![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
This Very Site that we blog and have fun on is a gigantic community of people, many of whom will likely never see each other in all of their interactions on the site. This is fine - we do not need an algorithm or some other entity trying to push us together for "engagement" or other nefarious purposes. Dreamwidth does not have to engage in such tactics because they do not have advertisers to satisfy, nor do they have to accept money from everywhere because they are attempting to scale themselves up to ridiculous size so that they can provide some kind of return upon investment. Which you know, if you've heard![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise talk about the principles of Dreamwidth on any news post. Or in any other context where denise gets to talk about Dreamwidth and how improbable it is that the service has continued for all of these years and gotten remarkable amounts of support from the people who use it and enjoy it. That lack of "engagement" pushing means that it can be hard to find other people on dreamwidth who are interested in the same things that you are or who you want to talk about your blorbos and your shows and all the rest. On the other hand, that lack of pushing people together also means that if someone wants to be a dick to you, they have to have engaged in a greater-than-usual amount of effort to find you and then do so. Or to have joined a community that you are also part of and then gone from there. It's very difficult for someone to leave a drive-by insult or comment or to have your post appear on the tag feed, or have someone else tag your post and bring the hordes down on you. I appreciate the access restrictions and controls built into the platform that make it require effort to find users and communities on specific topics and to demonstrate that you are someone who deserves to know about the existence of communities and users on those topics. Dreamwidth really is a good place for comunities to be, but it's for communities that aren't trying to chase having thousands or millions see their posts immediately and give them both the dopamine and the cortisol hits of having people's hot takes show up in the dash immediately.
I like Drewamwidth as a platform, much how I liked the more Dreamwidth-like LiveJournal, before SixApart and SUP and finding out about how much the Cyrillic side of LJ was using it for activism and coordination and how much the Russian government wanted to acquire and then shut down all of that activism. I like that the founders of Dreamwidth are the kind of people who fight overreach by government entities and plans to force de-anonymization of users by banning social media sites to minors. (By virtue of being a company, the founders and the team leads also aren't restricted to an artificial conception of "neutrality" or any requirement to have "both sides" of any issue. There may still be things on the site that other users, or even the founders, find distasteful, but aren't required to be reported by law. Those things probably are hidden and/or locked to avoid casual discovery.)
DW doesn't force me to conform to character limits, so you get all of the ramble and the long-form that my brain likes to do. It's primarily text-based, which works for me for just about all communications and applications except for the people who work in primarily visual or auditory media. (There is some limited image hosting, but not nearly as much as other sites.) It does sometimes give the impression that if you're not posting essays of great length and deep philosophy, then you're not on the right platform, but for the people who believe that, we also have to point out that Dreamwidth is the current home for FailFandomAnon, and also,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
capslock_dreamwidth exists. And sometimes, the quotations of metaquotes sum up quite a bit (or produce some useful shitposting, or hilarity) in a small amount of words. So it's not a requirement that posts on Dreamwidth be long-form essays, or meta-posting about things, or other serious topics. (Even if I do like the long-form things that are here.)
Because Dreamwidth is a place where you curate your own audience, I have been able to find interesting people and subscribe to them, because those people are interesting, or they're friends of friends who we've said hello to in passing in a journal, or they're people who I've had fun comment discussions with in a different space and then peeked at their journal and saw interesting things that I wanted to subscribe to. I have a few more people who are subscribed to me, but as I put in the commenting culture post, as much as I would like to spend most of my time reading fanficton, unfortunately, I end up being the person with the job and the responsibilities that preclude me from doing so, and therefore I don't always subscribe back. It's not a snub, and it's also very nice to have the separated-out elements of access and of subscription, so that I don't have to make additional calculations about whether the person I want to read is also someone I want to give access-locked entry permission to. And I suspect a lot of the Dreamwidth people also appreciate that distinction between "people I want to read" and "people I want to read the stuff I don't put out for general consumption." I appreciate my reading list, and I hope that the people who are subscribed to me get something useful out of seeing me dump lots of links in their laps on a regular basis and also engage in introspection-type posts such as these in and around December and January, and sometimes July or other spaces, as warranted. (The comments, when they arrive, usually say so.)
