Alternative: Dreamwidth
Http://www.dreamwidth.org
So, we're all exploring a bunch of things, and Pluspora is pretty neat, and MeWe... I don't love it, NGL, but I'm trying to learn it because a lot of Blisstopia does and it seems like it could be a really interesting chatting service. I need something else in my social, something that G+ danced close to becoming a lot of times over the last few years. I think I'm finding it, however, in Dreamwidth. I've been mentioning it on FB and Tumblr, gathering connections to folks I have who have already been using it, and one Tumblrfrond asked me to compare to to the Ploos for them. What follows is my response, with some additional headers in case you TL;DR out but want to grab highlights of info relevant to you:
~~~~~
post length and stream speed
It’s great for longform posting as well as short; that is, there’s not content restriction. It’s not as speedy-moving a medium, at least for me, because I’m not following several thousand people on DW and there is therefore no hopeless sense of never keeping up with it all.
Notifications persistence is controllable
It has solid notifications of when there are comments on your posts or your comments on other people’s posts, which you can mark as read or even delete altogether if you wish.
images and media
It allows for inserting images and embedding media, although not for hosting, so if you’re going to be dropping images in (like I do for my Mornthing posts) then the image needs to be hosted elsenet (Tumblr will continue to be useful for this).
THREADED COMMENTING, Y'ALL
The commenting system is So. Much. Better though. Hierarchical threading! If I post, and you comment to it, and then I comment to your comment, and then Jane Bleepo comments to my post? Her comment is its own toplevel post, separate from your and my comments back and forth. You don’t have to tag someone who commented five people before you to make it clear to whom you are responding - you go directly to their comment, click reply, and your comment gets put right under their comment (and indented a little the clarity of response threading is a beautiful thing). This kind of commenting is going to be fabulous for Drunkblogging, because the main commenting on the movie can carry on with the addition of little side conversations.
Communities
I have yet to dig into the Communities there, which are going to be another big important thing for me, but if it is like they were on Livejournal (which is what DW was modeled after) then I expect to have a positive response.
Following/friending, mutuals, and privacy
- You can subscribe to a user, which is basically following them. Any user can subscribe to you. Subscribing means that the subscriber sees anything publicly posted on their reading page (which, by the way, is STRICTLY CHRONOLOGICAL).
- You do not have to post all your stuff public. You don’t have to post anything public if you don’t want to; you can post protected. You also have the option of access filters...
- ....which are so fantastic. You create a filter, name it what you want, and then you can hand-select any of the users you’ve granted access to, to be included in that filter. There are so many great uses for this; back in the LJ days, this was awesome for planning birthday parties for people without them knowing. It’s also really handy if, say, I’m going through some medical stuff that I really need to talk/post about but don’t want to potentially trigger a couple friends I have who have medically related PTSD, so I could create a NoMed filter that includes everybody but those folks. AFAIK there is no limit to how many filters you can make, although I need to dive deeper to be certain; I’m doing everything on a free account right now and haven’t poked around into the relative allowances of free vs. paid accounts.
- subscription filters. You can set up filters for the folks whose stuff you want to read! So if you have a bunch of folks who post a lot of different things, but today you just want to see the posts of people who use their DW for roleplaying, you can create a filter that includes just the RPers and read just that stuff.
Tagging posts
- Tags are personal. You can create up to 1000 tags (on free at least, IDK if you can do more on paid) to add to your post. They are clickable, so I can tag all my mornthing posts as mornthing; my drunkblog posts as drunkblog; my nightmare fuel posts as nightmare fuel and horror; my drunkblogs of horror movies also as horror; my fiction writing as writing, original, fantasy, horror, erotica, Bliss Makes Things; my inktober as art, Bliss Makes Things, original, drawing, ink; my calligraphy as Bliss makes things, artsy wordsing, ink, calligraphy; my fiber art stuff as crochet/knitting/weaving/spinning (as appropriate), yarn, fiber arts, knotty monkey, Bliss Makes Things... etc. By clicking the “horror” tag on any one of my posts, it will bring you (still in chronological order!!!!) all of my posts tagged “horror” including horror movie drunkblogs, nightmare fuel, and original writing. If you’re looking at one of my calligraphy posts you can click Bliss Makes things to see all my calligraphy, fiction, fiber arts, and art - you could then click, say, the writing tag to just bring it back down to the writing posts. My tags are MY tags, so clicking writing on one of my posts will only bring you to my writing stuff. However....
Interests
- Interests are self-selected and public. You create a list of interests; they are attached to your profile. Interests are a searchable field. So if you were looking at my fiction or Nightmare Fuel posts and having a good time and decided you wanted to find some more writers on DW, you put “writing” in the search box, set it to search Interests, click the Go button, and it drops you at the top of a list of all users across the entirety of DW who have writing as an interest. The list is ordered by how recently the users updated, so the most recently active folks are at the top. BUT!
- What if you’re interested in writing communities, not merely individual writers? Same page, right above the list, instead of All Users you would click Communities only, and it will give you a list of Communities with writing listed as an interest. You can click Users Only. You can also click Circle Only, which will give you a list of users you’re subscribed to who have that as an interest!!!!
