(no subject)

[galadhir]

Okay, having said that my reading page wasn't long enough to keep me off Tumblr, today I have spent entirely on DreamWidth and Mastodon. Mainly that's thanks to all the lovely people who have welcomed me into the DW community again (and also into the MDZS fandom.) If I want my inbox to remain full, I know I need to keep posting and also commenting on others' posts. We'll see how long I can keep that up this time.

I have always tended to go in and out in waves like the sea, depending on enthusiasm and executive function, but at least I do feel firmer this time about my belief that DW and Mastodon are going to be my social media of choice. And that I might spruce up my own website on the offchance that both of those platforms end up going down too.

Back to the old web it is for me - the 1990s-early 2010s model.

If you're interested in Mastodon, btw, I'm on galadhir@sunbeam.city There seems to be a massive influx of folks from Twitter there too, which is overloading the servers but also making the place a lot more active.

I'm liking this!

Today Tumblr asked me to turn off my ad-blocker. I was shocked! Shocked, I say. (Actually I wasn't. I was just disappointed.) It's so nice to have somewhere homely to come back to.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, I'm mostly active on tumblr, but basically only to reblog things. I rarely do more than tag posts with general categories - even tag commentary is rare from me. Remembering that I *can* post about things and share my thoughts is something I have to almost forcibly remind myself of, haha.

But I do really appreciate the connections fostered on DW. It's not that that type of convo is impossible on tumblr (or other social media sites, too), but I feel like DW has better architecture for it.

You're right though: there are probably a fair number of people for whom that ISN'T what they're looking for out of their time online.
But I've also seen some people - including ones young enough to have never used or maybe even heard of LJ - who seem to long for a sense of community/connection/reciprocity that they can't seem to find on twitter/insta/tiktok/tumblr. I feel like DW could give them what they want... but they don't know it, haha.

Also very fair - I'm used to needing to poke around a site to figure out how it works. I don't want an algorithm telling me what accounts to follow - I want to find accounts that interest me! A few people have remarked that they thing the DW user interface is impossible to use because it's too clunky... and I think I just disagree, haha. It's not super shiny or sleek, but I don't find it clunky.

[galadhir]

Having been on Mastodon over the past few days, I have to say that is really good and social. Because you can post quite a bit of text at a time, it's a lot better for nuance than Twitter. I can see why a lot of people are choosing that over DW. But I do think DW is a lot better for making a nook of your own. There's more of a record of what you've been up to over the years. It's more of a diary, a permanent thing that belongs to you and that you can look back on over years. Nothing else really lasts in the same way.

[mistressofmuses]

That's good! I'm glad that it allows for a bit more nuance than Twitter does - that's, I think, one of the worst things about it.

But I do enjoy DW for its ability to be very personal and personalized. And I'm not someone who goes all-out on customizing a layout or anything. It's just very much something you can use however you like.