I also appreciate Dreamwidth as an entries and comments-based community, even as I have seen some very clever methods of putting in some more likes-based methods of interaction using the tools available to the users. (Polls, for example, with options that represent the various potential reaction emoji or txt phrasing so that someone can click on a button and register their presence without having to create a comment.) As is also mentioned in the commenting document, I don't demand long, thoughtful comments from anyone. If you want to provide such things, that's fantastic, and I'll try to respond and keep the conversation going, but if what you have time and attention for is a ♥ and nothing more, then that is a perfectly fine thing to do, even for the big thinky posts that have thousands of words on them, or many links and you want to comment on or react to just one of them. It makes for a good time when you're having a good chat in your comment space or someone else's, and I think that Dreamwidth really encourages us to have those kinds of conversations, more like we are gathered at friends' houses to have them, rather than the more public-square shouting that other platforms tend to treat their posts as. Different media for different people, and as much as I occasionally want to soapbox about things and have them spread far and wide, I much prefer the more conversational aspect of entry-comment-reply, and the limits of scope that Dreamwidth's design and friction put on things that get said. Sure, someone could copy and paste a thing that I write or comment on to a much more broadcast-related platform and bring either fame or infamy to my doorstep, but that takes a lot more effort than to click a button and quote-dunk or reblog-with-comments, or reblog-with-unfavorable-tags, or even broadcast a big reply to someone with the intention of piling on. There are, frankly, bigger targets to go after on the Internet than someone on Dreamwidth.
So, yes, I like it here. A nice piece of what is possible when you're not chasing monetization and scale, when you're not having the advertisers dictate to you what content you can have, and when the users have the ability to find other people who are interesting by whatever their own standards and ideas are, rather than trying to figure out how to game an algorithm so that you can have your message go to the people it needs to go to (and as many other people as can be put in the broadcast line of sight.) I think the community that I interact with here is fantastic and I hope that you all feel the same about your communities, too. And if you don't feel that way about them, then perhaps it is time to go through your lists and prune or add or both until you have the community built around you that you want to have. Like so many things of the "Old" Web, it may not be the most polished, slickest thing, but if you can work with or forgive the failings (or possibly contribute a pull request or suggestion yourself), the community is definitely worthwhile.
This Very Site that we blog and have fun on is a gigantic community of people, many of whom will likely never see each other in all of their interactions on the site. This is fine - we do not need an algorithm or some other entity trying to push us together for "engagement" or other nefarious purposes. Dreamwidth does not have to engage in such tactics because they do not have advertisers to satisfy, nor do they have to accept money from everywhere because they are attempting to scale themselves up to ridiculous size so that they can provide some kind of return upon investment. Which you know, if you've heard
denise talk about the principles of Dreamwidth on any news post. Or in any other context where denise gets to talk about Dreamwidth and how improbable it is that the service has continued for all of these years and gotten remarkable amounts of support from the people who use it and enjoy it. That lack of "engagement" pushing means that it can be hard to find other people on dreamwidth who are interested in the same things that you are or who you want to talk about your blorbos and your shows and all the rest. On the other hand, that lack of pushing people together also means that if someone wants to be a dick to you, they have to have engaged in a greater-than-usual amount of effort to find you and then do so. Or to have joined a community that you are also part of and then gone from there. It's very difficult for someone to leave a drive-by insult or comment or to have your post appear on the tag feed, or have someone else tag your post and bring the hordes down on you. I appreciate the access restrictions and controls built into the platform that make it require effort to find users and communities on specific topics and to demonstrate that you are someone who deserves to know about the existence of communities and users on those topics. Dreamwidth really is a good place for comunities to be, but it's for communities that aren't trying to chase having thousands or millions see their posts immediately and give them both the dopamine and the cortisol hits of having people's hot takes show up in the dash immediately.I like Drewamwidth as a platform, much how I liked the more Dreamwidth-like LiveJournal, before SixApart and SUP and finding out about how much the Cyrillic side of LJ was using it for activism and coordination and how much the Russian government wanted to acquire and then shut down all of that activism. I like that the founders of Dreamwidth are the kind of people who fight overreach by government entities and plans to force de-anonymization of users by banning social media sites to minors. (By virtue of being a company, the founders and the team leads also aren't restricted to an artificial conception of "neutrality" or any requirement to have "both sides" of any issue. There may still be things on the site that other users, or even the founders, find distasteful, but aren't required to be reported by law. Those things probably are hidden and/or locked to avoid casual discovery.)