Basically, the more I sit here and talk about it at you, the more excited I am to be using it. I’m still adding to and tweaking my profile (I only have “writing” as an interest so far, LOL), so getting that up to speed will be a process, but I can feel myself rapidly falling toward DreamWidth as my Internet Prime if enough folks will also come play there with me. It feels good. It feels right.
Usericons!
You're not limited to just one. You can have a default but also other ones, so, like, I can have one that i use whenever i'm doing a NF post, which is a quick and easy visual right beside my name that will let folks know something about what I'm posting. I can have a pissed-off icon. I can have a writing icon. Yesgood.
lookfeel
While DW has it’s on steady color scheme, there are optional layouts that you can choose. Do you like a single central column of stream? You can do that. Do you want a sidebar with links to you interests or your post archive? Heck, why just have one sidebar, you can pick two! There are also a slew of themes for choices of font, page background, post background, headers, et centers - assuming you don’t simply want to go ahead and make your theme fully your own by crafting the html yourself. It can be as simple or as in-depth tuning as you want. Me, I found the one theme with “bliss” in the name and am really enjoying its cool blue-grey tones on my reading page.
I’m http://blissmorgan.dreamwidth.org - do come check me out.<3
http://blissmorgan.dreamwidth.org
Http://www.dreamwidth.org
So, we're all exploring a bunch of things, and Pluspora is pretty neat, and MeWe... I don't love it, NGL, but I'm trying to learn it because a lot of Blisstopia does and it seems like it could be a really interesting chatting service. I need something else in my social, something that G+ danced close to becoming a lot of times over the last few years. I think I'm finding it, however, in Dreamwidth. I've been mentioning it on FB and Tumblr, gathering connections to folks I have who have already been using it, and one Tumblrfrond asked me to compare to to the Ploos for them. What follows is my response, with some additional headers in case you TL;DR out but want to grab highlights of info relevant to you:
~~~~~
post length and stream speed
It’s great for longform posting as well as short; that is, there’s not content restriction. It’s not as speedy-moving a medium, at least for me, because I’m not following several thousand people on DW and there is therefore no hopeless sense of never keeping up with it all.
Notifications persistence is controllable
It has solid notifications of when there are comments on your posts or your comments on other people’s posts, which you can mark as read or even delete altogether if you wish.
images and media
It allows for inserting images and embedding media, although not for hosting, so if you’re going to be dropping images in (like I do for my Mornthing posts) then the image needs to be hosted elsenet (Tumblr will continue to be useful for this).
THREADED COMMENTING, Y'ALL
The commenting system is So. Much. Better though. Hierarchical threading! If I post, and you comment to it, and then I comment to your comment, and then Jane Bleepo comments to my post? Her comment is its own toplevel post, separate from your and my comments back and forth. You don’t have to tag someone who commented five people before you to make it clear to whom you are responding - you go directly to their comment, click reply, and your comment gets put right under their comment (and indented a little the clarity of response threading is a beautiful thing). This kind of commenting is going to be fabulous for Drunkblogging, because the main commenting on the movie can carry on with the addition of little side conversations.
Communities
I have yet to dig into the Communities there, which are going to be another big important thing for me, but if it is like they were on Livejournal (which is what DW was modeled after) then I expect to have a positive response.
Following/friending, mutuals, and privacy
- You can subscribe to a user, which is basically following them. Any user can subscribe to you. Subscribing means that the subscriber sees anything publicly posted on their reading page (which, by the way, is STRICTLY CHRONOLOGICAL).
- You do not have to post all your stuff public. You don’t have to post anything public if you don’t want to; you can post protected. You also have the option of access filters...
- ....which are so fantastic. You create a filter, name it what you want, and then you can hand-select any of the users you’ve granted access to, to be included in that filter. There are so many great uses for this; back in the LJ days, this was awesome for planning birthday parties for people without them knowing. It’s also really handy if, say, I’m going through some medical stuff that I really need to talk/post about but don’t want to potentially trigger a couple friends I have who have medically related PTSD, so I could create a NoMed filter that includes everybody but those folks. AFAIK there is no limit to how many filters you can make, although I need to dive deeper to be certain; I’m doing everything on a free account right now and haven’t poked around into the relative allowances of free vs. paid accounts.
- subscription filters. You can set up filters for the folks whose stuff you want to read! So if you have a bunch of folks who post a lot of different things, but today you just want to see the posts of people who use their DW for roleplaying, you can create a filter that includes just the RPers and read just that stuff.
