Newcomers to Dreamwidth

Side blogs are a feature of Tumblr that are beloved by many: A secondary blog that you can post to without signing out of your primary blog. Most people use this secondary account to blog about and reblog things related to an interest they consider too "niche" for their main account, specific fandom content being among the main contenders. Other Tumblr users can subscribe to/follow specifically that side account, and while Tumblr recently added the ability for side blogs to respond to comments under the name of the account that is commented on, the side blogs themselves cannot subscribe to/follow anyone.

That's not quite a thing on Dreamwidth. One alternate option would be to create an entire separate journal account; Dreamwidth Roleplayers do this a lot, and may even be able to direct you to widgets that can help you switch between accounts quickly. But this is about the same as creating a separate Tumblr account, and not so much as creating a side account.

Something that might come closer is creating a personal community: A community that only one person can post to.

If you've been nosing around newcomers or the_great_tumblr_purge for a while, you probably have some idea of how communities work on Dreamwidth. Tumblr is, in fact, currently implementing a similar feature, so you may be familiar with the idea from there, as well (though last I knew it was still in beta).

Creating a community of any kind should start in a similar way to creating a personal account; unlike creating a new journal, however, it can be done while you are logged in: Go to the "Create" tab and scroll to the bottom to Create Community. There, you will be prompted to name and title your community. As an example for this post, I am currently creating a community named example_comm, whose title is, "An example community for demonstration's sake".

You will then be prompted to pick how open you want community membership to be: open (anyone can freely join), moderated (anyone can ask to join, must be approved by an administrator), or by invitation only (only people invited by an administrator may join). This does not affect whether people are able to subscribe to a community, only whether they can post. I'm selecting "By invitation only", because this community is only for an example, but you can pick whichever you like.

Some things to keep in mind when picking your preference: Anyone who joins a community will be able to see posts locked to that community; if you want to have a side blog that only a certain subset of people can see the posts of, they will need to be members of the community. If you've ever wanted to have control of who follows your side account before they click the follow button, go with "moderated" or "by invitation only". If you don't have a preference to who joins, go with "open". If you don't plan to make any locked posts that only your community members will see, pick "by invitation only".

The next steps are to edit the community settings, edit the community profile, and customize community appearance.

( Edit Community Settings )

( Edit Community Profile )

( Customize Community Appearance )

And that should do the trick! If you have any questions, if I've missed anything, or anything else, please feel free to comment and I'll do my best to help.