different?" post over here.

Current Mood: tired

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.

I've spent the last day-ish monitoring a Tumblr post I made promoting the hell out of Dreamwidth on the basis of the following four features:

- Yes to porn
- NFTs and crypto can fuck off (with link evidence of

denise saying so in not quite those words)
- Posts in (reverse) chronological order
- Actual privacy options

With Discord (and now self-publishing site Gumroad, and possibly Patreon) leaning into NFTs, these seem to be decent selling points to the Tumblr crowd 😂😭

I did initially forget the lack of ads, but managed to go into extra detail when someone else brought it up. Definitely a good selling point, that.

In retrospect, putting all of those together would've been a nice, "Top 5 Cool Things About Dreamwidth", but I think it's doing well on its own at the moment.

(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 )

If you're looking for icons,

dreamsheep has a whole bunch! The Dreamsheep itself may not officially be the mascot of Dreamwidth, but we sure love it anyway ♥

Anyhow, here's a link to a bunch of Pride Dreamsheep icons I made a while back! I also took the opportunity to update the Disability Pride sheep to the visually safe version of the flag, so if the old one gave you problems (migraines or seizures), you should be good to go 👍

Edit: Oh right!

queerly_beloved is also a nice place to check out, though less for icons at the moment and more for just general queer solidarity ✌

(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)