Tagging posts
- Tags are personal. You can create up to 1000 tags (on free at least, IDK if you can do more on paid) to add to your post. They are clickable, so I can tag all my mornthing posts as mornthing; my drunkblog posts as drunkblog; my nightmare fuel posts as nightmare fuel and horror; my drunkblogs of horror movies also as horror; my fiction writing as writing, original, fantasy, horror, erotica, Bliss Makes Things; my inktober as art, Bliss Makes Things, original, drawing, ink; my calligraphy as Bliss makes things, artsy wordsing, ink, calligraphy; my fiber art stuff as crochet/knitting/weaving/spinning (as appropriate), yarn, fiber arts, knotty monkey, Bliss Makes Things... etc. By clicking the “horror” tag on any one of my posts, it will bring you (still in chronological order!!!!) all of my posts tagged “horror” including horror movie drunkblogs, nightmare fuel, and original writing. If you’re looking at one of my calligraphy posts you can click Bliss Makes things to see all my calligraphy, fiction, fiber arts, and art - you could then click, say, the writing tag to just bring it back down to the writing posts. My tags are MY tags, so clicking writing on one of my posts will only bring you to my writing stuff. However....
Interests
- Interests are self-selected and public. You create a list of interests; they are attached to your profile. Interests are a searchable field. So if you were looking at my fiction or Nightmare Fuel posts and having a good time and decided you wanted to find some more writers on DW, you put “writing” in the search box, set it to search Interests, click the Go button, and it drops you at the top of a list of all users across the entirety of DW who have writing as an interest. The list is ordered by how recently the users updated, so the most recently active folks are at the top. BUT!
- What if you’re interested in writing communities, not merely individual writers? Same page, right above the list, instead of All Users you would click Communities only, and it will give you a list of Communities with writing listed as an interest. You can click Users Only. You can also click Circle Only, which will give you a list of users you’re subscribed to who have that as an interest!!!!
Basically, the more I sit here and talk about it at you, the more excited I am to be using it. I’m still adding to and tweaking my profile (I only have “writing” as an interest so far, LOL), so getting that up to speed will be a process, but I can feel myself rapidly falling toward DreamWidth as my Internet Prime if enough folks will also come play there with me. It feels good. It feels right.
Usericons!
You're not limited to just one. You can have a default but also other ones, so, like, I can have one that i use whenever i'm doing a NF post, which is a quick and easy visual right beside my name that will let folks know something about what I'm posting. I can have a pissed-off icon. I can have a writing icon. Yesgood.
lookfeel
While DW has it’s on steady color scheme, there are optional layouts that you can choose. Do you like a single central column of stream? You can do that. Do you want a sidebar with links to you interests or your post archive? Heck, why just have one sidebar, you can pick two! There are also a slew of themes for choices of font, page background, post background, headers, et centers - assuming you don’t simply want to go ahead and make your theme fully your own by crafting the html yourself. It can be as simple or as in-depth tuning as you want. Me, I found the one theme with “bliss” in the name and am really enjoying its cool blue-grey tones on my reading page.
I’m http://blissmorgan.dreamwidth.org - do come check me out.<3
http://blissmorgan.dreamwidth.org
That actually seems interesting.
ReplyDeleteEdit: On 2nd thought, it's more of a blogging platform. Hmm.
Do they support custom domains? Like could you host bliss . com there if you owned it?
ReplyDeleteThank you!!
ReplyDeleteCydramech Zaharak I find it equitable to what Plus offered, but better on a lot of fronts. I may have been using G+ differently than you, of course; what had the thrust of your G+ use been like?
ReplyDeleteJohn Ward I do not know but I will dig into it; at the base level though you have the url of (username).dreamwidth.org right out of the gate.
ReplyDeleteDonna Buckles you’re welcome!
ReplyDeleteBliss Morgan I've used G+ in various ways. From just sharing links to posting thoughts, debating and arguing, etc. - you name it. I'm not saying I dislike it, just that blogging to me should be preserved for something more formal than casual and therefore.. yeah.
ReplyDeleteInteresting but looks like some good features are only had by paying for them.
ReplyDeleteIt looks bloglike, and does definitely allow for a lot of long form writing more prettily that Plus does, but at its core the way you use it is still the same - you make a post about whatever how want, it goes into a stream, the people who follow you comment/respond. It doesn’t have to be Srs Bzns.
ReplyDeleteBut you have to go for what you want in terms of interaction speed and all that. DW is an option I like for my needs, and recommend it for checking out, but use what suits you. :)
I'm still struggling, too; I have a Dreamwidth account, used briefly in the great exodus from LiveJournal after the Russians took over. Never used it much, because G+ came along soon afterward and was much easier to use (and more populated). I appreciate the mom-and-pop nature of it, but my main use of G+ is to share photos, and they don't do a great job with that. But I'll admit the other options aren't looking great, either.
ReplyDeleteMeWe looked promising, design- and function-wise but a bit of searching reveals that it's a haven for alt-right groups, 4chan assholes and others subcultures I don't especially want to be associated with. Still exploring, and very glad we have nine months to figure out where we're going. Its' inevitably going to fracture a lot of the communities and friendships we've all made here, and that makes me sad. :(
ETA: See comments here - this is what I'm hearing from several other sources, too: https://www.reviewopedia.com/mewe-social-network-reviews
It's basically LiveJournal without the Russian connection. I've been on it for some time. A quiet place, but you're right about the functionality.
ReplyDelete