Dreamwidth Meta

March Meta Matters Challenge 2026 Returning!

2026-02-18T18:56:46Z

Posted by: yourlibrarian

March 1 is just weeks away, so that means the kickoff to this year's March Meta Matters Challenge will be taking place soon! The challenge involves locating and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation, plus there will be some prompts for creating new meta.

Feel free to ask questions here about the challenge, locations, etc. Otherwise subscribe to marchmetamatterschallenge and look for our opening post on March 1!

comments

An Intersting Bluesky Thread about Dreamwidth, Livejournal, and a Security Incident from 2018

2025-02-28T20:08:16Z

Posted by: florianschild

denise wrote a long thread on Bluesky a few days ago about a security incident that happened several years back (that was ultimately traced to livejournal) and how it affected Dreamwidth. You can read the thread here.

Some of you probably already know all about this, but I was out of the loop so it was all new to me and I found it really interesting.

comments

March Meta Matters Challenge 2025

2025-02-02T23:33:58Z

Posted by: yourlibrarian

The kickoff to this year's March Meta Matters Challenge is just 4 weeks away! As usual, the challenge involves identifying and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation. There will also be several prompts for creating new meta. ( Read more... )

Feel free to ask questions about the challenge, locations, etc. at our announcement post and then look for our opening post on March 1!

comments

A Graph of New Dreamwidth Users by Year

2025-01-22T20:14:17Z

Posted by: florianschild

I was curious about how many people actually use Dreamwidth, and I found a lovely stats page that shows how many users have joined on every day the site has existed. I love the transparency!

So I downloaded the data into Excel and made this graph:

Thoughts on the decline of new users joining? Has anyone noticed a dropoff in traffic? Are people concerned or is having a larger user base not much of a priority for those of us who like our quiet internet corners? I personally would love to see Dreamwidth have more users and be more active.

The platform has limitations of course; many users these days don't want to use HTML or have to self-host their images. And while I understand the reasoning for not having an app, it's probably a limit to drawing in new users as well. I wonder what, if anything, it would take for this site to actually grow it's user base instead of maintaining/losing users year over year. I'm also not sure if the owners actually want growth either. There's something to be said, of course, for a business model built on sustainability rather than growth. I guess I'm just putting this out there to hear if anyone else has thoughts or concerns about the number of people on the platform.

I crossposted this from my own journal. I hope that's ok.

comments

Cross-posting from Dreamwidth to Facebook

2017-07-17T17:46:52Z

Posted by: jducoeur

Just a small signal-boost for those who might be interested:

One of my longtime frustrations with the social-networking ecosystem has been the cross-posting situation. Yes, it's fairly easy to set things up so that, when you post here, a link gets posted to Facebook. But the fact is, not too many people follow those links. What I really want is to be able to post here, and automatically copy the post over to there, so folks can read it directly. (I can wish that all my friends were here, but the fact is, Facebook is still the 800-pound gorilla; if it doesn't show up there, most of my friends won't see it.)

So a little while ago, I sat down with IFTTT (which has finally gotten powerful enough), and puzzled out how to do this right. This IFTTT Applet takes your Dreamwidth RSS feed as its input, and requires that you hook IFTTT up to your Facebook account. Given that, whenever you post something to Dreamwidth, it (eventually -- it takes a while) reads that post off your RSS feed, rebuilds the HTML into something that looks acceptable on Facebook (basically, it turns your post into Markdown), and posts it as a status update on Facebook, with a link back to the original DW article.

I can't promise that it's perfect -- it handles the most common HTML, but almost certainly will choke on complicated stuff. But it seems to be a pretty good compromise, and I've been using it successfully for a month or two now.

Here is the source code for the Filter at the heart of that, if anybody wants to take it in hand and enhance it for their own use. For an example of how things get translated, see this DW post and how it looks on Facebook.

Use it as appropriate, and please pass this along to anybody who might care...

comments

A couple posts from DW's head

2014-01-28T17:32:54Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

A generalized three things about the internet and a nice DW specific dreamwidth as vindication of a few cherished theories.

comments

Xanga crowdfunding to convert to a WordPress multiuser site

2013-06-06T01:32:31Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

So, remember back when LJ was a bigger thing in the US? Xanga was also a pretty big thing back then, but it's fallen on hard times. They're now attempting to crowd fund the costs to convert to a WordPress multiuser site--and in this new system, ONLY paid accounts will get to have blogs, and there will be no ads. If it doesn't succeed, then it will shut down July 15th.

comments

Our Incredible Journey

2013-05-20T05:13:55Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

A grim tour of why investing your community in a startup destined to be bought out is going to lead to disappointment

comments

Google Reader shutting down

2013-03-16T23:45:00Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Google is shutting Google Reader down July 1stt--many people used it as a reading page for the wider internet. It was a very efficient way to consume lots of data from many sources in a way much faster and more reliable than Twitter, Facebook, G+, or other social media.

