Why I Moved to Dreamwidth

[popmygoddess]

Months ago I toyed with the idea of kickin’ it old school and returning to my OG, Livejournal. Obviously, in the years since LJ was bought by a Russian company and more visual social media platforms have flourished, online journaling has taken a steep decline. But the idea kept scratching at the back of mind and finally I relented.

Here’s why:

1. I am selfish--or, I am looking out for my best interest. I have started many blogs through Wordpress, Weebly, and Squarespace through the years. I would spend days working on the back end and never post more than twice on the front end. It was a waste of my time and, in some cases, money. But I have been blogging consistently since I was 11 years old on Livejournal, so I knew it was time for me to return to my original home.

I need simplicity. I don’t want to focus on SEO. I don’t want to obsessively refresh my analytics page 100 times a day watching the count slowly go up. Worse, I don’t want to ruin my day when the number stagnates. I want to post my thoughts and move on. I want to enjoy talking about tarot again.

I want community again. This may be completely nostalgia (see above) but Livejournal was the place I felt connected to people. Entire discussions would happen in comment threads. Communities were built around shared interests. Today it feels like I am shouting into the void whenever I post something. By moving to Dreamwidth, I hope people will feel inspired to chat in my posts. I have anonymous commenting turns on which means you don’t even need a Dreamwidth account to comment! Please come be friends with me. (Don’t be a dick and abuse the power of anonymous.)

I hope whoever finds their way over here understands and even enjoys it. Try leaving a comment on this post to test how it works!

Edit: It seems like the anonymous posting is working, but it's too anonymous for me! If I know you from Instagram, consider signing with your username so I know who you are. If you want to keep it truly anonymous, I respect that, but maybe sign with an initial or emoji in future posts so I can get to know you?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've never heard of Dreamwidth! What are some of the reasons you find it preferable to other blogging sites?

[popmygoddess]

I'm going to try to keep this simply, but I'm a wordy person so I apologize in advance.

To be completely honest, if you never used Livejournal, it may not appear special to you at all. Before Tumblr, Livejournal was the place to go for a personal online journal/blog (and Xanga before that and so on). There was some drama on Livejournal (bought by a Russian company) so an amazing team of people created Dreamwidth using the opensource coding.

While many people migrated over to Tumblr in the end, I think a lot was lost when we moved to other platforms. On Tumblr, for the longest time the only way to comment on a persons post was to reblog it, which became cumbersome and ugly. When they introduced replies, they off to a better start, but it still gets messy. Dreamwidth has comment nesting, so replies are organized neatly and coherently. Instagram is slightly better about nesting.

On Dreamwidth, you can follow your friends and all of their posts will appear in your feed. Unlike nearly every other social platform (besides Tumblr) it is not based on algorithm or clicks. Simply the time you post. This also puts it above hosting my own blog on Wordpress or otherwise, because you become silo'd there. I also rarely comment on those big blogs because sometimes the process to leave a guest comment was cumbersome.

With Wordpress and Squarespace, I had my own mental block that I needed to OWN the domain. Which cost me money that went literally no where. There's no option to own your domain here--that I know of--and I could work around my silly mental block. There's also no pressure to create a beautiful homepage or anything like that. You upload your post, maybe drop some fancy html into it, and hit post. In a few days, I'll throw a few links into my sidebar and that will be the max of my customization.

And then there's the fact that it's not commercialized. There is no SEO for running a Dreamwidth blog. You don't have to worry about using the right hashtag. No hits counter and, again, no algorithm. Almost daily I see on Instagram (my other main social media platform) a creator complaining that their engagement has dropped dramatically because the algorithm changed again.

I want to engage with the tarot community on my own terms, not others.

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I said that would get wordy and I surpassed my own expectations. I hope it was informative and not boring!