Welcome To All The New People!
Dec. 7th, 2018 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptWelcome to the new people! For those of you who were around when Livejournal was the dominant platform, Dreamwidth is forked from them, so it should seem familiar to you. For those coming from Tumblr, though, there's some adjustment to make. We hope you'll stay and enjoy the place. Also, better heads than I have compiled more than a few introductions and helpful guides to the platform, which, as the magpie I am, I'm grabbing the things I think are most useful and reposting them (It's a little more difficult than just touching a repost button here, which is good and bad.). This is also a fairly convenient excuse for me to show you what many of my posts look like, in case you were wondering about the possible content you'll be subjected to here. (You may have seen a lot of this from elsewhere, mostly umadoshi and conuly if you're subscribed to them.)
If you're looking for the general welcome from the official DW people, here's the official welcome news post. And if you're looking for the philosophical underpinnings of why Dreamwidth is, there's a different news post with a short history of the site, welcoming a different group to the site.ilyena_sylph has put together relevant comment threads from the news post, so if you would like a highlight reel on particular questions, there's a good space for it.
starnise has a great post on getting oriented to Dreamwidth if you're coming from a space not like LiveJournal at all. seperis has a more direct Tumblr-to-Dreamwidth guide.
niqaeli provides a guide on installing and using a script that will capture all of your Tumblr content, including he things that you've given likes to, so that, even if Tumblr completely implodes, you still have the content that you've created. And maybe can upload to somewhere else in a batch, once someone has written a way of parsing it and creating entries for it.
If you're going to be using it mostly on mobile,branchandroot developed a style to be very mobile-responsive. If there are things you'd like from the desktop experience, has some time and some coding that could be put to service in browser tools.
There's also a giant guide to getting started on Dreamwidth, thanks tobisharp, if you really want to dig in deep.
marshv has a guide to using the image uploading and posting, which is still a bit rudimentary (since there hasn't been a giant need for it in a mostly textual thing). If you need more, there's a guide to using Mediafire from mific, which I'm sure could be replicated with other sources. And Instagram can cross-post to DW, with a significant amount of glue and tape holding it together, says niqaeli.
kore offers advice on how to filter out tags so you don't see things you're not interested in, which, regrettably, does require the person in question to use those tags consistently. And the memory function can be used as a way of categorizing and tagging other peoples' entries so they're close-by to hand.
Once that's under your belt, you can take a look atsylvaine's post on some of the more advanced things you can do to your entries and your space, which exposes a lot of the very cool functionality that's baked into the site (or the HTML standard).
ironymaiden has a tag on things you can do to get the best out of Dreamwidth.
Some of the support staff and the very old hands are answering questions without their official hats on if there's something that's sticking on the site or otherwise not going according to plan.
If you're an RPer, there's resources available for you as well, thanks torpanonos. If video games are your thing, masu_trout offers a community list for popular video games and their fandoms. erinptah has a more general fandom community list. ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
historium is for historical fandoms and Real Person Fiction (RPF). fffriday is a review community for all your F/F needs. And there's more. Waaaaaaay more.
If you're not sure what to do with this seemingly vast and infinite space,melannen offers suggestions on how to build your community of people in your journal space, and siderea offers a recipe for posting, which involves doing a lot of pointing at other people as your primary content.
conuly has a way of adding in Tumblrs as feeds on DW in addition to a large amount of communities and places where you can jump in and start participating immediately. As well as the existence of two currently-running finding friends activities - one for finding not-fannish friends by angelofthenorth and one that's all about fannishness by snickfic
If there are more questions, there's a community called Getting Started. And a community for people coming from Tumblr.
And once you're oriented and ready to go, maybe go seemelannen talk about where the next big fannish thing might be, and how sites like DW and AO3 may never end up being the next big fannish space, but they serve their own purposes and help hold the community's history in a way that's more permanent than otherwise might be. trascendenza solicits suggestions on what the mechanical parts of an ideal fannish social site are and greywash offers a lot of cogent thoughts about what a robust fannish site (or network) that can handle images and videos would hae to be able to do. (There's a lot of this going around, so this is a representative sample, rather than an end-all be-all.)
If this is a place that you'd like to throw money at to keep existing, (kore suggests paid accounts here and donations to the Internet Archive) but you can only move money about with PayPal, paidaccountfairy may be a placae to help you convert your PayPal into actual Dreamwidth points (there are Reasons why PayPal doesn't do DW, which are conveniently in the comments of kore's post).
