i think i hit everything?

Hi new DWers/returning DWers!

If you are new and baffled, or been away so long it's like you're new and also baffled, you're probably wondering what the hell you're looking at and what it does. I am a native LJ/DW and will try not to confuse the fuck out of you but it's also been a while, so anyone want to correct me or clarify something I made sound incredibly byzantine, feel free.

Let's talk about your posts:

Same

Your posts are just that--you're posting words to your journal. Just like in Tumblr; it shows up on your journal home page, your reading list, and on the reading lists of those who are following you.

You can tag it with personal tags, and no, shitpost tagging is not a thing though you can if you want? But unlike Tumblr, you can use the tagging system of your DW to actually organize your own journal and find shit, like that post you did on that thing like two years ago and had cats?????

Different

You have options.

At the bottom of your post is a lot of stuff; tags, mood, location, whatever. Then there's "Show this entry to" and here you can choose who sees what you write.

Options:
- Everyone - this is public. Anyone can see this post anywhere.
- Access List - everyone you have granted Access to your posts can read this. We used to call this 'friendslocked' in LJ. The next section will explain this.
- Private - just you.
- Custom - this is where it gets fun. You can create subgroups of those you granted access for posts only they can see. See next section.

Posting Summary

Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Everyone" is public. Anyone can see this.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Private" is private to YOU. Only YOU can see it.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Access List" is restricted to PEOPLE YOU GIVE ACCESS TO. Only people on your ACCESS LIST can see it.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Custom Filter" is restricted to people both in your ACCESS LIST and also in a custom group you can create.

Let's talk about your circle, friends, and follows.

Same

Your Circle is who you follow aka want to read. When you add someone to your Circle, you are saying "I like this person's thoughts and want to read them." So like a Tumblr follow. They appear on your reading list (tumblr: dashboard). We're good? Awesome.

Different (ish)

Your Circle is your reading list; this is how you control who you read.

Access List is how you control who can read your posts.

Granting Access: granting access means you are explicitly letting someone have access to your locked posts. At the bottom of your Post page, "Show this entry to: Access List". Anything you want to limit access to, this is how it's done.

You can also create custom groups out of your Access List, giving certain people access to access-locked posts but not others.

Summary

Add to Circle - Who I want to read
Add to Access List - Who I want to read MY access-locked posts.
Add to Access List in a Custom Group - Subgroup of my Access List who can read my Subgroup-locked posts.

Let's talk about images and art

DW does have native image hosting. kore talks about it here in comments.

Also of Interest

Network - PAID FEATURE - You'll see something called "Network" - that page contains all the public posts of the friends of your friends aka, the people who belong to the Circles of those in your Circle.

...seriously, just call it friends of friends.

Search - PAID FEATURE - okay, I get it's not perfect but IT ACTUALLY WORKS AND YOU CAN FIND SHIT. Search here.

Inbox - no, this is actually useful. For [insert reason], you want to see all the comments you've gotten on any post? You want to see who added you to their Circle? You want to check your IM's Your inbox: you can see it all or use those links to break it down a little.


Conclusion

You'll notice one word I use a lot up there: control. That's the biggest difference between tumblr/twitter and DW/LJ.

DW/LJ give control of content to the creator; you choose exactly who sees what you post. You can edit it, delete it, whatever you want; your content never leaves your control and cannot be edited/changed by someone else. Someone could copypaste the entire post to their own journal, change it, and post it, but your original is still under your control.

DW/LJ give control of comments to the owner of the journal. You can disable comments on your posts, screen them, delete them.

Me

Okay, it's possible I wrote this for myself to make sure I remember everything. Did I miss anything important?

Note: this is being updated and clarified in progress.

More Reading:

This will be for links to comments or posts on DWness. Some of this stuff I didn't even know or forgot so feel free to link me.

kore How to filter by tags for people on your feed. Kore's been all over my comments with some fantastic advice and info, btw.

independence1776 has a fantastic master post of links here. So. Many. Beautiful. Links.

Comments

new to dreamwidth and mourning tumblr's imminent demise

[hopelessheathen57]

Long-time reader, huge fan. :)
Also, tragic tumblr user watching the end draw near and seeking new homeland. :(

I have a question for you as a DW native - How does one find people to follow, or add to one's circle, I guess? I see the "explore interests" function up there, but it seems to give me either no results or just a list of random usernames with no way to sift through them. On tumblr, I was able to find new blogs I knew I'd like by seeking out the creators of content that people I already followed had reblogged, and a lot of writers on AO3 gave their tumblr usernames in their profiles or end notes. Do you know any starting point or advice for doing the same here in order to build up a circle?

