star-anise:

For people who want to use Dreamwidth, but are totally confused about how it works!

What is Dreamwidth?

• Dreamwidth is a social media platform founded in 2009 after Strikethrough
• It’s made out of a heavily-modified version of Livejournal code
• It’s based around producing your own original content, and seeing original content other people post
• The site is owned and run by fans and aims to provide creative people with an Internet home

Getting around your account

• Your journal is like your “home”. It’s where you keep your stuff. It’s got different parts:
  • Recent Entries: View your posts in chronological order
    • (yourusername.dreamwidth.org)
  • Profile: Your “about” page
    • (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/profile)
  • Archive: See your posts as a calendar
    • (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/archive)
  • Tags: See all the tags you’ve used and go to their posts
    • (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/tag)
  • Memories: Like the “Likes” feature on Tumblr
• You also have a “Reading” page (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/read)
  • This is like your Tumblr dash
  • It’s where you read entries from your “circle”, the people and communities you’re subscribed to
  • You can customize it a lot with filters and control who you see when
• You also have a “Network” page (yourusername.dreamwidth.org/network)
  • This is where you see posts from everyone that everyone in your circle subscribes to
  • It’s a great way to discover new stuff and also learn what awful taste some of your circle members have

Finding new things

• Listing an Interest in your profile is like getting listed in the phonebook. This is opt-in, choosing to say, “Yes! I’m really into this thing! Consider me a person who blogs about it!
• Content Search is the more powerful way to search through the blog of everyone who’s opted into it, so you can look for everyone who’s posting about a certain thing right now. However, you’ll have to wade through a lot more junk.
• Communities are Dreamwidth’s social hubs. They’re places where a lot of people can share content they’re interested in and talk to each other. Unlike Tumblr tags, they’re managed by specific people and have rules, so people behaving badly can get kicked out.
• Latest Things is a direct firehose of EVERYTHING PUBLICLY POSTED TO THE SITE, HOMG

Privacy controls?! That’s a thing?!

• You get to choose who sees your posts! You can make your posts public, private, or “locked”, which means only people you’ve added to your access list can read them
• When you add a new person to your circle you can choose to subscribe to them, to make their posts show up on your Reading page, and/or to grant access, which lets them see your locked posts. You can do one, the other, or both!
• Likewise, communities can make posts viewable to members only.
• You can also create custom access filters, to allow only some of your access list to see a post.
• Banning someone means they cannot leave you comments or send you messages. There are more advanced tweaks to make sure they never show up on your reading page if they post to a community you subscribe to, or remove them from the comments on a post.

Comments

• The comments to a post are where the real fun happens.
• Comments are sent to the email of whoever you’re replying to. They’re a real conversation. You’re not shouting into the void–you’re talking back directly to the post’s originator and other commenters.
• You can edit your comment so long as it hasn’t been replied to, and you can delete your own comments.
• The originator of the post, and administrators if it’s a community, can delete threads, or “freeze” them, leaving them intact but preventing anyone from replying to them.

You will add new skills to your resume

• Dreamwidth leaves a lot more “backend” open so you can customize your experience to a huge degree. However, this means learning or using coding languages like HTML and CSS
• The comment box on entries does not have a built-in text editor, so you will have to add your own HTML if you want to add <i>italic</i>, <b>bold</b>, or <a href=“http://websiteurl.com”>links</a>.
• There are lots of cheat sheets and informative guides around, like HTML on Dreamwidth and Dreamwidth-specific markup tags

greywash:

“Ugh, I know, what a time for it, right?? I’m so sorry this is stressing you out *sends hugs*

I’m going to start by seconding the advice that a lot of olds are giving: do not delete your blog! It makes it harder for people to find you! Let Tumblr do what Tumblr will, but keep your presence here as long as possible, because the first thing that your friends will do wanting to know where you’re going is type in “http://apprenticegamemaster.tumblr.com” to see what you’ve said on your front page about where you’re going to go. Ideally, make a post and then also link it from your header—you can set up a redirect in your blog customization page to make any link, including a link to a specific post, show up in your header. Won’t work on mobile, but it’s a start.

Beyond that?

Ask yourself, what do you really need to preserve of your Tumblr life? For most people, this is going to be some combination of content and connections.

Connections are in some ways easier to preserve, but they’re also the thing where there’s the most uncertainty right now. How are we all going to find each other? We don’t know. The key thing right now is that you have (at least) one other site where people can go to find you, whether that’s AO3 or Dreamwidth or Twitter, whatever; and that you tell your mutuals what network it is and what your username is over there. You’re about to go into finals, so if you already have an account on another network, use it—it doesn’t have to be something you use long-term, just a place where people know they can find you that isn’t Tumblr; just tell people what it is and put, on Tumblr, a link to your profile, or another page on that account on another site that you can update later as the migration continues.

If you don’t already have an account elsewhere, I recommend Dreamwidth; it’s old-fashioned, but it’s also rock-solid and it’s not going to get firebombed by TOS changes the way that corporate sites so frequently do. Even if DW doesn’t end up being where fandom lands en masse, long term, it’s a good place to keep as a backup fannish phonebook, and it’s free. Make an account, make a post that says “This is the post I’ll update with my username(s) after finals, comment here to tell me where you’re headed.” This takes maybe 10 minutes, and then you can move on. [Several people have recommended that you make a fan page on Fanlore; I think they’re right, long term, and I did so, but it was kind of a headache, which is why I’m not tossing it out as a first-line recommendation. I’ll probably make another post about how to do it when I’m less tired, though.]

