an aesthetic note
Dec. 6th, 2018 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2rqlaM2
For so long now, I’ve been in the habit of waking up and looking at my computer, and going to my Tumblr activity page, and refreshing, and seeing notes and most of them aren’t things I can respond to at all, they’re notes of commentless reblogs and likes and such. So I’d get, on a really good day, like 2-3 replies to posts, and you can’t natively reply to replies, but if you have xkit you can kind of fudge it, so I’d get to do that. But remember the dark times when we had no replies? yeah then i would often have absolutely nothing to respond to. Sometimes I’d have asks, but I rarely got many of those, and if I did for some reason they made me so anxious– how was I to know whether i ought to reply publicly or privately? public replies make other people send asks, but is that rude, to make a conversation public? how do you know? sometimes that just meant i didn’t reply, which seemed like it also must be rude, but definitely meant that i got even fewer asks going forward.
Anyway.
Then with PF I’d go and try to force it to refresh, and remember of course, it doesn’t work like that, so I’d click over to my replies-dash, and get lost trying to answer replies, and wind up opening a shitload of tabs and accidentally closing the wrong ones and such, and then there’d be no indication of whether I got any likes, so I’d greedily go back to my own posts and scroll down and see if there were any, and sometimes there were and that was great, and for a bit I knew how to see who had actually done the liking but then they changed the feature slightly and so I actually now don’t know how to tell who liked a post, all I can see is that someone did at some point, so there’s that.
Now I refresh my email and have a bunch of comment notifications from Dreamwidth, and it’s like a voyage back through time to when I was in my 20s and had a pretty active social media life on LJ that a lot of, I could conduct without going to the webpage, because the comment notif emails allowed you to reply right in the email and they’d send it for you, and at varying times, they even had the full text of the entry in the email itself so you could scroll back up and remind yourself what you’d been discussing. So you could pretty much live from your email inbox and not have to load any webpages that might have images and things, and I didn’t appreciate that while I had it. (Also: if you replied to a post you liked, then you’d have it in your email, and if you had a POP mail service like I did, that meant you could reread it offline, which was how I genuinely lived for a while there.)
So that’s nice. I like that. It also helps me a lot because I lose track of conversations, and having a written record in email threads is kind of nice.
I’m still Tumblring but my heart’s not as in it, I’m being lured away. I’m gonna make yet one more appeal, there’s a few holdouts among you who haven’t said you’ll go to either Pillowfort or Dreamwidth, and I’m begging you, come away with me, to a land where we’ll never grow old– ok ok I’ll stop.
(Side thought: does DW privilege the Fandom Olds? Are we being smug about it? Do I count? Am I smug? I’m not meaning to be smug but God it’s so homey there, I’m so comfortable, I’ve already found the blogs of two or three Tumblr-lurker-likers who it turns out are actually beautiful longform essayist bloggers who never felt comfortable on Tumblr so they just scrolled and liked a lot, it’s been fabulous. Please come and let me win you over. Add me and comment to me and I will do whatever I can to help you feel loved, I promise.)
(Your picture was not posted)
For so long now, I’ve been in the habit of waking up and looking at my computer, and going to my Tumblr activity page, and refreshing, and seeing notes and most of them aren’t things I can respond to at all, they’re notes of commentless reblogs and likes and such. So I’d get, on a really good day, like 2-3 replies to posts, and you can’t natively reply to replies, but if you have xkit you can kind of fudge it, so I’d get to do that. But remember the dark times when we had no replies? yeah then i would often have absolutely nothing to respond to. Sometimes I’d have asks, but I rarely got many of those, and if I did for some reason they made me so anxious– how was I to know whether i ought to reply publicly or privately? public replies make other people send asks, but is that rude, to make a conversation public? how do you know? sometimes that just meant i didn’t reply, which seemed like it also must be rude, but definitely meant that i got even fewer asks going forward.
Anyway.
Then with PF I’d go and try to force it to refresh, and remember of course, it doesn’t work like that, so I’d click over to my replies-dash, and get lost trying to answer replies, and wind up opening a shitload of tabs and accidentally closing the wrong ones and such, and then there’d be no indication of whether I got any likes, so I’d greedily go back to my own posts and scroll down and see if there were any, and sometimes there were and that was great, and for a bit I knew how to see who had actually done the liking but then they changed the feature slightly and so I actually now don’t know how to tell who liked a post, all I can see is that someone did at some point, so there’s that.
Now I refresh my email and have a bunch of comment notifications from Dreamwidth, and it’s like a voyage back through time to when I was in my 20s and had a pretty active social media life on LJ that a lot of, I could conduct without going to the webpage, because the comment notif emails allowed you to reply right in the email and they’d send it for you, and at varying times, they even had the full text of the entry in the email itself so you could scroll back up and remind yourself what you’d been discussing. So you could pretty much live from your email inbox and not have to load any webpages that might have images and things, and I didn’t appreciate that while I had it. (Also: if you replied to a post you liked, then you’d have it in your email, and if you had a POP mail service like I did, that meant you could reread it offline, which was how I genuinely lived for a while there.)
So that’s nice. I like that. It also helps me a lot because I lose track of conversations, and having a written record in email threads is kind of nice.
I’m still Tumblring but my heart’s not as in it, I’m being lured away. I’m gonna make yet one more appeal, there’s a few holdouts among you who haven’t said you’ll go to either Pillowfort or Dreamwidth, and I’m begging you, come away with me, to a land where we’ll never grow old– ok ok I’ll stop.
(Side thought: does DW privilege the Fandom Olds? Are we being smug about it? Do I count? Am I smug? I’m not meaning to be smug but God it’s so homey there, I’m so comfortable, I’ve already found the blogs of two or three Tumblr-lurker-likers who it turns out are actually beautiful longform essayist bloggers who never felt comfortable on Tumblr so they just scrolled and liked a lot, it’s been fabulous. Please come and let me win you over. Add me and comment to me and I will do whatever I can to help you feel loved, I promise.)
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 03:13 am (UTC)I am glad I am not the only one who overthinks how to reply to asks. I assumed they were, in most cases, requesting a public reply until I answered one publicly. The person followed up later if I was going to reply to their ask. I said, "I did!" and sent the link. "Oh," they wrote back, "I didn't expect you would answer it publicly."
Does DW privilege fandom olds? Possibly. We are certainly comfortable here, but then, we really made an effort for years and years to be comfortable on a platform (Tumblr) that was often counterintuitive to how we "did fandom." I'm okay with being comfortable again for a while until the next big thing sweeps the fandom along with it. :) Also, personally speaking, I am happy to help anyone who needs it to get acclimated here. I do think veteran fans have a responsibility to help newcomers and remain sensitive to the challenges newcomers face when trying to get started in a sixty-year-old fandom.
(Also, hello, btw. :)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 11:33 am (UTC)What I'm loving here is the inbox, which is a case of me using it in a completely different way to how I used to. Tumblr trained me to click on the little lightning bolt thing to see who had been talking to me, so now I go to inbox before I go to my email.