Some talk about how Google Reader destroyed the ecosytem around it--it was good and free and thus cut the legs out from under its competitors. Yonatan Zunger, a project lead at Google, made a G+ post asking people what they liked so much about Reader. He quickly received 500 comments (consisting of about 53,000 words) in commentary. Some are lamenting the loss of private reading. (Others might disagree their Reader use was private, except that Google killed built in Reader sharing two years ago.) Some are positioning the shutdown of Google Reader as a threat to the internet and acknowledging Google Reader's censorship busting power as something hard to replace. BuzzFeed says Google Reader still sends them more traffic than G+. Some people like to think Google is about to learn a tough lesson, but others disagree.

comments

Posterous bites the dust, Posthaven arises

2013-02-17T02:18:44Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Posterous was ninja sold to Twitter early in 2012. That started the countdown to when (not really if) it would be shut down. That day has come: Posterous will turn off on April 30. This quiet ending stands in contrast headier days when Posterous had an import campaign for "dying" platforms...such as Tumblr--but now Tumblr's still around and Posterous is going away. (Of course, Tumblr still needs to figure out how to make money, too.)

The news had the original founders scrambling to finish getting their next project ready--a replacement called Posthaven that pledges to stick around forever. Of course, in order to do so, it's a paid only service.

comments

Why your distributed social network will not work

2013-01-02T06:13:37Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

If you know that checklist of why spam solutions won't work, then this checklist of why your distributed social network will not work from programmingisterrible.com will seem a little familiar:

( Your post describes a ( ) protocol ( ) github repo ( ) manifesto ( ) kickstarter for a distributed social network. )

comments

Spam is choking InsaneJournal to death, and they are finally doing something about it

2012-12-21T22:37:20Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

The latest announcement from IJ indicates that spam is choking the service to death: The issue is we are getting overwhelmed with spam posts and don't have the funds to add the hardware needed to deal with it.

This has been a long running problem. It's easy to see how much of a problem using the stats page: on almost every load, the majority or entirety of recently updated and recently created journals are SEO spam journals. They might have been trying different strategies up until now, but so far none have been all that effective.

However, IJ isn't about to roll over and die: they're working on a strategy to improve the issue. Facebook posts indicate a return to an invite code system, at least for a few months while the problem is cleared up.

As a service, IJ offers more icons for free accounts than either DW or LJ, and it still has comment subject lines, making it attractive for RP communities and journals. Permanent paid accounts with even more icons are routinely available for as little as $30 during sales. It's a bit up in the air whether or not that's the cause of funding troubles: IJ's strong RP-based clientele often create multiple journals for characters and games, so lots of permanent accounts doesn't necessarily mean cutting off all future revenue from a given user. There's also light ads on the site to help out with revenue.

It hasn't been enough to buy enough hardware to withstand the increasing spam onslaught, but that's a fool game: no matter how much hardware you buy, when you get at this point spammers will just use the power to fill your service up with more spam. Hopefully a combination of invite codes and a thorough scrubbing will return IJ to an even keel.

All in all, it's a sobering reminder that effective spam fighting efforts are vital to the health of any user content generating service.

comments

Dark Social

2012-10-12T19:32:31Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong

Summary: even before the big social networks started coming into focus, lots of social sharing on the web happened in places not so easily measured--chat and email, for instance--a practice that still continues to exert a greater influence on website visits than any social network today

comments

More Google+ meta

2012-08-15T00:01:15Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Why I left Google:

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+: The Charge Of The Like Brigade

Could Google ever have won? I think so. But not by blitz. By envelopment.

comments

Home grown meta!

