Hi I'm here now!

[gallusrostromegalus]

guess who got off their ass and made an account? Pls stand by as I figure out how this site actually works.

Comments

[harpers_child]

I've been here since April of 2009 if you have questions.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Thank you so much! I'm gonna be mad busy with the tumblr meltdown and the Holidays LOL, but I'll come bug you when I need advice, thank you!

[rabid_bookwyrm]

If you ever used LiveJournal, DW is very similar. It's actually a fork of the LJ code but they made massive improvements in accessability and paying down the code debt over the last decade or so. Welcome!

[gallusrostromegalus]

Oh gosh, no. I didn't get onto the internet proper until 2009, and that was Deviantart LOL. but thank you very much!

[rabid_bookwyrm]

No worries, it occurred to me after I replied that it wasn't a terribly helpful comment - either you would recognize the style very quickly or you... wouldn't.

Springboarding off of Fred_Mouse's comment below - in comparison to tumblr, DW has very different privacy settings. For any post, you can make it visible to everyone; only to people you have decided to allow access (everyone, or just a subset); or just to yourself. By default, journals are set to default-public, but you can change the default in your preferences and then adjust per-post if you want to lock something down or open it up. You can adjust the publicity of posts after you have made them at any time, if a post is getting more attention than you want.

DW makes a really handy distinction between "I want to see this person's stuff" and "I want this person to be able to see my stuff." Perhaps you have a dear friend and you would like them to be able to read your private thoughts. But perhaps this dear friend also posts 30 times a day about terrible fandom drama in a fandom you loathe. You can "grant access" to that person so that they can see your private posts, without additionally "subscribing" to their posts.

Or, vice versa, if you have an internet celebrity that you want to watch but you don't want to give access, you can just subscribe without granting access.

On any personal journal page, look for the little Book+Key (grant access) and Book+Green-plus (subscribe) icons. When you click either, you'll be taken to a page where you can adjust the access/subscription options for that person.

If you want to make subsets of access, that's also an option but I haven't done it here and don't know how off the top of my head. Try "filter" or "access filter" in the FAQ.

[brooksmoses]

Welcome! Also happy to help with questions, though probably a lot of the really important questions are not the technical ones but the social ones such as "how do I make my reading page be full of interesting things written by interesting people?"

I mostly found interesting people by commenting on other people's posts (which, unlike Tumblr, stays on their post rather than being a separate post on your page) and then following other people who made interesting comments on people's posts. That means there can be an advantage to going back and looking at older posts -- usually from the last day or so; things seem to taper off a bit after that unless a really interesting conversation starts -- to see if there are new comments. Also, if an interesting conversation starts or a post looks likely to spawn interesting conversation, you can click the "track this button" (which looks like a little bell in my default style; I'm not sure how universal that is) to get notifications when people make new comments on it.

Unlike Tumblr or Twitter, there isn't really any way to see all the comments that a specific person is making -- but you can see their "reading" page using a link like http://brooksmoses.dreamwidth.com/read (or click the "reading" link on their main journal page) to get an idea of what the people they're subscribed to post. That won't include private posts that you couldn't otherwise see, and if they use a lot of circles to have specific narrower reading pages it won't show you what those are, but it is still pretty useful in finding other interesting people.

Finally, on things I have actual experience with: I'd note that my friend jenett does weekly "salon" posts which are basically just forums for people to have conversations in the comments. The most recent one is at https://jenett.dreamwidth.org/1794110.html, to give you an idea -- and you could either join the conversation there if it looks interesting, or you and other people reading this could start your own if the idea looks useful but there's less community overlap.

On things I don't have experience with, Dreamwidth also has communities, which are essentially communal journals where multiple people can post -- those were a big thing in fandom in the LiveJournal days and I believe still are here now, but it's been a long time since I've had time to seek those out. There are also the "interests" lists in people's profiles, which become links to lists of other people with that interest listed.

[fred_mouse]

Hi!

I'm following you here, because I follow your Tumblr, please don't let that put you off. If you choose to follow my posts, I'll give you access to locked posts, because that is my standard protocol; it isn't a request for reciprocal access.

[conuly]

:D

If you want more people to follow, you might try posting at addme and/or addme_fandom or, apparently, the_great_tumblr_purge. If you need it, you can also find a brief intro to DW here: https://staranise.dreamwidth.org/620081.html

[dreadlordmrson]

Welcome!

[moon_custafer]

*Waves*. I’ve been here a while. Been trying as of yesterday to make a WordPress backup of my Tumblr, which tends to be more visual, but I may just give up and create a secondary account here for my stories and give up on the pictures.

[idraax]

Hello friend! - Writingfish

[shrewreader]

Hi there, welcome, and you'll be happy to hear that cuts ('Read More's) work much more easily here!