The Mandelbear's Musings

I don't really expect that many Tumblr refugees will see this post, even with the tag, but I know there's at least one person already on my reading list who cross-posts from there, so there may be a few. There may be some G+ refugees, too. In reality, all I'm doing is taking advantage of the occasion to post a few links. Hopefully more than just a handful of my readers will find them interesting.

Let's start with the useful stuff. (People who have been on DW long enough to remember the Livejournal exodus will probably want to skip ahead to the fascinating stuff.)

We can start with the DW community post_tumblr_fandom and ilyena_sylph's About tumblr and DW, mostly news post answers. Good overviews. Another great summary is staranise | Basic Dreamwidth for Tumblr users. (Which comes by way of umadoshi | More using/getting-to-know-Dreamwidth, fandom-migration, and WTF-Tumblr links.)

That's probably enough to get most people started. On my personal reading list, the posts I've seen lately are:

• denise's announcement on dw_news | Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks! -- this, or rather the notification in my email, was how I first learned about this debacle. With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs.
• From siderea | [dw] Welcome, G+ and Tumblr Refugees!, which links to Welcome Back to Social Journaling (basically how to get the most out of DW) and The Recipe, Or What you don't know about LJ/DW (on how to build and hold an audience).
• From kyburg, a crosspost from Tumblr, ironically, of Arkady Cosplay — From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal,... deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit... (Good advice about how to leave gracefully.)
• From madfilkentist, a post comparing Dreamwidth vs. Facebook and Tumblr.
• ... and my own post from the (most recent) LJ exodus, PSA: LJBF: Goodbye's too good a word.... (I note that I still haven't carried out the full plan there -- I'm still cross-posting. I'll probably continue to, since there are still some people who only have accounts there. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Tumblr.)

Okay, now the fascinating stuff. Watch out for rabbit holes.

Let's start with jesse_the_k's post, Remember when Fandom Spec'ed Pinboard?. Well, no, I don't -- I wasn't using Delicious at the time. But apparently a lot of fans were, so when the site's owners (Yahoo) made some "improvements" like disallowing several punctuation characters in tags (in particular, "/" -- just try tagging fanfic without slash), there was a mass exodus to Pinboard.

Jesse links to Fan Is A Tool-Using Animal, which tells the whole story very entertainingly. It's a transcript of a talk given at dConstruct 2013 by Maciej Cegłowski. The talk included a reading from this hilarious bit of fanfic and, more relevant to our current topic, this amazing collaborative Google doc which is a list of features (with votes and use cases) that fans wanted for Pinboard.

So, finally getting back to Tumblr, (remember Tumblr? this is a post about Tumblr) here's the Tumblr-inspired version of the Pinboard spec: Fandom platform of the future - specs and features, on Google Docs.

How much of that gets into Pinboard, Dreamwidth, AO3, or anything else is anybody's guess. But fen are amazing, and anything can happen when you dive down a rabbit hole.