Helpful Tips for Former Cohost Users (like myself)

[onlyknownothing]

1.) Markdown Posting

If you miss being able to post via Markdown instead of HTML, the beta features page has an option to opt into the "New Create Entries Page." This allows for creating posts using Markdown, much as the comment function has a Markdown option. Just as with cohost, HTML input into the post will overrule/overwrite the Markdown you're using (if you want to get silly with it).

2.) HTML and CSS Stuff

If you instead want to jump feet-first into the brave new world of all-HTML posts, I recommend w3schools as a reference and primer. They have really good walkthroughs of current-gen HTML5, as well as CSS (and even JavaScript, though that doesn't apply here). I refer to them regularly when Markdown is insufficient and I can't remember what the various style options for an HTML element are.

3.) Your "Dashboard" is Public

I haven't seen any evidence of this being misused here, but it's an old carryover from the LiveJournal days and people coming from cohost tend to be surprised by it. Everyone can see what shows up on your Reading page, unless the original creator of the post has restricted that entry. Not only is it an open HTML link, but it's literally a link on your main page for anybody to click on. If you wouldn't want someone else seeing that you're following something, you might want to use a separate feed-reader and just subscribe to the feed there (which you can also do for actual public dreamwidth journals, as they have an RSS and Atom link on each front page).

4.) You Can Customize Your Journal

Another carryover from the LiveJournal days, but also something which used to be a big deal on Tumblr and wasn't possible on cohost. If you're into the CSS crimes stuff, or just want something which reflects your personality/interests, you can customize your journal's CSS to give it a unique look. You could easily get very in-depth with this if you wanted. Or heck, just make it look (mostly) like cohost did if you'd like - you could pull the CSS off cohost itself as long as it's up, or use their rehosting tool (once it's live). I actually specifically incorporated the "cohost font" of Atkinson Hyperlegible onto my page because I like how easy it is on the eyes.

5.) Tags Don't Work Like Cohost

Yes, you can tag your posts - but unlike cohost and Tumblr, they aren't global. You can't click on a tag and see other people who have used it, unless it's a tag in a community (and even then, those community tags only apply to that particular community). There's no "I enjoy seeing the art people make, so I follow the 'artists on dreamwidth' tag." Interests are the closest equivalent; instead of each post being tagged individually, people list their overall interests and you can either search them or browse through them to find people who've said they like that thing. That said, there's nothing requiring people to post about the things they're interested in.

6.) It Takes a Bit More Work to Connect

This is a very early "web 2.0" system. As in, "web 2.0" was coined in 1999 per the Wikipedia article I just linked and the code for LiveJournal (on which dreamwidth is based) started being written that same year. There's been 25 years of intervening development since then designed to make the "social" part of social media more seamless, and this place doesn't really have any of that. That means you have to do more of the legwork yourself. You can't engage with posts or users without actually engaging with them - there's no reblogging/rechosting, no "likes," nothing on any post except perhaps a comment box. So you're going to have to search, reach out, or maybe just DIY it. There are communities such as this one and addme which make it possible to find other people, and ysabetwordsmith's followfriday is a community meant for recommending other communities. You can also create your own! It looks like someone's already made eggbug_writes as a community for former cohost writers and writing-prompt-makers, and there's nothing that says you can't create some other central meeting-place communities for people to regather and find one-another again.

7.) Protect Yourself

You can turn off or limit Private Messages in your Account Settings under the Privacy tab, which is also how you can turn off anonymous comments and IP logging (which is on by default). You can also ban users directly from commenting on your own journal page there too. I encourage you to liberally take the actions you need to make it hard for other people to make your life more unpleasant. If anybody is actively violating the Terms of Service (section XI - Member Conduct), you can also report them... but there is no sitewide blocking or muting like there was on cohost, so keep that in mind and take proactive steps to make sure you aren't giving access you don't want to people you don't want having access to you. This place is generally more insular due to its old design functions - it takes work to search out others, which limits discoverability of people you want to know and people you don't in equal measure - but it's still possible for you to show up in the Latest Things global feed (which is a true global feed), so please take steps to take care of yourself in advance if someone barging in and being an awful human on your page will be worse than a "sigh, delete, ban" response for you.

I haven't seen anything of the sort happen, but that doesn't mean it can't. I never saw any of the cohost-related issues first-hand either.

Comments

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

It is so great to see someone making a post like this! It's not one that I could've made because I didn't use Cohost. I have linked this in "Cohost Is Closing" and also added it to the linkbox on this community.