Content is trickier. WordPress nominally has a Tumblr importer, but AFAICT it either doesn’t work at all, or it’s being crushed mercilessly by the current level of traffic on the Tumblr servers. I’ve had very good luck with the previously-mentioned greymask backup script; I’m currently coaching a friend through using it and I think we’ve got the worst of the kinks worked out, but no guarantees (I’ll update that post if I make changes). That’ll download a local copy of your blog, and it’ll probably be huge; but then at least you can sort through for fic/meta/whatever later.

If you don’t have access to Python and several GB in which to store your blog locally, ask for help. See if other people have good recommendations for backups, or if you have a friend or two who can start running that greymask script for you to grab your content while you finish your finals. There are a lot of fannish olds like me who understand how important it is to grab and archive content right now, before it vanishes, and a lot of us don’t have finals; in my particular case I also don’t have the storage space on my laptop to do a lot of archiving and I’m also not sure how I’d get it to you later, which is why I mostly haven’t been offering so far (I’m pulling @havingbeenbreathedout’s blog right now, but I live with her, so I can like… walk a thumb drive across the hall), but I am absolutely willing to help out where I can and if I can figure out how? And I suspect that you’ll find that a lot of other fans out there also want to help if they can, too.

Longer term, the best advice that I have, at the moment, is just get through your finals. Beyond that, yes, by all means, try to identify where you’ve stashed the content you want/need to rescue, and do downloads manually as you have time—but not as a priority, ideally, until after your finals.

You can probably do a couple things now to kind of triage the content problem without taking a million years? Or, use these things as study breaks? This original post finder may be helpful (screens out reblogs); you could save a post or two as a break—just set a timer so you don’t get sucked into it. Also potentially useful is http://web.archive.org/ – go there and go down to “Save Page Now“, then put your blog url in the box and hit “save page” to get the Wayback Machine to capture it. This isn’t a long-term solution and I don’t know how deep their crawlers go, but it’ll probably give you a little bit of coverage while you do finals. And your finals, and your mental health, are both more important than Tumblr!!

*sending you many good de-stressing thoughts*

rex-luscus:

Sure, here are the steps:

1. Go to “Settings” in the account menu.
2. In the sidebar where it says “Blogs,” click on the blog you want to back up.
3. You’ll see the page that lets you edit the appearance of the blog, etc. At the bottom, you should see a button that says “Export blog.” Click that.
4. Tumblr will now take a shitload of time to create the backup (hours, or maybe even days if your blog has a ton of media posts) but eventually it’ll send you a link to download the backup. You don’t have to keep your browser open for that time, by the way.
5. Once you’ve got the link, click it and download! It should give you a ZIP file with a folder of HTML files for the posts and a folder for the media files.

ksao:

lavender-sprinkles:

I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).

Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:

• If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
• The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
• A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
• A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for. 
• They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
• They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
• Posts in chronological order like they should be!
• A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
• A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
• The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.

So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.

If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.

If you like everything that you’ve read about Pillowfort.io, please pledge to their Kickstarter. Even $5 can help and it will get you a registration link to get on Pillowfort yourself if the Kickstarter gets fully funded.

If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can. 

This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!

@tatteredskin @fluffbuun @pulmonologist

mckaytriarchy:

arubbishmedic:

bollymusings:

nickthenerd:

1. Soup.io – well-known alternative to Tumblr. Reblogging, post types, themes, collab blogs, dashboard, artsy, great community already there. Soup can auto-import everything you’ve posted on Tumblr.
2. TypePad – Includes reblogging. Dashboard and post types similar to Tumblr.
3. Jux – Artful posts, beautiful blogging experience

Reblogging cause one day it just may be neccessary.

It became necessary

WordPress will also import Tumblr blogs.

marsza:

today’s mood is finding peace and solace in the knowledge that we have always existed. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were buried together in a tomb decorated in paintings of their union- nose kisses, erotic embraces, and other illustrations paid homage to their love, which motivated them to be buried together as equals and compaions even in death. Sappho wrote at least 10,000 lines of poetry about her love of women. David and Jonathan met under the light of moon and loved one another more than either of them had ever loved any woman. Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz were married in a Spanish church during the 9th century. James Barry, who by all accounts would most likely identify as transgender, was a successful, accomplished doctor throughout the 1800′s

(and a bit of a casanova at that). Virginia Woolf loved her husband Leonard deeply, but it was only with Vita Sacksville-West that she could finally overcome a lifetime of sexual trauma and enter a fufilling romantic and sexual relationship with another person. When Oscar Wilde was on a Literary Rockstar Tour around the United States, he almost certainly hooked up with Walt Whitman. Willa Cather’s first sexual experience was with Gwendolyn Brooks and Emily Dickinson wrote love letters to women. One night F. Scott Fitzgerald leaned across the table between them and Ernest Hemingway allowed himself to be kissed. Billie Holiday had deeply passionate relationships with men and women. Frida Kahlo and Josephine Baker had an explosive and fantastic tryst in France. James Baldwin was as couragelously gay and he was valiantly black in a world that constantly tried to rob him of his god-given pride to be either. we have always existed. histories and governments and oppressors may have tried ardently to deny our rights and destroy our stories, but we have always existed: we the gender-queer or the gays or the bisexuals. we the brown or the jewish or the disabled. we the abuse survivors. we the singers, the writers, the creators. we lgbt+ and queer folk … we have been here since the dawn of human history and we are here to stay. when we love and live and exist as we are, we invoke a tradition with the greats…