SOS (save our socialization)--someone please explain dreamwidth to me

[bodyetal]

not the usual thing, but could someone explain to me how you find/form social circles on dreamwidth? do communities work? HOW do they work? i'm a zoomer who's too used to the tagging & algorithm economy and i'm kind of losing my mind.

i don't even need good advice, i'm just going in circles without feedback /lh

Comments

[dkta]

I'm in the same boat so I have no clue whether or not this'll help but I've had this tab open for the past... day, I've been on this website 😅 right now I'm honestly just going through the Latest Things feed and reading/replying to the stuff that interests me, see if that'll lead me to some bearings or a comfortable community.

[lb_lee]

Some communities do indeed work! We don't use them much ourself, so are useless for recs, but there are some still plural comms around. (By which I mean, like, proper ones. pluralstories is kinda monkeywrenching it for cataloging purposes, it's not really a social community!) Search "plurality" or whatever as an interest (it's in the search bar in the top right corner) and at the "Show:" list, click "communities only." (You can also use this to find individual users with interests you share, be they "plurality" or... I dunno, "macrame.")

Finding people on Dreamwidth is generally having conversations in the comments! Find people in the comments saying neat things, respond, check out their accounts, see if they're saying interesting things, then comment there and say hi and see if you hit it off. Tags are PURELY for individual blog sorting and have no global search. (I honestly way prefer this; I don't want to have to come up with weird workaround names for my tags to avoid people searching them globally just to be a jerk to me! And it also means nobody'll get spammed because I'm using a "plurality" tag and doing a bunch of catalog work for it all at once.)

You can also check out people's profiles to see if any of their comms or friends look interesting!

But yeah, commenting is the main name of the game.

[erinptah]

Honestly, it's a lot of "you start with one friend, they link to posts from other people and/or have comments sections with other people, you follow any of the other people who seem cool."

Communities to follow to find other places to follow: dw_community_promo, followfriday

Some active general-fandom communities: fandomsecrets, yuletide_admin, fanart_recs, fancake