Newcomers to Dreamwidth

Buckle in, everyone, this is going to be a long one!

One of the things that has made Tumblr wildly popular with fandom is its unlimited image hosting capacity. Content, Tumblr eventually put limits on, but number of total images (rather than images per post) and size of images? Not so much.

Unfortunately, that's one of the big reasons why Tumblr is basically hemorrhaging money: Because data is expensive, and image data is much more so than text data, mainly because it's a lot more data. That number just goes up with gifs and videos, the former especially being a favorite on Tumblr.

The ways to get money to run a social media site on the internet are basically venture capitol (the investors will want their money back someday, somehow), selling user data (doesn't everyone love ads and hate privacy?), and users directly paying for services (in this economy?).

Dreamwidth started from a foundation of prioritizing privacy and user freedom, and that meant that they compromised on image hosting in order for their users to truly be the main focus of this site. A dedicated user base pays to keep Dreamwidth running, and while there's a price rise on the horizon, we've managed to keep Dreamwidth's doors open with just our own money for sixteen years now.

So what does this have to do with icons? Well, with the limited image hosting options in Dreamwidth's budget, they're one of the main ways we use images at all—and Dreamwidth users make the most of them!

( Hold up; what exactly IS an icon? And what do you mean by 'make the most of them'? )

( How do I get and upload icons? )

Is that it?

Well, it's everything I can think of, at any rate! But you might have questions that I haven't covered. This is a great place to ask them! I may not have the answers, but odds are decent that someone here will be able to point you in the right direction.

One last favor before I go...

Dreamwidth users, if you've got favorite icons, show them off in the comments! I think it would be great to be able to share examples of just how fun and creative we can get with this medium, and this seems like the perfect opportunity 😉 Reply to your own comment if you have more than one, or to other people if the icon fits, so it's not just a mass of top-level comments.

As for any newcomers, if this post gets enough comments, you may get a chance to try out another one of Dreamwidth's features; at 50 comments, comment threads will collapse to keep loading time down and limit data transfer costs. Towards the topmost comment, at the bottom of the comment below which everything gets folded up, there's a clickable option to Expand the thread. This will open up and display all of the comments below that for you! The thread will collapse back down if you click away, though.

If this post doesn't get that many comments but you still want to try it out, I'd recommend checking the latest post at dw_news. (Incidentally, if you have a Paid account, there's an option to expand all the comment threads at once at the top of the comment section. Pretty neat, yeah?)

Thanks, everyone, and I hope this post was helpful! I'm going to go collapse for a while now 😅

Edit: I've added a clarification about which icons will be kept if you go from a paid account to a free account with more than 15 icons.

Hello, everyone! I'm Socchan, and I run moodthemeinayear.

For those of you who are new to Dreamwidth-style blogging, you may have noticed a field where you can input your mood when you make a post: You can select a given mood from a drop-down menu or enter a custom mood in a separate field. If you select a mood from the drop-down menu, you'll notice that it adds a little graphic to your post, themed after the mood you've chosen. This is called a "Mood Theme", and if you have a paid account, you can make and use a custom one!

Custom mood themes can be a lot of fun; you can use screencaps or gifs from your favorite show or comics, draw fanart of your favorite characters, or even do original art! If you go the original art route, you can even submit it to be an official Dreamwidth mood theme that will be available for everyone to use, no paid account required!

While there are a total of 132 possible mood images to make, mood theme images have a hierarchical structure, where one image can represent many moods. If you want a better idea of how that works, I recommend taking a look at the Chasy's Animexpress hierarchical mood tree; you can see pretty easily how a mood like "Frustrated" gets its image from "Angry".

Since the moods are structured like this, you only need a bare minimum of 15 images to have a picture for every mood. If you want more variety, there are another 19 higher level moods that branch off into other moods, for a total of 34 moods total.

In addition to running the full 132 mood set at three moods a week (with regular one-week breaks), Mood Theme in a Year also runs a Minimal Mood Theme track parallel to it, with the base 15 moods plus the three second-level moods that have the most images associated with them, to min-max your mood image diversity. If you want a fairly diverse mood theme but don't want to go for a whole year, this is a pretty efficient way to go about it! The current run of the Minimal Mood Theme track started on Monday, and goes through December 1st, with the usual three moods a week; it's the last Minimal Mood track run this year, so if you miss any moods or want to include extras, you'll have the rest of December to make more. And if you want to go for the whole shebang, the mood calendar will be starting over again on January 1st!

If you want more information on how to make or use a custom mood theme, or about Mood Theme in a Year itself, feel free to drop me a comment here, at moodthemeinayear, or via DM, and I'll do my best to help sort things out!