the more friends ask me about dreamwidth, the more i realize i know a lot about this site that isn’t super obvious at first glance. so here is a primer for those of you thinking about making a dreamwidth account. this post ranges from your really basic starter tips to the completely esoteric things that come from using it for a decade.
2023 note: This post was written in 2018. While most of this post is still true, various features may have been changed or updated in the years since.
a what now? dreamwho?
Dreamwidth is a code fork of LiveJournal. A code fork means that they took LJ’s code (which used to be open source) and went their own direction with it. They still use the basic ideas behind LJ’s codebase, but have changed and improved upon it in various ways.
The core difference between DW and other websites is privacy isn’t an afterthought, but the central feature. You can lock posts, filter them to a select group, or make them visible to only you. I recommend reading through this section of DW’s FAQ for more on this.
When you make an account, you can subscribe (ie follow) and grant access to other users. Both of these are one-way – if A subscribes to B, that doesn’t automatically grant B access to all of A’s locked posts. Here’s more on this.
DW in general can be kind of confusing for people who have only used tumblr, but their FAQs are pretty good on the whole, and they’re searchable. If a website feature is confusing, start there.
okay, i have a journal. now what?
Customize it! DW doesn’t have all the latest and greatest features, but you can still make it your own. Here are some useful tips.
You can change your layout from Organize > Select Style. Mobile support is hit or miss, unfortunately, but there are some nice default layouts that work with it. You can also use this style for Practicality which makes DW fully mobile-friendly. If you’d rather design it yourself, Tabula Rasa is completely stripped down.
You can get premade DW layouts at the dreamwidthlayouts community. If you have trouble with your code, ask over at style_system.
Edit your profile! This is where you put your usernames for other social media sites, tell people a bit about yourself, and mention your interests. Your interests will be part of the interest search; it’s one way to find people.
Upload icons! Free accounts get 15 icons; paid accounts get 100 icons, premium accounts get 250 icons. You can use one icon in each entry and commment you make. It’s good form to put the maker of the icon in the comment section if you didn’t make it. If you got it from someone on tumblr, you can even link their blog using the code <user name=username site=tumblr>. (This works all across DW!)
While you can’t make pages, you can set a post to stick at the top of your journal, much like Twitter’s pinned tweets. Here’s how to do it.
You can also change how Dreamwidth itself looks, if you don’t like the red. Go to Account Settings > Display. Most other site display preferences are on that page.
While you’re here, look through the Account Settings > Privacy page. By default, your public entries will be included in site searches. You can turn it off at the bottom of the page if you want. You can also set it so your entries are automatically access-locked or private as well.
This got very long so the rest is behind the cut. (Now you really know I’m legit.)
so how do i post, exactly…?
On the default layout, you’ll find the post button at the top right corner. By default, you will end up on the old post editor, which is… let’s go with dated.
But don’t worry! There’s a new one! It’s still in beta, and you can turn it on right here. Isn’t that better?
…Not entirely. The reason the new entry page is in beta is because there’s no rich text. You know HTML, right? …Right?
But don’t worry! Dreamwidth supports Markdown. All you have to do is write !markdown at the top of your post and you’re off to the races.
you, probably: wtf is markdown and why would I want to use it??? forget this the old busted editor is better than nothing–
NO WAIT COME BACK. Let me teach you how to use Markdown. It’s very very simple. In fact, I wrote this post in Markdown! I am the one person on tumblr that uses it, apparently, because they keep stripping it out of every fucking version of the mobile app. No I’m not mad why do you ask
Ahem. Here is a 10-minute Markdown tutorial. Do it, and you will never have to write HTML again. If you don’t know HTML, now you don’t have to learn! Win-win.
(you should still learn HTML though, it’s pretty neat)
The new editor has a lot of optional features, which you can enable by clicking on the settings panel. It is worth noting that you can change the display date for your post, which will let you post months in advance (or backdate) as you wish. Good for archiving.
