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newcomersThere's a number of technological and cultural shifts Tumblr users will have to make when switching to Dreamwidth; the differences in image hosting are probably the biggest technological switch, but the one I anticipate giving people the most trouble is tagging.
On Tumblr, you can add pretty much whatever you want to the tags, in any order you want; there is no limit to them, and they're essentially used as a secondary comment system.
Not so for Dreamwidth! Dreamwidth has a hard limit on the number of tags any journal or community can register; it's 1,000 for free users, 1,500 for basic paid accounts, and 2,000 for premium paid accounts, and they're basically entirely for organizational purposes. One of the ways that Dreamwidth's code reflects this is that it lists tags alphabetically in posts, not in the order that they were written or added. If you want to include a stream of consciousness in your tags and have them make sense, your best bet is to find a way to make them alphabetical. There's also a hard limit of 40 characters per tag for everyone, regardless of account type (paid vs free).
There are other organizational options, Memories chief among them, but it's not really possible to opt out of tags being organizational and switch them to being communication. So what, if anything, can you do instead?
The first option, and most popular all the way back to Dreamwidth's predecessor, is icons! Free accounts get 15 icon slots for images of up to 100x100 pixels, and up to (IIRC) 60kb in size. Supported file types are .jpg, .png, and .gif—so yes, this means your icons can be animated! If you have the perfect reaction gif to go with a post or comment you want to make, as long as it's the right size, you can include a tiny version of it with your post or comment!
Icons also come with an extra nifty feature: Keywords. While this is, in part, to help you select which icon you want to use from your drop-down menu, the keywords are also visible as alt text, and you can have multiple keyword options for the same icon. So if you want to add a little bit of subtext to what you're saying, you can have some additional interesting content for those who go looking.
For example, you can replicate the very popular Supernatural Current Events meme via icon form: Make a gif where the first part is Castiel confessing his love, and the second part is Dean looking constipated and saying, for example, "Today's top headlines are..." Then for keywords you can use "Supernatural", "Queerbaiting", and "Current Events". You can then choose whichever keywords you want to use for the post or comment that you're making. Just talking about Supernatural stuff? "Supernatural" is a fine keyword. Complaining about media dangling representation in front of fans only to yank it away and go No Homo (etc)? "Queerbaiting" is a fantastic choice. Want to announce some breaking news? "Current Events" is your contender. And all three of those keywords will show the same icon.
Each of these options add a little bit more nuance and subtext to the icon you're using, and, in my opinion, increase the fun factor accordingly. I'll talk about this again when I give icons their own post.
Another fun thing to do is play with titles and cut text. Titles on Dreamwidth function pretty much the way they do on Tumblr, aside from not tending to be part of a given post's web address unless you toggle a specific switch or two. Meanwhile, cut text is extra text you can add to a cut tag, Dreamwidth's equivalent of a Read More. Notice how the "read more"s in this post say Option One, Option Two, etc? That's cut text!
While both can be used straightforwardly, as they are in this post, they can also be used to add a little bit of off-the-wall commentary. Want to include a note that is relevant to the post but doesn't quite fit in the body? Is it something you might put in the tags on Tumblr? Consider putting it in the title or cut text!
The title trick works both for posts and for comments. Doubly for comments in fact, aside from contexts where the field is used for organizational purposes, such as fic memes and the like; mostly because the title field is so rarely used otherwise in comments. People do use it on Dreamwidth, and some people do so often, but the majority of Dreamwidth users leave the title field blank most of the time. If you've got something to say that is really more on the margins of the rest of the comment, the subject line is somewhere you can consider putting it.
To find out how to make a cut and use cut text, click here.
The third option is post-specific (can't be done with comments) and are what Dreamwidth refers to as "Currents": Your Current Mood, Music, and Location.
Mood has a drop-down list of pre-selected mood options, some of which make more sense than others (how is "recumbent" a mood?). If you pick one of those moods, you may also get an associated image from one of Dreamwidth's provided/server supported Mood Themes; these are small and simple, and can be animated, but frequently aren't. You can check the available ones out here. If you have a paid account, you can also upload a custom mood theme, which you can make yourself or may be able to find made by someone else. Making them can take a while, but it can also be very rewarding to find or create just the right image for every mood in the menu.
