Okay, so LOFTER is a Chinese language website, it’s a lot like Tumblr.
AFAIK, the only way to create an account directly with LOFTER requires a Chinese cellphone. It is possible to make a Weibo account outside China, but QQ or WeChat is probably easier. So make an account with QQ or WeChat and log in that way.
Ok cool you’ve got an account now. Let’s check this bish out:
Here’s a screenshot of a portion of my LOFTER dashboard (in Chinese, 首页). You can see my icon and some pretty self explanatory icons to make a text post, photo post, music post, video post, and then the last one is for a long text post (such as for fanfic).
At the top, the thing between the dashboard tab and “APP” is kind of like the Explore function on Tumblr only not as useful IMO. None of the others are very useful if you aren’t in China/read Chinese except the last one, which has two things you need:
Logout is self-explanatory I hope. Settings, the only things you probably need are at the bottom:
From left to right, “blacklist (of people)”, “tag blocking”, “delete account”. Isn’t tag blocking a useful feature by the way? Wouldn’t it be nice if Tumblr had that??? You can subscribe to your favourite character and block your NOTP tag and basically never see it!
Ok. Time to look for a fandom! The easiest way to find the Chinese name of your fandom is to use Wikipedia. Look up your fandom in English, then change the language to Chinese on the side (中文). Another option is to Google “[fandom name] 是什么” which means “what is [fandom name]” and might give you a clue. Or, you can try searching for the English name directly in LOFTER.
Let’s try “Naruto” or 火影忍者 as it’s called in Chinese:
The top result is to search the tag “Naruto”, then there’s the option for stuff that includes “Naruto” but isn’t necessarily tagged, and then some related searches such as “Naruto mobile game” and “Naruto Shippuden”. Below that you can see people who have “Naruto” as their username.
Naruto is in the top 5 most popular Japanese media on LOFTER. Cool.
From left to right, you can organize by most recent, what’s hot now, and top all time. Unfortunately I haven’t yet figured out a way to sort by photos vs videos, text etc. The “+” sign icon is to subscribe to the tag for your dashboard.
Hopefully you find something that you like! Whoa, check this out:
Looking good Neji. (You can also see the tag 日向宁次 which is Neji’s Chinese name.)
The “heart” is an obvious way to show an artist your love and basically works the same as a heart on Tumblr. Directly to the left of the heart is “recommend”, clicking this will put it into the dashboard of people who follow you, but it will not go on your own LOFTER blog, to do that you have to do reblog. To the left of “recommend” is “share” and to the left of that is “comments”, all artists love comments! A single word adjective in English like “beautiful” or “cute” is easy to understand, or you can use this post I made to aid you in writing compliments for Chinese artists.
If you hover over the upper right corner of the post, there’s a little folded corner (it’s visible in my screencap), click that to go to the permalink version of the post.
Ok now in the top you should see these icons. From left to right, it’s “like”, “recommend”, “reblog”, “share” (via email etc), “follow this user”, “return to dashboard”.
Now we are getting to another exciting feature of LOFTER. Click “reblog” to see.
You see that circle in the upper left? LOFTER enables artists to opt-in to using creative commons licenses or not, as they choose. This screencap’s artist is not using any creative commons license, so you do not have any advance permission to use this work. You can still ask to reblog on Tumblr, just like you would someone on Pixiv or elsewhere!
This artist is using a Creative Commons License! You can click the symbols and read an English version of it, but IIRC this one says you can share, as long as you give credit, don’t use it commercially, and share your work under the same terms.
Here’s another CCL! This one is freer than the above one–all you have to do is give credit and indicate if you changed anything.
The image I screencapped is released under this license, so here I’m going to say that the artist is Hanyijie and the only change I made was showing it in the context of a screencap.
So that’s the basics! Feel free to send me a message or ask if you have any questions!
For my next guide, I want to make a list of Naruto character names in Chinese and how Chinese pairing names work. :)
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