2012-08-12T20:11:31Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

roadrunnertwice writes a short essay titled Mothra is killing app.net that contains some good points on why Diaspora and app.net have trouble getting traction while trying to copy their more popular counterparts:

I don't think the people behind Diaspora ever understood any of that. They thought people were on Facebook because Facebook was a good app, and people actually wanted some atrocity that was kind of like Tumblr/Flickr/Twitter/LJ/toilet-graffiti/emotionally-abusive-Gameboy except worse. That's manifestly not the case. People want everyone they know in one place, and the only way to give them that is to be evil. Which makes it impossible to replace Facebook with any less-evil alternative -- whatever eventually kills Facebook will win by being either MORE evil, or more SOPHISTICATEDLY evil. And since Diaspora was unable to compete with Facebook, it found itself competing with all the non-Facebook focussed-purpose services like Twitter and Flickr and DW and Tumblr, and it since it was built to be worse than all of them, you probably still aren't using it. Of course, you're probably not using Dreamwidth, either. You probably ARE using Twitter, and I'll be interested to hear app.net's plan for dealing with the fact that 80% of Twitter joined Twitter because all their friends were on Twitter.

comments

Not new, but notable: Tumblr foraying into paid ads

2012-07-31T22:13:12Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Tumblr annouces foray into paid ads (Adage)
Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out? (NYTimes)

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that has had a LOT of VC investor dollars put into it before it had a monetization strategy.

comments

Here, have some meta-essays on social networking

2012-06-30T19:04:16Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Internet companies and the billion dollar money drain:

The root cause of these poor returns is the lack of sustainable and user-friendly monetization mechanism beyond the unprofitable display advertising business model. Ad-funded Internet models are a more than $40 billion money drain...There is simply not enough online advertising money or minutes spent online to pay for the billions invested thus far in Internet-related deals by venture capital and corporate venture capital over the past ten years.

The Social Graph is Neither -- Interesting essay about the inherent problems with making an open social graph standard.

Why Google+ is still not working for humans

comments

Found this on teh intartoobs, and I'm curious...

2011-02-01T20:46:22Z

Posted by: pauamma

Growing and maintaining an open-source community Is there anything mentioned there that Dreamwidth doesn't do, and that might help? He doesn't mention misogyny by name, but a number of his points include it implicitly.What do you make of that approach? (also, can someone remove the "interview" tag? It's't fix it) a misclick, and I can

comments

Access/subscribe and internet culture collisions

2010-09-17T16:34:37Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

DW culture question on friending -- people discussing how the access/subscribe split affects how they interact with others, as opposed to LJ's friending, in lj_refugees

A Tale of Two Internets, by nikkiscarlet, talks about the difficulties when internet cultures that developed by different mores (anonymous or not) collide.

comments

How to be a filthy seditious Dreamwidth supporter

2010-03-21T12:46:11Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

So, maybe you are into Dreamwidth, or maybe you want to be more into Dreamwidth but are having troubles making that happen, or maybe you know somebody who wants to be into Dreamwidth but doesn't know how to get that ball rolling. Being "into" Dreamwidth, in this instance, is defined as having a vested interest in helping Dreamwidth grow and thrive, especially in a way that personally benefits you.

This article is going to give you suggestions on how to be a filthy seditious Dreamwidth supporter (as opposed to just a Dreamwidth user or nonuser, which is a perfectly fine thing to be too!)--and they're just that, suggestions. If you have a reason to not use one, don't use it--it's just a general practice guide! (It uses a lot of points from 101 Ways to Help Dreamwidth Grow, if you are curious.) It assumes that you use Dreamwidth and enjoy it, or are strongly interested in using Dreamwidth. And while volunteering is great, this article isn't about supporting Dreamwidth that way, either. So, with that in mind, let us continue!

( This way to the agenda )

comments

Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity -- Danah Boyd essay

2010-03-18T21:34:41Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

Danah Boyd has put up an essay from a presentation at SXSW called Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity, which feels relevant to me about Dreamwidth and its functions for users.

comments

Allowing OpenID accounts to post to existing communities

2009-11-09T09:59:28Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

So, currently mark is working on a project to import communities so we can migrate scans_daily, and part of that means making it so that OpenID users can edit and delete posts in communities, but not post to them. But what if OpenID accounts with verified emails were allowed to post to communities?

( More discussion )

So, what do you think the effects of letting OpenID communities post to DW would be? Positive? Negative? Underutilized?

comments

Interview with Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci

2009-09-16T00:29:48Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

zvi LikesTV. 2009. Interview with Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0166.

It can be read here.

comments

Ways to help Dreamwidth that don't involve volunteering

2009-08-14T00:30:04Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

So, today I decided to make a wiki page called 101 Ways to Help Dreamwidth Grow. It's a list of things people can do to help Dreamwidth grow and thrive that don't involve volunteering--most of them don't involve paying Dreamwidth money, either. Does anybody have things to add to this list?

comments

Essay link: How Dreamwidth is helping save LiveJournal

2009-08-01T18:45:24Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

azurelunatic has written an LJ/DW meta essay titled How Dreamwidth is helping save LiveJournal.

comments