Also, throwing in one more question while I'm here - does anyone use DW for gif sharing, or am I out of luck on that front?

Re: new to dreamwidth and mourning tumblr's imminent demise

[seperis]

People--easiest way is friending memes, or find one person you like and go through their Circle to see if you like anyone (that's what I do).

To see someone's circle, just https://username.dreamwidth.org/read - it will show all the public posts of their Circle.

Here's the newest friending meme: https://snickfic.dreamwidth.org/667727.html?page=1

Re: new to dreamwidth and mourning tumblr's imminent demise

[seperis]

OH ASO THIS

https://username.dreamwidth.org/network - network is all the people that are in your Circle's circle (friends of friends)

Re: new to dreamwidth and mourning tumblr's imminent demise

[jamethiel]

... jumping in! Hi!

How to find people to follow! First of all, read the comments on people's post. Find people who seem awesome, click through to their journals to see if their thing is what you're interested in, strike up a conversation and subscribe to them
(You don't have to strike up a conversation, tbh. You'll see their public posts if you just subscribe, but if you want them to grant you access to private posts, you probably need to talk to them. Not everybody grants everybody access: some people just go "yeah, whatever" and let everybody in, others go "... only for people I've known for a while, thanks")

Secondly, search interests and then click through and read people's blogs. Comment on a public post--as above, you can subscribe to them without them subscribing to you.

Third: Communities! Find a community for your special interests and join it. Go and look at cool people who replied!

Fourthly, go to friends-of-friends! If go to your reading page and then change the name in the URL to be someone else's reading page instead of yours, you see all public posts that are on their reading page!
For example:
https://seperis.dreamwidth.org/read
or
https://jamethiel.dreamwidth.org/read

Lastly, there's Latest Things
https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest
Which produces a chronological unfiltered feed of everything public on the site. Read through there, drop in and say hello! Er, obviously caution needs to be taken there given that DW is officially NSFW content friendly. I just came across a weight loss pill spam post :(

Re: new to dreamwidth and mourning tumblr's imminent demise

[sara]

One of the things I think you'll notice, in re. getting to know people, is that it's much more conversational -- threaded comments lend themselves to visiting and longform discussions in a way that doesn't happen as much with reblogging. So that's how I've gotten to know a lot of people, over the years, is that I get into a discussion with them at "someone else's place" and then follow them and see where the relationship goes from there.

Alternately, if you're more lurkey, you wander through people's comment sections and see what they're doing in their own space and decide whether you'd like to read that.

[jamethiel]

Thanks for posting this! I shall link it! (Do you want to put something in about posting/hosting images?)

[seperis]

I dont know enough about it, but there was a post on images. I'll find it.

[kore]

If you want to upload images to Dreamwidth, go here: https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/new

There's a drag-n-drop interface even I find easy to use. You can also choose whether your images are viewable to all, to your access list, or just you. You do NOT have to have a paid account to upload images, BUT the image limit is 500 MB.

One workaround for hosting photos might be for people to upload images to Google Photos and then embed the photos. You can do it with this link https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/ (someone on my flist thought of this, no idea who now). Not sure how that plays out in terms of Google and privacy, but it's better than people asking DW to increase photo storage immediately.

[dhara]

Thanks for posting this!

(It's been five years, nearly six, since I was last around here. I didn't think I'd ever forget how LJ/DW stuff worked, but I guess tumblr broke me!)

[kiratael]

Geez, thanks for this. It’s weird to be going BACK to Dreamwidth, Instagram, and Twitter, but simultaneously feeling like I’ve been released straight from my 14th century monastic cell into 2018. *shakes iPad in confusion*

(I had a WAVE OF NOSTALGIA when I went to upload an icon, for pity’s sake.)

[christycorr]

This was a really great post ♥ Thank you so much for writing it!

[archaeologist_d]

That was helpful. Even though I've been here for years, I still hadn't figured out the difference between access and circle. That makes sense, now.

[azurelunatic]

Speaking as DW Support: "circle" is the entire collection of reading list + access list, as it's used in the tech support documents.

[kore]

This is great!

