Cimorene

After a while of using the desktop less and the laptops and phone more, I've started to use Tumblr much less (Tumblr Mobile is awful), and I find Dreamwidth more pleasant and more interesting now.

Dreamwidth doesn't have nearly the volume of content (well, unless I look at the Network, but that is almost bewilderingly large) and it has few images, so it doesn't give you the dopamine hit that more modern social media sites were engineered to create for the purposes of addiction so they could sell ad space. Reloading Tumblr or Twitter will almost always give something new that catches your eye if you're having that restless, bored ADHD-brained feeling, but it's not as pleasant or as interesting. I am more engaged by my Dreamwidth circle that lets me actually keep up with the lives of the people I follow (well, to varying degrees), and the more writerly post style.

I do miss images though! I'm really grateful to the people I follow who post pictures regularly, and I always mean to post more of them, but I rarely get around to it. Here's a few though:

Today is the last day Wax has to work before her vacation (the first of two shorter ones) starts as well. It's been a pretty long week waiting for that. We have several projects we want to start right away and I'm really excited about stripping and painting our front door.

I got a bee in my bonnet about modifying my dreamwidth layout, which I frequently use from my phone, and digging into css always puts me in a time-devouring vortex. I have made some progress, but I'm starting to think I took the wrong approach and I may need to start over.

cesperanza posted: Also: random thoughts about Tumblr

What I miss about Tumblr - and what really worked for me at this stage of my life, and why I still go there - was that I felt that it let me send up a little flag a couple times a day: hi, I'm here! Not dead! Busy but thinking about you guys and Bucky and Steve in between washing the dishes and grading this here homework! . But I could do it by reblogging something fandom-relevant.

#relatable

fandom meta discussions on mastodon by tozka (crossposts from their mastodon evidently). A lot of discussion happening in the comments on the decline of community activity on dw, the nature of dw communities, and tumblr culture vs dw culture (and older eras of fandom culture) mores.

Reblogs, redux by potofsoup is in response to a post on the community for new DW-user refugees for Tumblr in which dendriteblues taught non-html-knowing people how to use html tables to fake reblogs within their DW posts (that is, to create indents, basically), which apparently got controversial because the original post has a bunch of frozen comments. I mean, it's obvious to me both why people would want to do this and why people would be upset about it - ymmv (although why THAT particular html??? TABLES OH GOD NO!!) - so what interests me more is potofsoup's attempt to dissect the issue and offer alternatives. In particular, I'm still reeling a bit in bemusement that she's actually explaining the entire notion of threaded comments and what they are.

The above post, in turn, sparked muccamuk's Tumblr Meets DW, which gained a chuckle of sympathy from me wrt the html code and then got heated (and then cooled down, as evidenced by a series of ETAs).

And THAT post caused potofsoup to make a longer post to clarify, essentially, what reblogging on Tumblr is and how it works. She explains (for the benefit of non-Tumblrites who were getting twitchy about other people wanting to copy-paste their content without permission) that it's not the same as reposting and that the motivation is signal-boosting, encouragement, or continuing the conversation. On the other hand, she also clings to using the term "reblog" to signify whatever form of link-posting (or signal-boosting) she intends to use on DW to take the place of the Tumblr reblog. And that is no doubt why I already saw a post on my reading list of confusion about the distinction between reblog/repost and it linked back to that post as context.

Google Photos has a lot of free image storage, but can't easily be used to host embedded images. However, I just found this tool, "How to Embed Google Photos into Your Website", which points you to a web app - that is, a website/bookmarklet that lets you input a Google Photos 'share' link and outputs a url for a full-sized embed. The link also covers modifying the url to resize the photo, which Google Photos also supports.

(We've got plenty of hosting space that I could use actually, but it's been so long since I uploaded anything there, since the advent of AO3 and all that, that I haven't even used ftp in years and I'm not sure I'd remember where to find my passwords. Because of the ease of getting images from the phone and desktop online, I've been using Tumblr to host anything I needed to embed here for years.)

A new Tumblr announcement just banned photographic NSFW of genitals, sex acts, and "female-presenting nipples" (this is not a joke), so I think the speed of implosion is escalating. (See Gavia's explosive article at The Daily Dot.)

There's a lot of panicked misunderstanding at this point from people with the erroneous idea that all adult content is banned. Since the announcement explicitly says that text-based and sculptures, drawings, etc are still acceptable, this leaves most fanwork activities (with the exception, of course, of certain scenes in plenty of canons...) intact. So probably everyone doesn't need to leave yet, and probably once word goes around about what it actually says and the dust settles, they won't.

Edit: No, sorry, that's wrong, even artistic illustrations depicting sex acts aren't allowed now. It's non-sex-act nudity (that is, nipples and genitals) that can be depicted but not photographed. And actually that does disallow a huge range of fanart, not to mention fine art, so... ???


On the other hand, this is hardly a good sign, especially if we compare it to the trajectory of livejournal or ff.net.

My last post on the decentralized net wasn't meant as a suggestion that people go out and create rotonde, fritter, or scuttlebutt accounts to serve as actual network backups, more... this is there now and we can expect more stuff to come into existence, with fans building some of it, and some of you may or may not be involved in the construction of that. I am not a programmer, but I'm guessing we are pretty far out from anybody actually having a new solution up and running.

We have plenty of places where fannish people can make accounts, but nowhere else where fannish people can make image-, video, and multimedia posts in an easy visual interface and share them with friendslists. And reblog stuff. Or have nice threaded comment discussions with plenty of tools for the OP (that's DW, not Tumblr, obviously, but we all live in hope).