That's not all, though! An important thing about Mood is that you can also input a custom mood. Not to be confused with a custom mood theme, a custom mood is an area where you can ignore the pre-selected drop-down menu of moods and fill in your own, such as "over the moon", "sick of this shit", or "what the actual hell". (Like Tumblr tags, moods are typically not capitalized.) Just using the Custom Mood field will not give you an extra image to use for your mood, but it can be combined with the Mood drop-down menu to display alternate text for the selected mood. For example, you can select "ecstatic" as your mood and input "over the moon" as your custom mood text, and the "ecstatic" image will show up with fresh text.
The Custom Mood field only allows up to 30 characters, but there's still a lot of potential for fun combinations.
The second "Currents" field is Music, but honestly it can just be whatever you're listening to. Your teeth grinding as the government makes yet another ill-informed decision? Your cat purring and taking away your worries? Your heartbeat going a mile a minute in the middle of a horror movie? The rain outside? You can even go abstract and claim to hear the sound of silence, and not in a Simon and Garfunkel way. Or the whooshing of a point as it sails past the heads of people who willfully misunderstand.
You don't even have to limit yourself to sounds, real or imaginary, you can just put text; same way with Mood and Location (next). Whatever you put in that field will be listed as Music in your post, but that doesn't mean it is.
The Music field has room for 74 characters.
Last is the Location field. There's some pretty important stuff to know about this one, so I'll just copy-paste from Dreamwidth's FAQ about Currents:
So yes, you can put your literal GPS location in the Location section! I don't personally recommend it for safety reasons, but it's an option.
You can also lie about your location and input the coordinates for anywhere in the world. You can go fantastical and claim to be in Narnia or in a galaxy far, far away, or you can say that you're surfing the waves of your own imagination. You can say that you're lost in grief or drowning in cookies. Or you can just continue whatever train of thought you were going with from Mood and Music. Just know that it can and will attempt to connect with an actual real-world location if you input one.
As with the other two fields in "Currents", it's up to you what you put there, but the Location field allows you a whole 80 characters to do is.
Also, despite the order they're listed in the post window, they show up in the order of Mood, Location, Music in your actual post, so keep that in mind as well!
A fourth option is to change the size of your text and include something in a smaller font to imply that you're "whispering" it, or mumbling it under your breath. If you're using the Rich Text Editor, you'll want to highlight whatever text you want to be smaller and change the font size in the drop-down menu. If you're using HTML, you can just use "small" tags.
You might also be able to do fun stuff similar to the "Currents" options with the Age Restriction section, but I haven't tried that, and honestly it might be heavily dependent on the registered age of who's viewing it. If you're making a fun joke that you don't want people to miss out on, maybe stick to the other options.
One final option that I can't say I've seen people using, but is certainly possible: The edit field. When you edit a comment, you can type in the reason you're editing it in a field that shows up at the bottom. Mostly it's reasons like "I forgot to close a tag" or "I thought of something else to add to the comment" or "I found that link I was talking about", but you could use it to add Tumblr-tag-like commentary to your own comments. Caveats that this is only an option for comments (editing posts doesn't have that same field) and that you can't edit a comment that someone has replied to. The latter portion is to try and keep communication honest and clear, though there might also be technological reasons for it.
So there you have it! Dreamwidth may not have "talking in the tags" the way Tumblr does, but it does have some other forms of communication that you can still have fun with.
On Tumblr, you can add pretty much whatever you want to the tags, in any order you want; there is no limit to them, and they're essentially used as a secondary comment system.
Not so for Dreamwidth! Dreamwidth has a hard limit on the number of tags any journal or community can register; it's 1,000 for free users, 1,500 for basic paid accounts, and 2,000 for premium paid accounts, and they're basically entirely for organizational purposes. One of the ways that Dreamwidth's code reflects this is that it lists tags alphabetically in posts, not in the order that they were written or added. If you want to include a stream of consciousness in your tags and have them make sense, your best bet is to find a way to make them alphabetical. There's also a hard limit of 40 characters per tag for everyone, regardless of account type (paid vs free).