(One last thing, as a thanks for getting through all of this: the creator of Pinboard once asked fandom what they would need from his service to make it work for them. Fandom replied by doing what it does best - creating, organizing, and making sure the tagging was right. Watching the process unfold in front of his eyes changed his opinion completely about what fandom does, doesn't, and is capable of. So thanks for being fans. Also, because everything that's old is new again, there's a second document afoot about what fandom would like to see in their ideal site, and the Pinboard person has actively said he'll see what he can do about bringing it into reality.)
umadoshi and conuly if you're subscribed to them.)If you're looking for the general welcome from the official DW people, here's the official welcome news post. And if you're looking for the philosophical underpinnings of why Dreamwidth is, there's a different news post with a short history of the site, welcoming a different group to the site.
ilyena_sylph has put together relevant comment threads from the news post, so if you would like a highlight reel on particular questions, there's a good space for it.starnise has a great post on getting oriented to Dreamwidth if you're coming from a space not like LiveJournal at all. seperis has a more direct Tumblr-to-Dreamwidth guide.niqaeli provides a guide on installing and using a script that will capture all of your Tumblr content, including he things that you've given likes to, so that, even if Tumblr completely implodes, you still have the content that you've created. And maybe can upload to somewhere else in a batch, once someone has written a way of parsing it and creating entries for it.If you're going to be using it mostly on mobile,
branchandroot developed a style to be very mobile-responsive. If there are things you'd like from the desktop experience, There's also a giant guide to getting started on Dreamwidth, thanks to
bisharp, if you really want to dig in deep.marshv has a guide to using the image uploading and posting, which is still a bit rudimentary (since there hasn't been a giant need for it in a mostly textual thing). If you need more, there's a guide to using Mediafire from mific, which I'm sure could be replicated with other sources. And Instagram can cross-post to DW, with a significant amount of glue and tape holding it together, says niqaeli. kore offers advice on how to filter out tags so you don't see things you're not interested in, which, regrettably, does require the person in question to use those tags consistently. And the memory function can be used as a way of categorizing and tagging other peoples' entries so they're close-by to hand. Once that's under your belt, you can take a look at
sylvaine's post on some of the more advanced things you can do to your entries and your space, which exposes a lot of the very cool functionality that's baked into the site (or the HTML standard). ironymaiden has a tag on things you can do to get the best out of Dreamwidth. Some of the support staff and the very old hands are answering questions without their official hats on if there's something that's sticking on the site or otherwise not going according to plan.
If you're an RPer, there's resources available for you as well, thanks to
rpanonos. If video games are your thing, masu_trout offers a community list for popular video games and their fandoms. erinptah has a more general fandom community list. historium is for historical fandoms and Real Person Fiction (RPF). fffriday is a review community for all your F/F needs. And there's more. Waaaaaaay more. If you're not sure what to do with this seemingly vast and infinite space,
melannen offers suggestions on how to build your community of people in your journal space, and siderea offers a recipe for posting, which involves doing a lot of pointing at other people as your primary content.conuly has a way of adding in Tumblrs as feeds on DW in addition to a large amount of communities and places where you can jump in and start participating immediately. As well as the existence of two currently-running finding friends activities - one for finding not-fannish friends by angelofthenorth and one that's all about fannishness by snickficIf there are more questions, there's a community called Getting Started. And a community for people coming from Tumblr.
And once you're oriented and ready to go, maybe go see
melannen talk about where the next big fannish thing might be, and how sites like DW and AO3 may never end up being the next big fannish space, but they serve their own purposes and help hold the community's history in a way that's more permanent than otherwise might be. trascendenza solicits suggestions on what the mechanical parts of an ideal fannish social site are and greywash offers a lot of cogent thoughts about what a robust fannish site (or network) that can handle images and videos would hae to be able to do. (There's a lot of this going around, so this is a representative sample, rather than an end-all be-all.) If this is a place that you'd like to throw money at to keep existing, (
kore suggests paid accounts here and donations to the Internet Archive) but you can only move money about with PayPal, paidaccountfairy may be a placae to help you convert your PayPal into actual Dreamwidth points (there are Reasons why PayPal doesn't do DW, which are conveniently in the comments of kore's post).(One last thing, as a thanks for getting through all of this: the creator of Pinboard once asked fandom what they would need from his service to make it work for them. Fandom replied by doing what it does best - creating, organizing, and making sure the tagging was right. Watching the process unfold in front of his eyes changed his opinion completely about what fandom does, doesn't, and is capable of. So thanks for being fans. Also, because everything that's old is new again, there's a second document afoot about what fandom would like to see in their ideal site, and the Pinboard person has actively said he'll see what he can do about bringing it into reality.)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-10 02:38 am (UTC)Yeah, there's always been a lot of UX complaints about DW. Maybe if we get enough to hire someone, that would make be a great help.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 12:32 am (UTC)Yeah, working in security has been an eyeopening experience. Partially because I've realized how many people who should be aware of these things aren't.
Thankfully UX stuff is one of the few things that doesn't require someone to understand how our wonky codebase works first.!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 01:52 am (UTC)