However, do note that if you backdate posts, you need to click “Don’t show on Reading Page”, because otherwise they’re going to flood the reading page no matter what the date is.
You can link accounts on other social media sites by using <user name=username site=whatever>. Do note that if you’re using markdown, @username will automatically link the DW account for that username. If you want to actually type out the text “@username,” you’ll need to escape it with a backslash (so it would be \@username.)
As noted above, posts can be marked as public, access-only, or private. You can also filter them to specific people on your access list. Here’s where you set that up. Please note that if you set up a filter to talk shit about someone who’s on your access list, you should probably make sure they’re not in the list of people who can see it. (Also, kind of a shitty thing to do in general, but.)
Other Dreamwidth-specific code is <raw-code></raw-code> (turns off auto-formatting) and <cut></cut> (makes a readmore). Here’s more on this. (If you’re having problems with line breaks, it’s probably autoformatting.)
okay i think i get how posting works, but what about tags? you didn’t mention those.
So, tags are different on a few levels. The key difference is that tags are for you, not for other people. They can be for other people, but they don’t have to be. At the most basic level, tags exist to help you organize your posts.
And, for that purpose, they’re GREAT. Seriously, tags alone are the reason I keep a blog on DW. It is SO EASY to find my old posts.
That’s not to say that tags are completely invisible – the Latest Things page has a big tag cloud with the most popular tags on public posts. Not sure how often it updates, but currently there’s a lot about tumblr, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, some specific tips on tags:
You can see all of your tags by going to yourusername.dreamwidth.org/tag. A tag is only visible to others if they can see the post it’s on. So if you have two public posts tagged “cats” and “public”, the whole world can see those two things on your tags page. If you have a bunch of access-only posts with “cats: kitty” and “dogs,” then your access list will see all of those tags. And if you have even more tags on private posts, you’ll see those.
Tag hierarchy is a thing and it’s GREAT. This is best explained through example.
Okay, so. These are all the tags ever used on this sample journal. Looks pretty straightforward, right? Except… the math doesn’t add up. How are there two posts tagged dogs when there are three posts in the subtags? And why are some of them not links?
Here’s a list of tags for one of the test posts I made: another test tag, dogs: good dogs: very good dogs, dreams: 2018: lucid, dreams: 2018: nightmares.
Dreamwidth uses colons to simulate hierarchy. There is no “dreams” tag on this blog. There’s no “cats” tag. There’s a “cats: best kitty” tag, which is why it shows up indented. However, there is a “dogs” tag, as well as a “dogs: good dogs” tag – and both of them can be used independently. Putting a tag under “dogs: good dogs” doesn’t automatically put it in the “dogs” tag.
That’s why it’s simulated hierarchy. It can take a little bit of getting used to, but it works really well once you do. And if you decide you don’t really like how a tag is working out, no problem! Just go to the Manage Tags page and rename it, merge it with another tag, or delete it.
what about likes?
Yeah, those aren’t here. It’s been talked about for a long time, but they haven’t done it for a few reasons. (Also, hey, if you have a suggestion, dw_suggestions is the place for it. Any community with that swirly icon is an official site community, by-the-by.)
However, you can bookmark entries. On DW they’re called Memories, and they’re really just a way for you to easily find other people’s entries. The nice thing about DW is that you can choose whether you want each individual memory to be public or not. Maybe your mom reads your journal and you don’t want her to see all that fic you’ve bookmarked, but that icon post from your latest fandom is fine. (Let’s just hope she doesn’t look too closely.)
Also, because I don’t feel like making another header, reblogs aren’t a thing here. Sorry. Try commenting? DW’s kind of about meeting new people. Most people don’t bite, really.
okay this is great and all but where do i upload images? do they even have that??
They do! It’s under Create > Upload Images. Each user has 500 MB of space to start; they’re currently looking into whether they can increase that. (Despite appearances to the contrary, image hosting is not cheap.)