There are other organizational options, Memories chief among them, but it's not really possible to opt out of tags being organizational and switch them to being communication. So what, if anything, can you do instead?
The first option, and most popular all the way back to Dreamwidth's predecessor, is icons! Free accounts get 15 icon slots for images of up to 100x100 pixels, and up to (IIRC) 60kb in size. Supported file types are .jpg, .png, and .gif—so yes, this means your icons can be animated! If you have the perfect reaction gif to go with a post or comment you want to make, as long as it's the right size, you can include a tiny version of it with your post or comment!
Icons also come with an extra nifty feature: Keywords. While this is, in part, to help you select which icon you want to use from your drop-down menu, the keywords are also visible as alt text, and you can have multiple keyword options for the same icon. So if you want to add a little bit of subtext to what you're saying, you can have some additional interesting content for those who go looking.
For example, you can replicate the very popular Supernatural Current Events meme via icon form: Make a gif where the first part is Castiel confessing his love, and the second part is Dean looking constipated and saying, for example, "Today's top headlines are..." Then for keywords you can use "Supernatural", "Queerbaiting", and "Current Events". You can then choose whichever keywords you want to use for the post or comment that you're making. Just talking about Supernatural stuff? "Supernatural" is a fine keyword. Complaining about media dangling representation in front of fans only to yank it away and go No Homo (etc)? "Queerbaiting" is a fantastic choice. Want to announce some breaking news? "Current Events" is your contender. And all three of those keywords will show the same icon.
Each of these options add a little bit more nuance and subtext to the icon you're using, and, in my opinion, increase the fun factor accordingly. I'll talk about this again when I give icons their own post.
Another fun thing to do is play with titles and cut text. Titles on Dreamwidth function pretty much the way they do on Tumblr, aside from not tending to be part of a given post's web address unless you toggle a specific switch or two. Meanwhile, cut text is extra text you can add to a cut tag, Dreamwidth's equivalent of a Read More. Notice how the "read more"s in this post say Option One, Option Two, etc? That's cut text!
While both can be used straightforwardly, as they are in this post, they can also be used to add a little bit of off-the-wall commentary. Want to include a note that is relevant to the post but doesn't quite fit in the body? Is it something you might put in the tags on Tumblr? Consider putting it in the title or cut text!
The title trick works both for posts and for comments. Doubly for comments in fact, aside from contexts where the field is used for organizational purposes, such as fic memes and the like; mostly because the title field is so rarely used otherwise in comments. People do use it on Dreamwidth, and some people do so often, but the majority of Dreamwidth users leave the title field blank most of the time. If you've got something to say that is really more on the margins of the rest of the comment, the subject line is somewhere you can consider putting it.
To find out how to make a cut and use cut text, click here.
The third option is post-specific (can't be done with comments) and are what Dreamwidth refers to as "Currents": Your Current Mood, Music, and Location.
Mood has a drop-down list of pre-selected mood options, some of which make more sense than others (how is "recumbent" a mood?). If you pick one of those moods, you may also get an associated image from one of Dreamwidth's provided/server supported Mood Themes; these are small and simple, and can be animated, but frequently aren't. You can check the available ones out here. If you have a paid account, you can also upload a custom mood theme, which you can make yourself or may be able to find made by someone else. Making them can take a while, but it can also be very rewarding to find or create just the right image for every mood in the menu.
That's not all, though! An important thing about Mood is that you can also input a custom mood. Not to be confused with a custom mood theme, a custom mood is an area where you can ignore the pre-selected drop-down menu of moods and fill in your own, such as "over the moon", "sick of this shit", or "what the actual hell". (Like Tumblr tags, moods are typically not capitalized.) Just using the Custom Mood field will not give you an extra image to use for your mood, but it can be combined with the Mood drop-down menu to display alternate text for the selected mood. For example, you can select "ecstatic" as your mood and input "over the moon" as your custom mood text, and the "ecstatic" image will show up with fresh text.
