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a fandom old’s guide to how livejournal fandom worked (in super basic terms)
so people are talking about dreamwidth as a tumblr alternative, and the idea of a return to livejournal-style fandom is sort of exciting to old people like me. but it is also wildly, unthinkably different from tumblr and twitter fandoms, not just in user experience but in the actual fundamentals of fandom activity itself. so i thought i’d try to explain how livejournal fandoms worked!
your journal
the obvious comparison here is your tumblr blog! but there’s a reason sites like tumblr were called “microblogging”: the DW/LJ style journal is much more text-heavy. there’s no mechanism for reblogging, and posting standalone images without a caption or story to go with it was not the norm. this is because most of the time when you’re posting, you’re hoping to actually start a conversation in the comments!
unlike on tumblr, comments were actually useful and useable. they nest, so it’s super clear who is responding to whom, and you can have multiple threads of conversation in response to a single post. i’d argue this is where the core of fandom interactions took place!
some people made their journals entirely private, meaning you have to be mutuals or added as a follower to see their stuff. this made it much, much easier to curate your fandom experience by being able to post meta/thoughts/complaints just to a selected circle of followers and friends.
the posts of journals you follow show up on a feed just like your tumblr dash, in reverse chronological order. as I said, there is no ay to share a post on your feed, just comment on it or write your own post and link to it. random discoverability is… low. there are tags, but they are only used for searching within someone’s journal.
so how do you find people, or get to know someone who has a private journal? well–
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