In the meantime, I hope the traffic of people downloading backups of their Tumblrs doesn't get too heavy. "Export your blog" is an option at the bottom of the page after you open Settings and select your blog from the sidebar, by the way.

The announcement (note misunderstandings and panic ballooning in the comments).

The new community guidelines.

Tumblr's Adult Content policy.

Yet another thought that I only realized after the fact was too long for Twitter

(3:04) Posting on DW feels so weird and artificial when I'm used to Twitter and Tumblr.

(3:05) It feels like making an Event out of what seems like just more of the same disconnected babble that is always in my head.

(3:06) Like in order to qualify for a Blog Entry, it should be a position piece, or a reminiscence, not just 20x too long for Twitter.

(3:06) But I can't start posting these things on Tumblr, because Tumblr is like 98:2 noise: signal and the tagging system is shit.

(3:07) ... Not to mention the COMMENTING system, geez. I am not comfortable having personal interactions or conversations there. Awkward & weird.

These tweets on Storify

The gap between Twitter, Tumblr, and DW is long stuff that doesn't seem all that important but which you nonetheless might want comments on and/or would like indexed and taggable.

...

Dreamwidth's (or rather, LJ-style) calendar-based archive browsing, the ability to bundle and rename tags and to label memories, and the nested commenting and notification/tracking features on DW are too useful to me as a blog owner to just abandon.

And for fandom purposes, LJ-style comment pages, notification and tracking features, and the community concept are similarly indispensible, until we get another good non-instantaneous mailing list/messageboard substitue.

But the filtering functionality you can get on Tumblr with Xkit or even just Tumblr savior, not to mention the ease of posting and embedding media and the reblog+comment concept, are still irresistable - and that doesn't even touch on the ability to search and browse across the site by tags, which is a huge boon to fandom.



( What would the ideal solution have to look like, anyway? What do I even want? )

I make a plebefic header post just about every day (Science suggests that in the past year the average is 1 day in 2). That's a lot of posts. When I started saving them and posting them 5 per day, in summer 2007, I really had no notion that it was going to become such a long-term thing. At that point, all the scattered occasions I'd posted them in the past had simply been tagged "badfic", so I kept that tag on them until last week.

Aaaaand as a result, my "badfic" tag was completely unusable for finding any posts except the header posts. Whenever I'd want to find a specific old post from that tag, I'd have to wade through pages and pages of headers instead.

The obvious solution was to remove the "badfic" tag from the header posts only, but I couldn't think how. I thought there ought to be some kind of batch-edit function. Dreamwidth does have an Edit Entries page, but you can't batch edit tags the way you can edit metadata in many music players. And anyway, I'd have to be able to take "Posts tagged with 'badfic' and 'headers & summaries'" as the group to edit, then overwrite all the tags on those posts with just one (in order to delete the tag from those posts but leave it on other ones). Dreamwidth doesn't yet have "and" filtering for tags, and Edit Entries doesn't work by tag anyway - the only thing you can do with posts grouped by tag is rename or delete their tags. And there's not a way to search for "Posts tagged 'X' but not 'Y'".

At first I thought that such a batch-edit feature might be useful, so I was considering submitting it to dw_suggestions, but then I realized it usually wouldn't be very useful. If you're talking about batch-editing all posts with a certain tag or combination of tags, it would certainly be useful to be able to re-set the security on all of them at once or to delete all of them at once (this might already be in the pipeline - I'm not sure, but it sounds familiar), but the ability to edit all their tags at once? In order to batch-edit the tags, you'd have to overwrite what was already there, and how often would you want to take a group of posts which all have different combinations of tags and erase all of those, thereby losing information? You usually wouldn't. You'd want to rename a single tag, everywhere it appeared.

waxjism thought I'd have to go through the "headers & summaries" tag and manually delete the "badfic" tag from each and every post, which would probably have taken the next six months or more (more, probably, because I'd get bored and give up). Fortunately I realized I could do it backwards: what I did instead was skim backwards through the "badfic" tag, opening every post that wasn't to do with plebefic headers in a new window (total: 79; total posts tagged "headers & summaries": 336). In the "edit tags" page for each entry I deleted "badfic" and replaced it with a new tag, "greeble". When that was done I deleted the "badfic" tag from the Manage Tags page, then renamed "greeble" to "badfic". It was still labor-intensive compared with how I wish the internet/computers worked, but at least I was able to finish in a couple of hours.

It's so annoying when you are completely sure that the computer should be able to do this (like Delicious.com! It should be able to filter out all duplicates on the Recent page instead of showing every single person who saved something!) and it just can't (yet).

After my post a week and a half ago in which I said that I'd been thinking about taking my content off LJ, I didn't actually do it - not so much because I wasn't sure that it was a good idea as because I was lazy. But, you know, it only happens if you actually do it, as I realized rather abruptly when I read merryish's post here. Advocating such a move without making the move myself as I did is a bit like campaigning without voting, so I'm not going to be crossposting to lj anymore. This presents little problem nowadays, as I've basically stopped using the filter/lock functions of my journal anyway, which is the only barrier to syndication. It's easy enough to follow the journal via RSS if you want to.

It's also easy to comment on Dreamwidth using your LJ account - just login using the OpenID option and your lj info.

And as previously stated, I have 17 DW invite codes which I'll happily give to anyone who isn't a spambot.