DW doesn't force me to conform to character limits, so you get all of the ramble and the long-form that my brain likes to do. It's primarily text-based, which works for me for just about all communications and applications except for the people who work in primarily visual or auditory media. (There is some limited image hosting, but not nearly as much as other sites.) It does sometimes give the impression that if you're not posting essays of great length and deep philosophy, then you're not on the right platform, but for the people who believe that, we also have to point out that Dreamwidth is the current home for FailFandomAnon, and also,
capslock_dreamwidth exists. And sometimes, the quotations of metaquotes sum up quite a bit (or produce some useful shitposting, or hilarity) in a small amount of words. So it's not a requirement that posts on Dreamwidth be long-form essays, or meta-posting about things, or other serious topics. (Even if I do like the long-form things that are here.)Because Dreamwidth is a place where you curate your own audience, I have been able to find interesting people and subscribe to them, because those people are interesting, or they're friends of friends who we've said hello to in passing in a journal, or they're people who I've had fun comment discussions with in a different space and then peeked at their journal and saw interesting things that I wanted to subscribe to. I have a few more people who are subscribed to me, but as I put in the commenting culture post, as much as I would like to spend most of my time reading fanficton, unfortunately, I end up being the person with the job and the responsibilities that preclude me from doing so, and therefore I don't always subscribe back. It's not a snub, and it's also very nice to have the separated-out elements of access and of subscription, so that I don't have to make additional calculations about whether the person I want to read is also someone I want to give access-locked entry permission to. And I suspect a lot of the Dreamwidth people also appreciate that distinction between "people I want to read" and "people I want to read the stuff I don't put out for general consumption." I appreciate my reading list, and I hope that the people who are subscribed to me get something useful out of seeing me dump lots of links in their laps on a regular basis and also engage in introspection-type posts such as these in and around December and January, and sometimes July or other spaces, as warranted. (The comments, when they arrive, usually say so.)
I also appreciate Dreamwidth as an entries and comments-based community, even as I have seen some very clever methods of putting in some more likes-based methods of interaction using the tools available to the users. (Polls, for example, with options that represent the various potential reaction emoji or txt phrasing so that someone can click on a button and register their presence without having to create a comment.) As is also mentioned in the commenting document, I don't demand long, thoughtful comments from anyone. If you want to provide such things, that's fantastic, and I'll try to respond and keep the conversation going, but if what you have time and attention for is a ♥ and nothing more, then that is a perfectly fine thing to do, even for the big thinky posts that have thousands of words on them, or many links and you want to comment on or react to just one of them. It makes for a good time when you're having a good chat in your comment space or someone else's, and I think that Dreamwidth really encourages us to have those kinds of conversations, more like we are gathered at friends' houses to have them, rather than the more public-square shouting that other platforms tend to treat their posts as. Different media for different people, and as much as I occasionally want to soapbox about things and have them spread far and wide, I much prefer the more conversational aspect of entry-comment-reply, and the limits of scope that Dreamwidth's design and friction put on things that get said. Sure, someone could copy and paste a thing that I write or comment on to a much more broadcast-related platform and bring either fame or infamy to my doorstep, but that takes a lot more effort than to click a button and quote-dunk or reblog-with-comments, or reblog-with-unfavorable-tags, or even broadcast a big reply to someone with the intention of piling on. There are, frankly, bigger targets to go after on the Internet than someone on Dreamwidth.
So, yes, I like it here. A nice piece of what is possible when you're not chasing monetization and scale, when you're not having the advertisers dictate to you what content you can have, and when the users have the ability to find other people who are interesting by whatever their own standards and ideas are, rather than trying to figure out how to game an algorithm so that you can have your message go to the people it needs to go to (and as many other people as can be put in the broadcast line of sight.) I think the community that I interact with here is fantastic and I hope that you all feel the same about your communities, too. And if you don't feel that way about them, then perhaps it is time to go through your lists and prune or add or both until you have the community built around you that you want to have. Like so many things of the "Old" Web, it may not be the most polished, slickest thing, but if you can work with or forgive the failings (or possibly contribute a pull request or suggestion yourself), the community is definitely worthwhile.
