Hooked On Anime

Absolutely devastating that Tumblr communities don't allow embedded links from Dreamwidth. I include so many of those fuckers in my tutorials, because I want to make things easier for potential Dreamwidth users! Unfortunately, when I go to copy-paste one of the tutorials I'm writing for newcomers over to Dreamwidth Sharing on Tumblr, that means I have to manually remove all hyperlinks and either enter a Tumblr substitute (or the occasional non-Dreamwidth substitute), or include a plain text version of the link after the text I would normally embed the link in. Very frustrating, especially when Tumblr informs me that I missed a link, and therefore cannot post the entry to the community.

Well, Dreamwidth post organizing didn't really happen today, but I did post an updated version of "What to post about on Dreamwidth" a few places!

I also thought of a couple more About Dreamwidth posts I want to make, with some points I want to touch on:

Commenting on Dreamwidth, and specifically how the comment section is where our "Yes, And" stuff happens on "silly" posts.

Icons on Dreamwidth, and specifically the comparison I made to reaction images. Information on where to get icons and/or how to make icons is a must (I only know the most basic of basics myself, so I'll have some looking up to do!), but I also plan to cover the fun that can be had with icon keywords.

Both of these I'd say fall under the "Dreamwidth Culture" umbrella, with the icons post potentially also covering "How To" basics.

Last thing I'm going to do tonight and then I'm going to bed for realsies, I swear.

I post a fair amount about Dreamwidth on Tumblr every time things look like they're going to shit there, because I love Dreamwidth and want more people to come hang out here, and I want to archive those posts over here. Tomorrow, I'm planning to go through my various Dreamwidth posts and sort out what's useful here and what's redundant. To that end, I'm going to sort them into what I think of as the categories of Dreamwidth posts I make.

These are the categories of posts I think I make about Dreamwidth; I may discover more in my organizing tomorrow, but I think this is a good start.

1) Love Letters to Dreamwidth
Any time Tumblr seems to be in danger, and sometimes for unrelated reasons, I write a post about why I love Dreamwidth and why I think a lot of people would also love it here. These are posts about that.

2) Links to Dreamwidth guides
Anywhere I collect links to guides other people have written about Dreamwidth. I'll probably just collect the direct links for those, rather than my reblogs of them, though I may also round all those links up into a single post for people to reblog on Tumblr.

3) Dreamwidth guides I've written myself
Sometimes I answer questions about how to do Dreamwidth; this is that

4) Dreamwidth cultural guides
There's some pretty significant cultural differences between Dreamwidth and Tumblr, and I talk about them in these posts. I certainly don't expect Dreamwidth to stay 100% the same with a huge influx of new users who bring their own experiences and posting styles from elseweb, but some of these differences stem from the technological side of things (such as no native reblogging feature, and tags being strictly organizational), so I figure that's important to know.


Okay, bed time now, I promise.

Putting together a post for Tumblr, but I figure I'll probably want to back it up here, so I'm typing it here first to make copy-pasting easier 😂

[Edit] Now rebloggable on Tumblr! [/Edit]

[Edit 2] Added a few more things to this version! I'll be copy-pasting it to newcomers, the_great_tumblr_purge, and the new Dreamwidth Sharing community on Tumblr shortly. [/edit]

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There's a question that may be on a lot of minds right now, that some people may be afraid to ask. Or you might not even think to ask it until after you're in deep enough that you'll feel silly for doing so. So let's get it out of the way ASAP.

"But what do I even post on Dreamwidth? Don't all posts there need to be super long and thoughtful?"

Not even a little bit! As with any social media site, posting is the blood that keeps social interactions going. Comments are also vital, but they don't happen without posts to comment on. Unfortunately, with the (I'm sorry to say) sub-par image hosting interface on Dreamwidth (that will hopefully be fixed someday, but probably is at least several years out, I'm even sorrier to say), people who are used to an image-heavy social media site might be a bit daunted by Dreamwidth's text-heavy interface. So here's some ideas of things you can post:

Shitposts. It is entirely fine, okay, and even wonderful to make shitposts on Dreamwidth! Since Dreamwidth isn't a content aggregation site and doesn't have built-in reblogging, you probably shouldn't expect them to go very far (unless a member of metaquotes sees them and wants to share), but they're still welcome 👍

GIPs, or, Gratuitous Icon Posts! Free users get a total of 15 icons to use like reaction images and gifs, and sometimes when you upload one, you just want to share it with everyone right away! That's when you make a Gratuitous Icon Post. You can literally just make a post using that icon, and then put GIP in the text field, and boom! You're done.

Steal some prompts from sunshine_challenge, snowflake_challenge, or thefridayfive. While you can also do any of these challenges in real time, there's nothing stopping you from doing them whenever you want, and The Friday Five has a huge number of back-posts to dig through. Just go back a few pages on the main community page, pick a day with questions you like the look of, and post those (with your answers) to your journal!

Another good place to steal some prompts is Questions and Questionnaires for 3weeks4dreamwidth; Three Weeks for Dreamwidth is the annual celebration of Dreamwidth's birthday, and a lot of people come up with fun things to do for it that you can do at any time.

Check out allbingo as well! While a lot of the bingo cards are made with fests in mind, there's no reason you can't pick or make a random bingo card and use the squares to come up with topics to post about. Money says the community would be down to celebrate a posting bingo with you, too!

Do you have a pet? Or more than one? Post about what they're doing right this second. Someone's bound to be interested in that!

To-do lists. Not only can it be helpful to have these actually written out, some of your followers may chime in to root for you to do them!

Media reviews in three sentences or less. Of course you can make them longer if you want, but if you're just looking to get a quick post out, this one might be pretty fun.

Something you're looking forward to! It doesn't have to be a big thing, even something like, "I can't wait for my next afternoon nap!" or "I just bought a new book and I'm really looking forward to reading it!" or "I wanna go home so I can pet my dog so bad!" Any of those would be a fine post.

Three (or more) Things Make a List: If you've got at least three things you've been meaning to post about, but don't have a lot to say about any of them, jumble them all together in the same post! Pretty sure this tradition dates back farther than Dreamwidth, though damned if I could say where it started.

Reoccurring posts are great for if you want to share something regularly and prompt discussion. Just come up with a few quick lines that you can copy-paste and share whenever, and boom! Solid posting strategy right there. There's a number of communities where this approach is fairly common, in addition to individual users.

It may not seem like these ideas have a lot in common, but one thing they're all good for is starting a conversation with your followers. And that's at least half the fun of Dreamwidth, IMO.

There's more ideas out there, but these should at least get you started. And if you keep it up, you'll have the hang of Dreamwidth in no time 😉

(With thanks to ysabetwordsmith for some of these suggestions 💖)

exuberantocean made the following post:

Please call this recession the Trump Slump.

We need to put Trump’s name on this.

I, for one, like this idea and would like to see it come to fruition! Who's with me?