Alternative to Tumblr: Dreamwidth.org (feel free to add more to this).
It’s mostly used by old school RPers and some people who made the move after LJ went kaput (in a very similar way to what’s happening now with Tumblr, might I add).
It has a community feature, in that you join communities of fandoms whose content you want to see and can leave it at any time if you don’t like what’s being shared. Your posts are only visible to your friends (if you lock your blog) and don’t automatically go into some giant tag aggregation search feature.
As mentioned above, you can lock your blog so only your friends can see it. A tremendously helpful feature, especially if you don’t want some random fucker strolling on your blog / yelling at you for putting something in the tags because they personally don’t like it.
I’ve been on there for a while, though I seldom use it. If more people want to hop over and make the move, please let me know.
Other things you can do there:
- Moderate who can join communities to avoid getting trolls/bullies, and underage users from accessing content.
- Create a list in your profile of your interests, do a search for like-minded folk and communities.
- Have multiple icons/avatars.
- Your “dashboard” is only made up of people whose blogs and communities whose posts you want to see.
- Admins send monthly updates and news info about the site and what’s going on.
- ICONS ARE ABUNDANT BECAUSE OLD SCHOOL RPERS FLOCKED TO THIS SITE AND COMMUNITIES CATER TO THEM lmao
OH AND IT’S FUCKING FREE
FREE REAL ESTATE
dreamwidth is Very Good and the site runners are extremely transparent and communicate with the userbase a lot. the one downside is that it’s pretty small.
I think it’s smart to market DW specifically for blogging and text posts. If you want fandom discussions or to really talk about your day (or to RP with more words than gifs or jokes or little memes to fill out) it’s definitely the place to be. I don’t think it has to be the “next” thing so much as an alternative.
Additionally, I personally don’t mind hand-holding if you’re interested in learning the UI or the site, especially for RP. Please feel free to hit up my ask box or message me directly!
Ngl I would still love it if fandom returned to this format even all these years later. You don’t get as much instant gratification as Tumblr (or Twitter, etc) but it’s also less stressful and easier to control what people can and cannot see and who can comment. If you make a dumb post you can delete it and it doesn’t live on in hellish perpetuity in reblogs.
The OP mentions being able to make your blog private but even better than that you can SELECTIVELY make posts private, in both your own journal or in a community. So if you have some gen fanart you can show it publicly then hide your naughty shit behind a lock, all from the same account. Or you can have several accounts of that’s more your fancy. (Back in the day I had a main personal account and one for fandom, for instance.) There also a private messaging service you can turn off anon to.
It’s an intensely better format for text posts and fanfic, and it has a small image host included, but you can also do something like post images from imgur to it. It also won’t fuck with the images like tumblr likes to.
And I make layouts for it UvU (and would love an excuse to make more)
https://betterdolphin.dreamwidth.orgIt’s not perfect, like its mobile responsiveness needs a severe need of revamping, but with more traffic the more revenue it would hopefully make and do things like that.
If anyone has questions feel free to drop me an ask!
I got a dreamwidth blog! It’d be great to see more folk over there<3
calliart 