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Yikes! I had a sufficiently complex morning that I completely forgot about posting. Sorry!
Topic of the week
I've been seeing a number of discussions around Dreamwidth about different ways people use social media, different customs (and how sometimes those are formed as ways to deal with a particular site's features or bugs.)
How do you use your Dreamwidth account? Has that changed over time? What's important to you? What do you not care so much about? And while we're at it, do you have a favourite feature you don't think enough people know about?
Not interested in that? As always, whatever other topics people want to talk about very welcome. Start a thread, see who joins in.
What I've been up to
Moving is exhausting! I got most of my kitchen unpacked last weekend, then fell over in a pit of exhaustion other than more or less keeping my head above water at work.
Useful notes
Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help over here, and more about notifications in general here.
Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!
Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.
House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.
1) Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is appreciated.
2) If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
3) If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.
Topic of the week
I've been seeing a number of discussions around Dreamwidth about different ways people use social media, different customs (and how sometimes those are formed as ways to deal with a particular site's features or bugs.)
How do you use your Dreamwidth account? Has that changed over time? What's important to you? What do you not care so much about? And while we're at it, do you have a favourite feature you don't think enough people know about?
Not interested in that? As always, whatever other topics people want to talk about very welcome. Start a thread, see who joins in.
What I've been up to
Moving is exhausting! I got most of my kitchen unpacked last weekend, then fell over in a pit of exhaustion other than more or less keeping my head above water at work.
Useful notes
Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help over here, and more about notifications in general here.
Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!
Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.
House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.
1) Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is appreciated.
2) If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
3) If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.
Tags:
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 04:57 pm (UTC)I am mostly here to talk to people? I love having a really busy reading page with all kinds of people posting about their personal lives, their fandoms, meta, dorky shit they've done, whatever. It feels like such a community.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 05:03 pm (UTC)(I say that broad reading and knowing lots of people who do all sorts of different things also makes me a much better librarian. But really, I just enjoy it a lot.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:57 pm (UTC)Very helpful!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 09:14 am (UTC)I've just found someone talking about my current slightly niche obsession and have bounced into their journal to say hello :D
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 05:07 pm (UTC)(also I love your icon!)
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Date: 2019-01-11 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 05:13 pm (UTC)Sometimes it's pretty quotidian. Sometimes it's "Let me write this out to an audience so I make sense of it in my head". Sometimes it's keeping things so I can find them later (medical notes, work things, librarian smash...)
I turn out to really like the 'write for some set of a known list of people' without needing anyone in particular to respond (where email feels a lot more like an explicit request/demand for people's time.)
I do have most posts locked, mostly so I can talk about multiple things (like work) without worrying about identifying details being easily found by search engines, but I am very amiable about granting access to most people.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:12 pm (UTC)Those overlap, of course: my friends don't care about minute details of health or exercise, but might care that I'm planning surgery or what my doctor said last.
I came to this from paper/print fandom, so I'm used to corresponding with people I've never met face-to-face. There's definitely an overlap between my journal and an apazine, and my comments to other people fit into the same mental space as mailing comments or letters of comment. (And if that means nothing to you, don't worry about it.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:14 pm (UTC)In other news, we are bracing for snow here in DC! I am a snow lover and am eagerly awaiting what I hope will be a weekend of sipping hot cocoa and watching the flakes come down. Any fellow snow fans here?
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:35 pm (UTC)(I am also on Metafilter, as you might have figured out, a few other people who comment here occasionally also are. But also many other nifty people with interesting stuff they know.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:34 pm (UTC)I was praying it wouldn't snow before I moved apartments (I moved to a place that's a walk-out basement, down a weird flight of stairs), but we have been almost totally snow free near Boston this winter (one bout in... November?)
So I'd like some, in a manageable amount to figure out how shovelling works at the new place, ideally.
