Newcomers to Dreamwidth

It's time to talk about Cut Tags, Dreamwidth's version of "Read More"s!

I'm going to start by demonstrating one, and I'm going to ask you not to click the actual "read more" text for now, so I can demonstrate one of the properties of cut tags. This should be the first post at newcomers or the_great_tumblr_purge for April 26th, 2025, so if you've been linked to the post itself, please visit the archive for that date, instead!

( Read More (or don't) )

That's a cut tag. One of the neat things is that you can put whatever text you want there, instead of just "Read More". The thing I want you to pay attention to, though, is that little arrow next to it:

You know how, on Tumblr, sometimes when you click a "Read More", the link will take you to directly to the page of the post, and sometimes it'll just unfold whatever is under the "Read More" so it shows up on your dash? I'm sure there's some logic to which one it is somewhere, but I have yet to really figure it out. (Not that I've been trying, mind.)

Dreamwidth has it codified so you know what's going to do what: The text itself will take you into the post, anchored to where the cut tag/Read More starts, while the arrow beside the cut tag will unfold the post for you. If you want to read the contents of a post, but don't feel like clicking away from your reading page to do so, click on that little arrow right there!

But wait, there's more! Somewhere on your page layout you might see a section that says, "Expand Cut Tags", with double right-pointing triangles and double down-pointing triangles. Click on the double-down triangles, and all cut tags on your reading page will be automatically opened for you! Pretty neat trick, right? That includes what's in the next bit...

This time, please click on that triangle there: ( Read More (yes, please) )

You may also have noticed at this point that cut tags on Dreamwidth can be closed. No more putting the entire remainder of a post under a Read More; you can put the long essay under there, and leave the TL;DR out at the end! This also means you can also include multiple cut tags in a single post, not just one. And not just the nested kind, either; just be careful when using nested cuts to make sure to close all of the ones you want closed, so any text you want on the outside doesn't get caught on the inside!

Etiquette-wise, Dreamwidth users (DWenizens?) tend to apply cut tags to posts that get a little longer, and to hide images that are more than, say, 800 pixels wide. The latter is a holdover from when bandwidth was a lot worse, though last I knew, some places were still running on dial-up, and it's polite to remember them, as well. And both are good for not turning your subscribers' reading page into Color of the Sky. If you've got a post that's more than a couple thousand words long or has a bunch of really big images, you might want to consider a cut tag. Writing that's more than a few hundred words or a dozen lines long (in terms of poetry) is a good choice to put under a cut tag, as are image posts that have multiple large images (unless you're using preview thumbnails). Honestly, this post is long enough that I want to put more of it under a cut tag, but it would mess up the demo...

That's all I can think of about cut tags at the moment; if there's something I missed or something you have questions about, feel free to bring it up in the comments!

Edit: ysabetwordsmith has some concrete advice about when and where to use cut tags!

Today I’m going to take a moment to talk about a major cultural difference between Tumbr and Dreamwidth, and that is Audience. That is to say, the person or people you assume will be reading what you post.

On Tumblr, when you post something and tag it, you post with the assumption that anyone, anywhere can and might stumble across it at any time; you have to be mentally and emotionally prepared for the interactions you will face. Since many of the people who will potentially see your post are people who don’t know you, and who you don’t know, one of the things you have to be prepared for is Bad Faith Interactions: Where a person reads what you have written and comes to the worst possible conclusion about both the writing and about you, and is prepared to take their conclusion directly to the source.

Since Tumblr is a content aggregation site, if something you write takes off, the odds that it will reach people who will misinterpret what you wrote and are willing to fight over it are higher than they are on other blogging platforms. If you only have a few followers on Tumblr, the odds of Bad Faith Interactions are fairly low; however, it is never impossible, and the odds go up with every follower you gain.

On Dreamwidth, you have one primary audience (that is, people who are primarily there for you), and many optional secondary audiences (people who might be there for you, but are just as likely, if not more so, to be there for a more general subject).