>> 2.) HTML and CSS Stuff <<

There's a section on Dreamwidth Code in "Cohost Is Closing" too. It has some general guides and explanations of how to do specific code. Some is in the section How to Do the Things in Dreamwidth.

>> 3.) Your "Dashboard" is Public <<

Most people never click on anyone else's Reading page.

There's more, if you have a paid account:

Your Network Page combines and displays the reading pages of all members of your Circle, including personal journals, communities, and feeds. The network page displays only the most recent 1000 entries posted within the last 14 days. Network pages are only available to paid, premium paid, and seed accounts.

Your Profile is public too; anyone can get that by clicking your userhead. However, you don't have to fill it out. If you want that information to be private, put it in a post and access-lock that post so it's only visible to people you grant access to or who belong to a certain filter.

>>Or heck, just make it look (mostly) like cohost did if you'd like <<

There are some styles with that plum color. I was going to use one here, but the setup glitched and started messing with my personal blog, so I gave up and left this one default. *sigh*

>> 5.) Tags Don't Work Like Cohost
Yes, you can tag your posts - but unlike cohost and Tumblr, they aren't global.<<

Prevailingly true.

>> You can't click on a tag and see other people who have used it, unless it's a tag in a community (and even then, those community tags only apply to that particular community). There's no "I enjoy seeing the art people make, so I follow the 'artists on dreamwidth' tag." <<

There is a workaround for this. Latest Things shows you what people are posting about right now, everyone and not just your own Circle. For instance, here is the Cohost tag. You can also access the feed for a tag, which lets you subscribe to feeds on the Feeds page.

However, it remains true that tags don't work exactly the same across platforms. Dreamwidth users are not as tag-friendly as people are on Cohost or some other heavily tag-oriented sites. Lots of people don't bother to list many Interests on their personal or community profile and/or don't use many tags on their posts. You can encourage better tag usage on Dreamwidth by doing it yourself and talking about how to do it. You're not just a newbie, you have skills that other people can learn from you!

>> There's been 25 years of intervening development since then designed to make the "social" part of social media more seamless, and this place doesn't really have any of that. <<

... it also doesn't have some of the flaws that developed later as people discovered drawbacks of those shiny new things. Specifically, Dreamwidth is a fairly safe place because people have to do more work to find you and bother you, and trolls tend to be on the lazy side. It can still happen, but it's not as easy here as it is on most later sites. Whether you consider this a pro, a con, or both is a matter of personal taste.

>> there's no reblogging/rechosting, <<

This is called crossposting. You can duplicate a post that you make on multiple venues. There's a limited automatic feature in Dreamwidth's post builder, or you can do as much as you want by hand. You could even copy-paste someone else's post, but usually, people ask the original poster to do that instead. I've been inviting people to crosspost here when I see them writing something useful about Cohost or Dreamwidth.

>> no "likes," nothing on any post except perhaps a comment box. <<

Some people use the comment or poll functions for this. Authors vary whether or not they appreciate posts that are just "like" or :D or similar, and some people will tell you that in their profile or sticky post. Dreamwidth will count comments or poll replies, but does not have a separate counter for how many people "like" a thing. While this makes it harder to collect such information if you want it, conversely it discourages the like-chasing that some people hate about other platforms and that has been linked to mental health issues.

>>You can also create your own!<<

See "Creating a Dreamwidth Community Masterpost" by vriddy. Creating a community is easy, although the style editor is currently glitchy (support staff are working on that). Maintaining a community takes more work, so think about how much time and effort you can commit before launching one.

>> You can also ban users directly from commenting on your own journal page there too. <<

It also blocks people from commenting on your community posts, replying to a comment you make, or sending you private messages. But it has some very serious drawbacks. There is no way to make people not exist for each other -- people you ban will still see content you create, and you will still see posts and comments that you can't reply to. Crucially, the software does not block you from typing a reply, only from posting that reply. You can waste 20 minutes making a reply only to discover that it won't go through, which is maddening. And if someone's posts or comments are routinely aggravating to you in a community, the only way to not see them is to leave that community, which sucks.

Dreamwidth's privacy and moderation tools are good, above average for social media nowadays, but they are not perfect and are a work in progress.

>> so please take steps to take care of yourself in advance if someone barging in and being an awful human on your page will be worse than a "sigh, delete, ban" response for you.<<

State parameters you expect people to follow regarding civility. Put those in your profile and/or a sticky post. Some people roll it in with everything else there, others have a separate post just for how they want people to behave. Describe what you do and don't want, and how you will respond if people break the rules. This helps people decide if they want to read your blog, and figure out how to interact smoothly there. It will save you a lot of hassle.