(I also like snow a lot more now that either I get told not to come to work - I work at a school but not with students - or if they don't cancel, my boss is fine with me working from home most of the time.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 07:05 pm (UTC)Getting to stay inside on a 'snow day' as an adult is the best. I have a job where I can definitely work from home if it's snowy and gross outside. I walk to work so I've definitely taken a remote work day in the interest of not sliding around and breaking my tailbone. I'm also based on Washington, DC, so even though we're a private company we follow the federal government's snow operations policy. I have no idea how that's going to work with the whole shutdown thing.
(And glad it wasn't rude of me to drop in! I mistook the feed of all Metafilter community users' posts for the community feed. D'oh.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 07:12 pm (UTC)I fortunately don't have to do drains, but do have to clear the steps and my own car, and maybe help with the driveway. But not having to do it in time to leave at 7am is definitely a benefit. (I've got a bunch of chronic health stuff, so I am also a "I do 15 minutes, then I sit down for 15, then I do another 15..." sort of person.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:23 pm (UTC)I particularly enjoy reading about people's lives. It's very similar to what I tell my students at the end of the school year: it's not just that I enjoy reading, it's that I enjoy stories and every single person has their own and getting a glimpse of it is wonderful.
Unfortunately though, since I've had my kids, my time blogging has become more and more limited. (And let's be honest, so has my content!)
I'm trying to come back though.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:38 pm (UTC)But I love reading about people's lives, and snippets of what's going on for them, and learning how people solve stuff in their lives that's different than what I would do. (And often better!)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 06:36 pm (UTC)I just had another good workout this morning at the Y, and took Uber both ways. I'm most likely not gonna use Uber all the time, due to financial issues. But I've had great experiences thus far, both in terms of the rides themselves and their app. I read elsewhere that the Lyft app is currently having issues with Apple's on-board screen reader.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 07:00 pm (UTC)I migrated to dw with a community that I'm gradually moving away from. My actual journal was fallow for many years, and I revived it recently as a mirror of my primary blog about bi news and various SFF media I'm engaging in.
Important to social media: Community curation and control. Had really bad experiences of being brigaded by people using search engines to find people to harass.
Not so important: Getting lots of notes.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 08:02 pm (UTC)Before we had AO3, I used my LJ to host my fic, and so my DW has some of it too, but I've rather foolishly gotten out of the habit of posting here with the share info of when I've put something over there.
Not sure why that is, going to have to poke the brainpan a bit on that.
I don't post all that often, but I am always on my Reading page -- and my Network page, too. Network is Amazing and one of my favorite things.
But the thing I think needs more exposure than it gets is the Latest Things page, sensibly located at dreamwidth.org/latest, which shows you the latest, mmm, thousand? entries posted, with a 5-minute delay so any quickly-caught mistakes (like forgetting to access-lock) don't go to that page.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 08:39 pm (UTC)Over the years and after moving to DW, my fandom participation has dropped (partially due to fests not moving over - Harry Potter fandom is a very small part of DW in comparison to LJ). I've become more of a life/links blogger. I've been willing to post a lot more personal entries than fandom based.
I think a large part of that willingness is due to DW's separation of the subscribe/access concepts. Without the baggage of the word 'friend', I'm actually more friendly. When I can divide "give access" and "get access", I'm far more likely to subscribe to someone new. I might post a locked entry once every couple of years - my journal is completely public for almost all purposes - so I don't grant access. (My two test journals and my two best friends, neither of whom actually use DW. XD )
Since the concepts are separated here, I don't feel ... hmmm. Not guilty exactly, but in that vein, if someone gives me access and I don't reciprocate. It grants me more freedom to be open in public posts. And that in turn lets me be more friendly. I'm not susceptible to the old LJ feeling of "they won't friend me, what's wrong with me". (Or the reverse of "why did this stranger friend me?!") Here it's "oh, there are public posts I like to read, subscribing!" instead. And that's much more comfortable to me.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 02:11 am (UTC)And yeah, I love the subscribe and access distinction. In practice, I both give access to basically anyone on request, and subscribe back (and I skim everything that goes by on my feed) but I love the idea that I don't have to connect those two things.