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Images hosted on DW cannot be remotely loaded from other places on the internet (i.e. tumblr). See above about image hosting not being cheap. So if you take the image URL Dreamwidth spits out and try to crossload it anywhere other than DW, it’s not going to work.
anything else?
Probably, but I’m tired and can’t think of anything. The obvious question is “how do I find other people” but that could be a post unto itself, so instead I will direct you to @bisexualbaker‘s post on how to find cool people on DW, which kinda sums it up.
Some specific communities to check out:
dw_community_promo: I mean, you can probably figure it out.
fandomcalendar: The main place to find fanfiction exchanges, big bangs, and the like. I swear there’s one every three days.
getyourwordsout: A super supportive writing community that’s all about being more productive. You make a pledge and sign up for a full year; signups for 2019 will be opening soon, I think. Also here as @gywo but the community itself is on DW. (Come join, it’s great!)
the_great_tumblr_purge, addme, animeaddme, addme_fandom, add_a_writer, etc: Find people from Tumblr! There are a couple similar communities (and if you mention them in reblogs/replies I’ll add them here). There’s also this thing called friending memes, but even mentioning them makes me feel really old.
You can also just read through the comments on the latest dw_news post, there are usually some suggestions there.
Think that’s it. Feel free to ask me any questions; I’ve been using DW on-and-off since the day it opened and know my way around.
ETA: Wrote a second primer on commenting options, since they’re pretty different over on DW (and I completely forgot to mention them here).
Here’s a secret about strikethrough and boldthrough.
I lived through it. You know what else I did? I stubbornly ground my heels in and stayed on Livejournal for several years.
When we’re talking about it, I think everyone thinks the big scary words up there meant that like... swat teams showed up and made us delete our accounts at gunpoint or something and that’s not the case.
First of all: Let me confess: Strikethrough and boldthrough? Didn’t even effect me, or any of my communities. I was mostly into RP back then, where we had these neat little single-universe ‘’’jamjar’’’ groups of crossover hell (it was a blast! Tumblr RP can never compare.) At the time of Strikethrough and boldthrough I was one of the people who didn’t care because it didn’t concern me-- though I was at the time a prolific writer of darkfic and those themes through my RP as well
But I did notice when entire tags and a few communities went under, and or stopped allowing certain kinds of content all together out of fear of being next. Sex positivity was still a burgeoning thing even then, and you were likely to get laughed out of town if you liked or focused on sex and or romantic relationships in your writing or even just-- shipping in general. There was a grind to a hault of everything but the most canon, vanilia romance crap in almost all fandom circles from day one (when shipping had already been a ‘persecuted’ part of fandom)....
People who had been cool with you and your content before changed over night. Suddenly their squicks and or intellectual superiority complexes were ‘proven correct’ by staff’s actions and reports of people getting harassed, bullied, and told that they should never write another fic if all they could write about was gross gays-- SKYrocketed
After a while, content became SO sterilized that interest dropped off. I wondered where everyone had went, and ended up in fandom limbo for a few years before making my first tumblr in like 2009 or 2010 or so.
Tl;dr: the death of live journal that all us old codgers are talking about did not happen overnight. It was a slow, painful, awful death of malady where your loved one forgot who you were and called you slurs before they finally died and the pain was over. Btw, you can still go make an LJ account today. Goahead if you want!
When we talk about tumblr dying it’s not about the site blipping out of existence, it’s about the fact that it’s going the exact same route as LJ. If you don’t believe me, you should look into the tags that have been completely purged (the yaoi tag for one, which I know or a FACT was mostly used by gay nsfw content artists).
If the Strikethrough 2018 takes down my Tumblr, find me at my DeviantArt or my Archive of Our Own pages. I post most of my art on DA and my fic on AO3 (which I don’t typically show you guys but if any of you want to see you might like it). I know it’s not the same, but it’s better than nothing, I guess.
