Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?
To be flat-out honest, it’s because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it’s also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:
- Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I’d say that it’s slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3’s abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.
- In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about “go nuts, show nuts”, it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It’s also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn’t have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple’s content rules this way.)
- Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn’t sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I’m aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
- No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.
- Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No “For You” or “Suggested” page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.
- The ability to make posts that only your “mutuals”, or even only a specific subset of your “mutuals”, can see. Want to make a post that’s only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that’s only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can’t see shit? You can do that, too!
- The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!
- We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.
- Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they’re making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don’t have to find out ten months later that they’re locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).
So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.
Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.
Finally, we’re recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just… not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that’s just not possible.
Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.
Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.
Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.
TL;DR: There is no website that has everything that Tumblr wants and nothing that it hates. Dreamwidth at least has all of the important stuff covered.