I would add: the splitting between reading list and access list happened on DW specifically in response to how welded they were on LJ. And the access list is the "granular privacy controls" Pillowfort keeps talking about. XD You can post something publicly, or something with different access levels like you describe, or just for yourself. People can also filter their friends feed to just people, or just communities, or filter out certain tags as well. (I just know a lot of Tumblr people were enthusiastic about Pillowfort, so mentioning some of the stuff Pillowfort and Dreamwidth have in common -- user-created communities, privacy controls, &c &c -- might ease the transition some.)

[jjhunter]

This is reminding me that I should really go dust off my old Dreamwidth calendar master post of repeating public events open to all and update it - I know jenett has resumed hosting weekly Salon posts (now on Fridays), and I still do ‘How Are You? (in Haiku)’ posts on my own whimsical schedule of 1-3 times a month, but I’m not sure how many of the rest are still active.

If anyone knows of other repeating events open to all that aren’t on that calendar post yet, please comment there and let me know!

Also, just for fun, if the idea of an entire comm devoted to celebrating different aspects of Dreamwidth in haikai form delights, check out dreamwidth_haikai. The one about the tag merge feature is one of my favorites. :o)

[thornsilver]

Do you need to have an upgraded account to see "Network" page?

(Also, Hi, I did not know you were on this site!)

[seperis]

Actually, I'm not sure. For me, it's just seperis.dreamwidth.org/network

Nitpicks

[conuly]

Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Custom Filter" is restricted to people both in your ACCESS LIST and also in a custom group you can create.

The way you wrote this, it reads like it's your access list PLUS some more people in that custom group, rather than that the custom group is a subgroup of the access list.

You'll see something called "Network" - that page contains all the public posts of the friends of your friends aka, the people who belong to the Circles of those in your Circle.

This is only available to paid users.

[cathexys]

Great overview. I personally love the access lists and make use of them. Maybe a way to think about it is small direct messaging groups on Slack or Discord. (I know people who use it to save their flist certain topics, but I've used mine mostly to talk about stuff only a few were interested or needed to know)

And we haven't even gotten to the tags exclusion/inclusion, but that's really varsity level DW :)

Also maybe add that you can search entire journals for phrases/words. I know I use it on my own DW all the time when I can't find an older post via tags. (And it's great on FFA!)

Really useful post!!!

[kore]

And we haven't even gotten to the tags exclusion/inclusion, but that's really varsity level DW :)

No no, filtering posts out by tag is actually pretty easy! Really! I just wrote up something on it

https://kore.dreamwidth.org/1321059.html

Most of it is automatic.


You can only search paid journals, and there are people (like me) with privacy concerns who opt out of site-wide searches.

[aeslis]

Hey! I'm a returning user and I don't remember how to filter comms separately from personal journals so that my reading list isn't so spammy. There's a way to do that, right?

[cathexys]

On your reading page at the top you have a dropdown box that allows you to choose your named filters but also already has options for communities only, subscriptions only, etc.

[kore]

This is sorta embarrassing, but since people have been asking about blacklisting tags, I wrote out a step-by-step guide to maybe the closest thing available on Dreamwidth: How to filter by tags for people on your feed It turned out long so I made it a post.


Yes, this is only available for paid accounts (although people were willing to pay Pillowfort five bucks for an account period, and I think you can get three months of DW for six bucks).

[seperis]

Bless you; just added a link to the post to this. Thank you!

[reginagiraffe]

Is there an upgraded way of coding people's DW names in a post besides using < user name=username >? (Let's see if that shows up...)

[reginagiraffe]

Oh, good it did!

Also, links: < a href="website link" > Words you want as the hyperlink < /a > (remove the first and last spaces)

And images... Y'know, I can never remember how to do images.

[xenakis]

I’m so happy you did this. Even I needed the reminder!!

[seperis]

That's part of the reason I wrote it up; I needed to remind myself of everything.

[umadoshi]

Thanks for writing this! (I'm not new, but I'm glad to have links to point newcomers to.)

[lyrithim]

Thank you so much for this! If you happen to read this, can you explain what the friending/access etiquette is in Dreamwidth? As in, do people tend to just randomly grant users they don't talk to access? Seems a bit forward. (I just make sure I haven't committed the DW equivalent of an unwanted dick pic if I accidentally click the wrong button.)

"Add memory"

[crystaldragons]

Is the add memory function a bit like a reblog would be on Tumblr?