Loftwings and Demons

I don't mind using this site as mostly just a convenient way to write text but I do want to make more of an effort to actually look for other active users on this site who are discussing topics of interest to me.  Average Dreamwidth user has way more stamina for essay-writing than I ever will from what I've seen, the challenge is finding ones that talk about my interests.  It would help if more users actually used the tag cloud but maybe it makes them feel called out (I know the huge 'about me' on mine certainly does for me lol).  I should try to social this media, or whatever.

On the one hand starting a community of some sort either here or on Pillowfort sounds like it could be fun and maybe a good experience for me.  On the other hand it sounds like responsibility so there's a very significant part of me that wants nothing to do with it lol.  Also seeing how dead a lot of communities are or become I think there are certain forces of Web 2.0 that make them difficult to maintain.  Perhaps even cultural forces that encourage very atomized behavior and alienation from others are involved with this phenomenon. Which is a shame, because I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with these online communities.

So apparently Tumblr has been acquired by Automattic, the same company who owns Wordpress.

I actually think that could be a pretty good outcome for it, though I'm not currently inclined to return to the platform.  Even if they fixed all the issues that made me leave Tumblr in the first place, I don't know how I'd feel about going back.  There are things that are integral to the Tumblr experience like reblog chains that I've always felt uncomfortable with (though I do understand their appeal as well).  And there's functionality on Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, and Mastodon that Tumblr just doesn't have.  But if Automattic ends up making the Tumblr code open source like Wordpress that would amuse me.

Just don't know if I can give up communities or post level privacy locks or Mastodon's federation capability.  Or the Dreamwidth tag cloud widget. 

I wish Dreamwidth let you make the list of blogs you subscribe and grant access to private.  That's one of the few areas where Tumblr is better than Dreamwidth in my opinion.  I would also prefer if it had an option to hide the reading page and make that private, for much the same reasons.  When I first got on this site, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make as many things on my blog private as possible, and not being able to make those things private was what bothered me most.  I think there were only a couple things that can be made private on Dreamwidth that I opted not to make private, and that was because the privacy of those specific things wasn't important to me personally (and I wish the things mentioned here could be made private in addition to or even instead of those things).  I'm also fine with there being the *option* to make all of these things public, but I wish it was an option and not a requirement.

Like I'm not going to stop using this site because of that, but those are two of the things that are sticking points for me personally due to my privacy concerns.  Though obviously the ability to make posts private to only our access list is a useful privacy feature that Tumblr doesn't have, and I do appreciate that capability even if I don't personally use it much right now.  I also like the private message feature on this site.  And overall, this site has the interface I like the most, it's just things like this that I feel prevent it from being better across the board from other social media.

I was a not very frequent poster when I was on Tumblr, but I appear to have become a frequent Dreamwidth poster just by posting close to the same amount I did on Tumblr.  I just really like a lot of things about the Dreamwidth platform.  There are a few things I'm not as fond of here as in other places, but for the most part the setup here agrees really well for me.  I really like the stability of the codebase and the extensive customization options, I really like the fine-grained privacy options, I really like that I can still have an RSS feed for my site like Tumblr did, I love that I can easily add a tag cloud to my blog, and I even like the kind of retro look this place has.

And the old style is back again! For now. I reverted my blog style back because I realized Dreamwidth was just using the desktop style for the mobile version, and while that doesn't bother me so much (I mostly take issue with sites that look very distorted on mobile), I know a lot of people don't like it. And admittedly, even I prefer the larger text size and better screen use of a mobile theme. Going to keep looking for a way to make my theme look nice on desktop and mobile as well as maximizing its usability.

I'm looking forward to exploring some of the fine-grained functionality this site has. Dreamwidth has a lot of settings, and lets you customize a lot of things you can't on Tumblr. I also really like the built-in tag cloud. I made the tag display on my blog into a tag cloud last night.

Titling my posts will make them easier to look through in the post listings thing my blog has so I should probably try to do that more often. Otherwise the post summary is just a long list of undifferentiated (No Subject) links lol.

Kind of wondering what a good distinction would be between the 'viewer discretion advised' setting on Dreamwidth vs '18+'. Like, I'm not sure what the difference would be, because I'm used to comparing things to like, movie or tv or videogame ratings and those don't really seem analogous.

Or just thinking of nsfw and 18+ as like, the same thing. Though I guess they're not, really. You might not want to be looking at pictures of artistic nudes while at work, but a nude person just standing there isn't really 18+, whereas if they were having sex that seems like it would be 18+.

Oh, so the nsfw thing appears if you set adult content to 'should be viewed with discretion'. I'm not going to have NSFW images on here though. I just discuss stuff that isn't G rated from time to time, as one does.