The Custom Mood field only allows up to 30 characters, but there's still a lot of potential for fun combinations.
The second "Currents" field is Music, but honestly it can just be whatever you're listening to. Your teeth grinding as the government makes yet another ill-informed decision? Your cat purring and taking away your worries? Your heartbeat going a mile a minute in the middle of a horror movie? The rain outside? You can even go abstract and claim to hear the sound of silence, and not in a Simon and Garfunkel way. Or the whooshing of a point as it sails past the heads of people who willfully misunderstand.
You don't even have to limit yourself to sounds, real or imaginary, you can just put text; same way with Mood and Location (next). Whatever you put in that field will be listed as Music in your post, but that doesn't mean it is.
The Music field has room for 74 characters.
Last is the Location field. There's some pretty important stuff to know about this one, so I'll just copy-paste from Dreamwidth's FAQ about Currents:
The location text area is linked to Google Maps. Whatever you fill in here will appear as a link to a map of that location when viewed on the entry. The field does not auto-detect your location: you must make a deliberate choice to type it in. If you add a ZIP code or street address the map link may pinpoint your location to others, so think carefully about your privacy and comfort level before specifying a physical location. You can also choose a non-specific location such as a city or country, or a descriptive phrase like "at home" or "in the library".
So yes, you can put your literal GPS location in the Location section! I don't personally recommend it for safety reasons, but it's an option.
You can also lie about your location and input the coordinates for anywhere in the world. You can go fantastical and claim to be in Narnia or in a galaxy far, far away, or you can say that you're surfing the waves of your own imagination. You can say that you're lost in grief or drowning in cookies. Or you can just continue whatever train of thought you were going with from Mood and Music. Just know that it can and will attempt to connect with an actual real-world location if you input one.
As with the other two fields in "Currents", it's up to you what you put there, but the Location field allows you a whole 80 characters to do is.
Also, despite the order they're listed in the post window, they show up in the order of Mood, Location, Music in your actual post, so keep that in mind as well!
A fourth option is to change the size of your text and include something in a smaller font to imply that you're "whispering" it, or mumbling it under your breath. If you're using the Rich Text Editor, you'll want to highlight whatever text you want to be smaller and change the font size in the drop-down menu. If you're using HTML, you can just use "small" tags.
You might also be able to do fun stuff similar to the "Currents" options with the Age Restriction section, but I haven't tried that, and honestly it might be heavily dependent on the registered age of who's viewing it. If you're making a fun joke that you don't want people to miss out on, maybe stick to the other options.
One final option that I can't say I've seen people using, but is certainly possible: The edit field. When you edit a comment, you can type in the reason you're editing it in a field that shows up at the bottom. Mostly it's reasons like "I forgot to close a tag" or "I thought of something else to add to the comment" or "I found that link I was talking about", but you could use it to add Tumblr-tag-like commentary to your own comments. Caveats that this is only an option for comments (editing posts doesn't have that same field) and that you can't edit a comment that someone has replied to. The latter portion is to try and keep communication honest and clear, though there might also be technological reasons for it.
So there you have it! Dreamwidth may not have "talking in the tags" the way Tumblr does, but it does have some other forms of communication that you can still have fun with.
Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 02:59 am (UTC)Ah, so that's where that came from. I've seen some people doing it here, but as you mentioned, there's a limit on DW tags that Tumblr does not have. However, if you have favorite commentary tags, you can keep a few of those here.
>> One of the ways that Dreamwidth's code reflects this is that it lists tags alphabetically in posts, not in the order that they were written or added. <<
There is also a "cloud" display option which shows the more-used tags in larger type.
>> The first option, and most popular all the way back to Dreamwidth's predecessor, is icons! Free accounts get 15 icon slots for images of up to 100x100 pixels, and up to (IIRC) 60kb in size. Supported file types are .jpg, .png, and .gif—so yes, this means your icons can be animated! <<
Some icons are images with labels, some are all text, and occasionally you'll see animated ones that blink between different phrases.
