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.
~~
I said that would get wordy and I surpassed my own expectations. I hope it was informative and not boring!
no subject
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.
~~
I said that would get wordy and I surpassed my own expectations. I hope it was informative and not boring!