( Primary Audience: Your own journal's followers )

So that’s your primary audience interactions. Secondary audiences are those who follow communities you may post to.

( Secondary Audiences: Community subscribers )

Overall, between these two factors, the interactions you’ll have with people on Dreamwidth will likely be of a very different character than those you have on Tumblr.

Is it still possible to have huge flame wars and fandom wankfests on Dreamwidth? Absolutely; they happened with frequency on LiveJournal, which is the structure Dreamwidth was originally based on. But in general, it’s easier to control the types of interaction you have on Dreamwidth than on Tumblr, and that includes fandom content and interactions.


As always, if you think I missed or misrepresented something, want to point something out, or have any questions, please let me know!

Reblogging is a core feature of Tumblr that doesn't really translate well to Dreamwidth. There are a couple of different ways to replicate it, but which one you pick depends on what your goal was when reblogging a particular post.

"I want to be able to refer back to this post at a later date."
The feature you want for this is likely Memories. Memories are a site-specific bookmarking system that predate tagging. In those times, a lot of LJ users would use it to organize their own posts, such as keeping track of their fics. (Tags were introduced a relatively short time before Dreamwidth split off from LiveJournal.) Memories can be public, access-locked, or private. Any Memories you make on Dreamwidth will be of Dreamwidth posts only.

Unlike with Tumblr's reblog feature, if you add someone else's post to your Memories and the original poster deletes it or locks it, you will no longer have access to it, but it does give you a way to keep track of posts made by other people. If you want to be sure that you'll have access to a post for later, ysabetwordsmith suggests using an archiving service, such as Wayback or Archive.today. Be aware that not all archiving services will save Dreamwidth posts, Ghost being one of those that does not.

"I want to be able to spread the word about this post."
The way most Dreamwidth users do this is by making their own post about it, either in their own journal or on a community, and including a quick blurb and a link to what you want to share. (If it's a post by another Dreamwidth user, it's considered polite to ask in the comments if OP is okay with you sharing the link around. Most people are okay with this if they made a public post, but some may ask you to make your own post about the topic instead, especially if their own post is access-locked.)

That said, there's also technically a workaround made to mimic reblogs, made by astolat (yes, that Astolat), ljwrites, and melannen. I haven't tried it myself and don't particularly want to, so there aren't a lot of questions I can answer about it. However, I would say that it would still be polite to ask for permission to reblog a post in this case, especially since, as far as I'm aware and unlike with Tumblr reblogs, the original poster will not automatically be made aware of your reblogging.

Interestingly, I've heard that this reblogging tool can also work on some non-Dreamwidth site links, such as from AO3.

ysabetwordsmith suggests: "If it's something you especially adore, you can ask the author to let you repost it on your blog as a guest post. If you host a community, however, it's more common to invite folks to crosspost it there whenever you see something that fits the theme. You can also tell people about a comm that matches their post if it's generally open to such things."

"I want to share this cool, funny, or interesting thing with other people."
Did a friend or someone else you subscribe to make a post that you thought was particularly funny or insightful? I recommend sharing it at metaquotes! Metaquotes is a community specifically dedicated to sharing fun and interesting things made by other people. It's not very active at the moment, but with a little work, we can change that...

"I have something I want to add to this post."
If what you want is to share your thoughts on a topic, I recommend replying to the post with a comment! If it's something you would have put in the tags or comment section of a reblog (and isn't rude), I can about guarantee that the original poster would be interested in receiving it.

There are exceptions; if you feel like your comment might derail too much from the original post, or if you manage to exceed the character limit for one comment, you might consider making your own post (with a link to the original), and replying to the original post with a link to your own.


And those are the basics! You may want to mix-and-match on these, depending on the content and your goals for it; for example, if someone posts something really funny that you want to share, you can reply to the post, and post to Metaquotes, and link back to it in a post of your own. You may also be able to do a bunch of any of these at a time ("linkspamming" is the nickname for a post where you share a bunch of links). But overall, these options should cover most of your needs.

If you have any questions, or if there's something I missed, please feel free to let me know in the comments!