An interesting result of Dreamwidth's infrastructure and members setting their own guidelines is that problems like flames and dogpiling are rarer here than on most other platforms. The infrastructure doesn't make it easy, and people have tools to quash it.

But more than that, the culture doesn't support it, because so many people have come to Dreamwidth because they hated how bitchy or downright dangerous some other sites were. Folks here will often jump in with "Hey, that's not cool."

Maybe once or twice a year, a flame will spring up on my blog -- and more often than not, by the time I get up and see it, someone else has already dumped a bucket of wet sand over it and solved the problem. I do write about controversial topics, and sometimes discussion gets heated. That's okay, as long as people don't resort to personal attacks or make anyone cry. I've only ever had to block a few people who just would not quit making trouble from scratch. If you tell your audience what you want, and remind them when anyone oversteps, then you should not need to use the hardcoded moderation tools very often.

>> I haven't seen anything of the sort happen, but that doesn't mean it can't. I never saw any of the cohost-related issues first-hand either.<<

This is where diversity matters. Other people may spot problems you don't. How you choose to respond is your free choice. A couple times I've had someone contact me backchannel to say that someone else was picking on them, and I stepped in to maintain a congenial environment in my little corner of cyberspace, but that's a rare issue here. It can happen, you have tools to handle it if it does, and listening to your audience about problems will likely improve everyone's experience.

And that's what people say they loved about Cohost -- its people, its community, its sense of safety. Dreamwidth is pretty well equipped to let you recreate that here, even though some of the details and tools may differ.

Re: Thank you!

[onlyknownothing]

The thing about cross-posting versus reblogging is kind of a Tumblr/cohost social-contract thing. Reblogging specifically recreates the post and gives the original creator a notice that somebody reblogged it to their own page, while cross-posting on Tumblr/cohost was known as "reposting" and was seen as undesirable. Since people had the option to make their posts able to be reblogged or turn them off, and no message is given if somebody copy/pastes someone else's post onto their own blog/dash, it tends to be seen more as "stealing" or "plagiarizing" the other person's post.

There's nothing that prevents someone who wants to "reblog" here from asking permission and linking back manually with their copy/paste if it's granted, but that was all folded into a single-button action whose permissions could be revoked and so it altered the nature of how people coming from cohost (or Tumblr, since that's the site which was most like cohost in design) might see it. That's what I was trying to get across as far as the "you have to do things manually here" explanation. If you like something, you have to tell the creator directly. If you want to "reblog" something the way you could on cohost, you have to ask permission directly and recreate the post yourself for your journal after you get the okay. That's not a bad thing in my opinion, since cutting down on the short-form one-click interactions inherently coerces users to actually... interact. Not just click a heart button.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Reblogging specifically recreates the post and gives the original creator a notice that somebody reblogged it to their own page, while cross-posting on Tumblr/cohost was known as "reposting" and was seen as undesirable. Since people had the option to make their posts able to be reblogged or turn them off, and no message is given if somebody copy/pastes someone else's post onto their own blog/dash, it tends to be seen more as "stealing" or "plagiarizing" the other person's post.<<

Ah, okay, that distinction makes more sense now. I agree that a reblogging feature with those traits, which could be toggled on or off, could be a useful thing to have.

>> That's what I was trying to get across as far as the "you have to do things manually here" explanation. <<

Yeah, that's a point.

>>That's not a bad thing in my opinion, since cutting down on the short-form one-click interactions inherently coerces users to actually... interact. <<

Sooth. This platform is much more interactive, and really promotes creating relationships, compared to other platforms.

>>Not just click a heart button.<<

We might want to point out that Dreamwidth uses a heart button for its Memories tool. If people are in the habit of clicking a heart shape, that might be confusing. But I don't know what the old one looked like on Cohost so I'm not sure how confusable they really are.

[locust_breakfast]

did *not* realize my reading page was public, that is a huge clue, thank you! this is a great resource.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I didn't know that other sites let you lock it. Useful feature, that.

You could make an account just for reading other blogs. Then nobody would know it was yours, and if you didn't make posts in that blog, nobody would have a reason to go there.

[duskpeterson]

Re #1: Actually, anyone can use Markdown in their post. You just need to add a one-word code at the beginning of your post.

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=260

If you reply to a post by email, your reply will be posted in Markdown.

[onlyknownothing]

Oh, that is interesting! Good to know, thanks for sharing!

[duskpeterson]

Glad you find it helpful! I was so glad when Dreamwidth added that feature.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's useful to know.

Re: Thank you!

[duskpeterson]

I originally learned that tip from jesse_the_k, who posted about Markdown hereand here. (It's surreal writing a sentence about Markdown in Markdown.)