Month: December 2018

dw_news | Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html }}

somnilogical:

dreamwidth-help:

With the new update to Tumblr’s community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we’d like to take a moment to reassure all y’all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it’s legal under US law, it’s okay to post here. We’re 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we’re here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways. 

dreamwidth has a welcome post for new people from tumblr!

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse   #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse   #(the following category tag was added retroactively:)   #Dreamwidth

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

arkadycosplay:

From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal, deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit:

– don’t knee jerk delete. I know it’s tempting to peace out immediately but hang on and do the other steps first. Out right ghosting and erasing everything is how fandoms die.

– archive everything on your blog you want to keep

– tell your followers how they can archive and keep your work too. A lot of fic and art were only saved from ff.net and lj because other people saved it first. If you’re cool with other people saving your work for them to personally keep, let them know this. You can absolutely discourage reposting but I really do highly recommend you allow people to personally save fic and art they like and are worried will disappear forever. Digital Dark Ages are a real thing.

– tell people where you’re jumping ship to. Give links. Keep that info up, even if you’ve left the site.

– go through who you follow and find out where else you can follow them. Save their work if they’ll allow it. It’s tedious as hell but if you want to keep up with people on here clicking on their page to check in is the best way to do it.

– support places like ao3. This is exactly why ao3 asks for donations a few times a year. They are a 100% anti-purging, judgement free, ad free non profit run by an elected board and protected by lawyers. Places like ao3 literally save fandom so please continue to support them and other similar archives. This is exactly why ao3 is so important.

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse   #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Remember, there’s more to backing up a Tumblr than the posts! Make sure to grab copies of your: 

  • Drafts (WordPress will include these in their Tumblr export, or you can post them and then use any method that backs up posts, or copy them manually into some notepad program)
  • Queue (I don’t *think* WordPress includes these, but there’s still posting them or manual copying; I pretty much never use my queue, so I don’t have any experienced techniques for archiving it)
  • Inbox (I paste mine into a Word document: the formatting is a bit off, but it’s still fairly readable, and you can always clean it up)
  • Outbox (same method as inbox)
  • PM logs (I separate these into one Word document per person)
  • List of followed blogs, to help you consider which other blogs to archive† or to find elsewhere (there might be a cleverer way to do this, but I simply went through my list and wrote everything down in another Word document; I also included a note of how many there were in total, so I can tell at a glance if any vanish from Tumblr)

—

†You don’t need to own a blog to use the tumblr-utils backup method [link] on it.

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #oh look an original post #(technically I use LibreOffice and not Word but I didn’t want to distract from the point) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Wordpress

Building Your Circle

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

dreamwidth-help:

dreamwidth-help:

If there’s one thing Tumblr does well, it’s that tag searches and reblogs make it fairly easy to find people to follow. In comparison, a common complaint I see often about Dreamwidth is that people unfamiliar with the format of LJ/DW find it hard to get “out there”. It’s not exactly like existing in a void, but you’re definitely not instantly connected the moment you start posting.

The key, similar to Tumblr, is exploring.

When you first make your journal, DW will suggest that you add a few interests to your profile. If the interest isn’t unique to you, it’ll turn into a search link when you view your profile, so you can find other users and communities who share it. Even if you don’t have a particular interest added, you can still look around using the search bar. (Example!)

Or, hey, curious to know what’s being posted to Dreamwidth in general? There’s the Latest Things page for you. (Keep in mind: you will see literally everything, depending on what and who are posting publicly, including unfiltered porn, spam, huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge images and posts.)

Friending memes play a part in finding other people. Essentially, someone sets up a post, you comment with some details and hopefully that way you gain some new friends. However, they tend to be rare and largely depend on where they’re posted/shared for people to find them. Add Me communities like these serve as an alternative.

Speaking of which: communities! The official FAQ gives a good overview of their purpose, but basically this is where most of the group discussion on DW happens. You might be familiar with them via kinkmemes. Some people even use them as separate art/writing blogs, as you can do on Tumblr.

As previously mentioned, you can search for communities by interest (WHICH IS WHY I can never emphasize enough how important it is to add interests when you make a new community). Alternatively, there’s the official community promo community (and others). Or, you can make your own!

I won’t lie: a lot of communities you come across will be inactive, since Dreamwidth kind of lost out when the majority of fandom shifted to Tumblr. A lot of people see this and try to start new ones, especially now, when it seems like there’s a growing need for more organized fandom than Tumblr can provide. I still highly encourage you to at least give the old communities a try, rather than letting them stay dead, as seeing someone else post may encourage others out of the woodworks. (I have seen it work, although with varying degrees of success.) The FAQ even has steps for you to consider if you think a community has been abandoned. But whatever works for you!