>>So yes, you can put your literal GPS location in the Location section! I don't personally recommend it for safety reasons, but it's an option.<<
I agree that this is typically not safe, but it can be used to rally a roaming bunch of people -- and it's a rally method that most people won't think to look for, stalk, or block. A little-known advantage of using a platform that's not super popular, compared to the big ones.
Re: Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 03:14 am (UTC)Yup, that's where it comes from! From my understanding, the way reblogging worked in early Tumblr days really screwed up the formatting of comments in reblogs, so people moved their commentary to the tags, which didn't get messed up. Tags also don't get replicated in reblogs unless you deliberately copy them in some way, though that's probably not relevant here.
>> There is also a "cloud" display option which shows the more-used tags in larger type
Shoot, I should clarify that. I meant that tags are listed alphabetically where they're listed in posts. For example, I've got a friend on Dreamwidth who has tags that I am 99% sure are a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but instead of reading, "life," "don't talk to me about life," they read, "don't talk to me about life," "life". So if someone wanted to have tags that go together and say something like, "I can't believe we're really doing this, but here we are," they'd want to change the first tag to "and I can't believe we're really doing this," so it would be listed first in the tag section. (And then they couldn't use any other tag that would alphabetically fall between them...)
>> Some icons are images with labels, some are all text, and occasionally you'll see animated ones that blink between different phrases.
Honestly, this post has only half of what I want to say about icons at best, but I figure it's a good starting point! I wrote the first version of this post about a year ago and only made minimal updates/changes, which is why I'm even sharing it today instead of waiting for tomorrow 😛
>> it can be used to rally a roaming bunch of people
That's an interesting point! It might also be good for future meetups, like, "Meet me at this geographic location," or "The convention will be happening here". The rallying idea might fall a bit flat if Dreamwdth becomes a lot more popular, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 03:20 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 03:28 am (UTC)It's not common, but I've seen a few examples.
>> The main fandom ship kind of went canon, with Castiel saying, "I love you," to Dean, and Dean... not really saying much of anything back? <<
Well what did you expect? Dean's level of emotional constipation is equivalent to a sloth climbing down to the ground once a week to shit and worrying the whole time about getting eaten by jaguars.
Re: Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 03:31 am (UTC)Okay, cool; I'm never sure how much to explain and tend to aim for over-explaining when I think I've under-explained something.
>> Well what did you expect? Dean's level of emotional constipation is equivalent to a sloth climbing down to the ground once a week to shit and worrying the whole time about getting eaten by jaguars.
I have only watched the first season plus the first episode of the second season, and that tracks okay with my understanding? It was never one of my fandoms, though; I've mostly picked stuff up from osmosis.
Re: Thoughts
Date: Apr. 14th, 2025 04:04 am (UTC)I err on the side of explaining things. Many of my readers are one or more of foreign, QUILTBAG, neurodiverse, not actually human, from a deprived background, etc. which means they often don't recognize "everybody knows" stuff. About 19 times out of 20, responses are favorable, to 1 in 20 people finding it condescending. Look, if you already know the thing, just skip it; it's not addressed to you; it's there for people who really do need to know why someone putting a whole egg in his mouth is funny because it's a reference to oral sex.
>> I have only watched the first season plus the first episode of the second season, and that tracks okay with my understanding? It was never one of my fandoms, though; I've mostly picked stuff up from osmosis. <<
I watched several seasons of it but drifted away before the last one. I do enjoy Destiel though. Dean's emotional constipation mixed with Castiel's fumbling around in human form are hilarious. And haven't we all known a guy who, when someone says the L-word, changes the subject like a driver cutting across 3 lanes of traffic to catch the last exit?
no subject
Date: Apr. 17th, 2025 03:02 pm (UTC)Though yeah I would think the equivalents on DW are messing with the cut text or the listening/location, but I would almost compare these to how AO3 uses tags, which while similar is slightly different.