I can see your point of view here. I don't personally think every last tag wrangler throwing in the towel would be helpful, but I've got to be honest: the reports of how bad and how long the corruption inside the OTW have been an issue, how badly the volunteers have been treated, how little accountability there is, just one thing after another all summer. It makes me wonder if it is possible to fix this organisation or change it into something less completely toxic. People have tried change from within for years and years, and gotten nowhere. I'm still a member of the OTW, and I'm still going to vote, but I've also started crossposting my fic to Dreamwidth, and am feeling pretty gross about posting to AO3 right now. I have to for fest I'm signed up for, but after that, I don't know what I'll do.
Agreed. I've put my AO3 on hold, and have been cross-posting a lot of my fics to Dreamwidth, but I'm just not sure how much the upcoming election is going to turn things around if there's so much to overcome with the Board and with Legal.
May I ask how your experience on Dreamwidth has been? I have been thinking of migrating to a new site that supports fanfiction in general (not just one specific fandom), but haven't had much luck.
Mine's been mixed. I'm already on Dreamwidth as a blogger, so it made sense to move my fic there (I used to post there before AO3). I find that people I know there already have been very kind about commenting on older fic I've posted there. However, my current fandom (Top Gun) doesn't really have many other fans on dreamwidth, so the most recent fic I posted (on both sites as it was for an exchange): ten people commented on AO3, and no one on dreamwidth (though I couple people very kindly left hearts). I'm trying to be up beat about it, but.... yeah.
It's a bit of a habit change to adjust to find and cultivate a feed (a little bit like tumblr, only more journalistic in format) - you have to put more effort into actively searching for a tag if you want to follow it for journal entries, but there are some comms (communities) that help connect new people. I think it's more personable, and I like the set-up that allows people to interact with both fics and the authors within a single entry.
The fandom calendar is a pretty good place to start, I think, since it shows a bunch of gift exchanges hosted on AO3 and there's a lot of overlap in people on both sites because of that. The Yuletide gift exchange also has a Dreamwidth account, and that's also a good starting point for connecting with people with similar interests.
I would say that the biggest drawback is that you need to know a bit of HTML if you want to post entries with things like italics or bolding, but they do have a page on their FAQ about what HTML is available here. Someone taught me when I got on to Dreamwidth how to do a basic formatting when cross-posting from AO3, and I put a modified version that I use, with a couple extra notes, onto pastebin, if anyone thinks it'll be useful for them.
I would say that the biggest drawback is that you need to know a bit of HTML if you want to post entries with things like italics or bolding
First, Dreamwidth has a rich text editor.
Second, the HTML editor allows you to use Markdown, which is always less effort than using DW's supported subset of HTML (worst case, you just fall back to using DW's supported subset of HTML if what you want to express isn't possible work in Markdown)
(That help page is slightly out of date, though, since DW has acquired support for Markdown in comments.)
I'm not sure how old you are, but you basically have to manually do a lot of things that are automated on AO3, like you have to make up and pick what tags to use, there isn't a pre-set list, and you can use a rich text editor, but it looks better if you do your own HTML (though You don't need to know very much).
DW FanFic has a directory of people's personal archives and journals, if you want to see what it looks like.
Replying because wow the other answer isn't very helpful. Also for anyone who is now hearing of Dreamwidth for the first time.
Dreamwidth is basically a blogging site, you keep a journal there. You can post whatever you want, though text is mainly what it's used for. That said, most embeds are allowed as well (images can be hosted on dreamwidth, but videos/sounds would have to be hosted elsewhere). Embedding is done using HTML and most sites just have a ready embed in the share dialogue.
Your journal supports comments and entries have a privacy setting (show to everyone, show to "friends" (i.e. people that you've granted access to), show to only yourself). You can subscribe to other journals and communities and that's what gives the ability to interact with people. Communities are mainly where you come in contact with lots of people, so that's how you find like-minded folk.
Posting fic can be done in two ways, either directly posting to a community or posting to your own journal and then (possibly in both cases) sharing the link to the fic post to communities. Yes, you'll have to come up with your own tags but you still need to do that here anyway. Searching for fic to read on dreamwidth is a bit of a pain, which is why communities like the one linked before are helpful.
(Guessing they brought up your age because someone older is more likely to have used a blogging/journal site and know how it works as opposed to someone who is young now and who most likely uses mainly social media, with tumblr being the closest example to Dreamwidth.)
Comment on Resignation of OTW Directors
Muccamukk Thu 27 Jul 2023 09:49PM UTC
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