Phew. That should just about cover everything. Hope it helps!

Giving this post another bump again since people are reblogging it a lot right now.

Tags:

#not sure yet where I’ll be moving to #I don’t really want to have more than one platform at a time but #I might end up trying Dreamwidth *and* Pleroma *and* Scuttlebutt and see which I like best #or for that matter see whether having multiple platforms grows on me #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth Status on Twitter

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://twitter.com/dreamwidth/status/1069676312619413504 }}

dreamwidth-help:

dreamwidth-help:

Dreamwidth staff are aware of the situation. Take it easy on them, guys.

“We welcome everybody, and with some exceptions like spam, our only content restrictions are what’s illegal under US law. We’re not advertiser supported and our income is entirely from user payments, so our concern is 100% for you, not what content makes advertisers nervous.” – update

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

As many of you know, in my day job I’m a journalist, and one of my colleagues is covering the tumblr changes and wants to talk to anyone who has been affected, creatively or financially, by the new policy, so that we can get your story out there. If that’s you, PM me or email her at kaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com. 

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #signal boost

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moral-autism:

i would ask that people leaving tumblr try to move somewhere with an rss feed so i can in theory find some kind of rss reader and follow everyone that way

also:

  • it seems like this policy shouldn’t actually affect my blogs
    • but i will still do backups anyway
  • most alternate sites, even the distributed ones, seem like they kind of suck compared to tumblr in terms of features. they don’t have stuff like
    • reblog chains
    • easily browsable archives
    • view a user’s tagged posts in [reverse] chrono order
    • fun customizable user pages
      • i can see why this one’s not supported, it’s probably a headache

maybe i should look at dreamwidth? i know it doesn’t make comments first-class the way tumblr does but it seems like a better fit for me than, like, a facebook-clone or a twitter-clone

It looks like you agree with me very well on what the best features of Tumblr are (except I don’t care very much about customizable user pages; I have literally never changed my blog background, this was what they gave me by default back in 2011).

I hope we can find something suitable for us, and I’ll make sure to let you, especially, know if I find it.

When I first started thinking about this after the first signs of a purge a few weeks ago, I wondered if maybe one could do some sort of Mastodon/DW hybrid, similar to the Tumblr/DW proposal [link; hmm, WordPress makes the early parts of long reblog-chains pretty unreadable, I’m going to have to do something about that; for now, here’s a Tumblr-hosted alternative link] a while back. Pleroma [link] might make the need for DW hosting of non-short posts unnecessary, but the idea could still come in handy.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth #Fediverse

How to Backup your Tumblr

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

fiction-is-not-reality:

I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +4k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search. 

Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog* 

*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. 
Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat. 

I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing: 

1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month)
2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog)
3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it)
4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not)
5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)

**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted. 

So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes. 

P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything. 

 

dadmondmiles:

There is also TumbleThree, a standalone program, if you prefer a GUI over command-line. Also seems to have more options, such as downloading your liked posts.

 

fiction-is-not-reality:

Haven’t tried it myself so I can only vouch for my OP, but I’ll reblog for the alternative. 

 

kedreeva:

According to Tumblr themselves, starting December 17th, NSFW material will no longer be allowed on their site at all (saw that coming since Yahoo bought them out, I’m positive they’ve just been waiting for an excuse). This includes any NSFW photos, videos, graphics, gifs, etc. They say it won’t include erotica text but honestly the former is just a step toward the latter, check our receipts for the ff.net purge and livejournal strikethrough. And since it’s an algorithm not a human coming after NSFW content, they’re using a “take down first, reconsider on appeal” method- just like LJ did, and content that IS SFW can be flagged and taken down without a human checking it first. I’ve had photos of my birds taken down because of this, so don’t assume you’re safe from this absolute nonsense because you don’t post NSFW content.

I’ve used the above method personally and can affirm it worked fine for me. I would absolutely recommend you do it, too, and sooner rather than later.

Storm’s coming folks. Time to get to safety. Grab the contact info of whoever you want to stay in contact with now. If you’re a content creator of NSFW material, get setup someplace else even if it’s only temporary, and tell your followers where to find you.

Stay safe, friends. I hope to see you on the other side.

I have recommended the OP’s method for some time, and now more than ever.

If you’re comfortable letting WordPress have access to your account, I recommend doing both (at least, once the exporter starts working again [link]). Personally, I try never to have anything exist only in the cloud *or* only locally, and [bbolli’s tumblr-utils] + WordPress is a fairly simple way to cover both of those.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #(look you know what I *meant* about hoping to use that tag again someday) #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Wordpress