(I also use smaller filters for a few specific things.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 09:26 pm (UTC)Dreamwidth entered the picture after the Strikethrough event as a place to have a backup in case LJ decided they were going to engage in mass deletions for flimsy reasons on the regular. (Hello, Tumblr folk. We feel your pain.) And, as LiveJournal continued to make decisions that favored advertisers over users, I basically stopped going there and have made my home full-time on Dreamwidth.
Now I'm slowly starting to be more overtly fannish in my space. The truth of it is, though, is that you're more likely to get a sense of who I am if I'm hanging out in your comment sections than if you just read my journal.
It's a nice place, Dreamwidth.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 10:16 pm (UTC)I don't always manage it, but when I do my brain does better.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-11 11:55 pm (UTC)I am here to get to know people! Andget to know what they know! (I followed mucca here, btw.)
The thing that's changed about DW most for me recently is that I started posting some art to it.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 04:32 am (UTC)For a long time, the ftf-and-RP-group friends were the core of my LJ/DW experience. That core's mostly gone now, but there's still folks who hang around my DW with me.
I migrated over to DW around when it first started, in the 'let us own the servers' sort of political decision, but obviously, I've kept the LJ connection even after a lot of people punted it.
Mostly I post in order to remember things later, to think about things, to vent about things, whatever. It does take some activation energy, more than it used to, so I'm a sporadic poster, and only occasional commenter, but I figure that's OK, it's what I can do.
Even at that beginning, I wasn't into LJ fandom, in the fanfic-and-picspam sense. I'm interested in similar sorts of shows and books and comics as fandom is, I just don't have the fanfic writing urge myself. But I quite like talking/posting about Book X, or whatever.
I used to post more linky political stuff, but most of that now goes to Twitter. I may ponder ways to change that, in the next few months. I don't at all like the Twitter-to-DW broadcast -- the two services serve entirely different purposes -- but I could certainly link interesting stuff on DW and comment on it more.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 07:39 am (UTC)I'm not exactly back, now, but I'm in the process of getting there. This is currently my only long-form blog space, and I'm wanting to build back a habit of reasonably regular day-in-the-life stuff with a bit of thinky and projecty stuff mixed in. We'll see how well I manage that over this year. I do really miss the exchanges in this kind of long-form space, and love reading about the lives of others with similar interests. It's a totally different animal than private paper journaling.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 09:46 pm (UTC)I started blogged way before that, on Blogdrive (RIP), and there I WAS into the social aspects of it. There was a circle of blogs I followed and they followed me and we all commented on each other's stuff...and then it slowly fizzled out and died, for various reasons.
I first joined LJ in 2007 but was never really good at keeping up the social thing. I guess after the death of my social blogging at Blogdrive I didn't want to go through all that again. Also, my blogging at Blogdrive had been mostly daily life type stuff, and the social aspect of LJ seemed more fandom-focused, which...interested me, but seemed a walled garden I couldn't crack.
And then as time went on I became bad at blogging at LJ, period, because I was doing more stuff on public blogs via Wordpress.
I started on DW in 2009 (10 year anniversary in May!), and for a while I was crossposting some posts to my LJ. I stopped doing that with the last true implosion of LJ though (when the servers moved to Russia).
In that time, it's been the same sort of focus, primarily -- a place for me to journal. But I've also tried to do the social aspect of it more and more, and I think this year might be the year I don't utterly fail at it. I'm making a true effort now, because the truth is I really love Dreamwidth and after being here for 10 years I feel I should, I don't know, have more of an actual presence here.
I'm also trying to break my FB addiction and DW seems like the only thing that will actually give me a chance at that.
Things I especially love: access lists. They mean I can actually be honest about things here, because if I need to I can uber-filter it down to a very small group of people or even just me. I can't have that same honesty at Facebook, where being honest is just asking people to attack you.
Cut tags. Being able to cut down lengthy posts or, even better, skip right on past most fic in my reading page because I like choosing when to sit down and read some slash porn about characters I ship really improves my experience.
ICONS. I'm lustful for icons. I can't wait until my practicum ends and I start working for real live money so I can continue supporting DW and GET MORE ICONS.