#sort of using tumblr as a private public diary since i don't think anyone is really following me here anymore...?

[cinnabea]

one of the things that continually stalls me out on so many things I've been writing is this big fear of how things would be received, since I constantly feel like nothing I write ever comes close to my golden era (sink to swim, and it was just right, sneku). and I don't think I'm wrong; I might be a more technically skilled writer now but whatever magic spark of inspiration I had back then isn't coming back. But it's okay! cuz now that I've largely disconnected myself from fandom I can just have fun writing again. like I'm genuinely having fun doing all this worldbuilding and writing for sink to sleep even though sequels are ALWAYS a bad idea. but again it's okay cuz I never even have to publish it (and at this rate bnha will be finished before I am anyway), I can just write it for me and me alone and that removes the fear entirely. well, not entirely, I am always my worst critic lmao but it's different!! anyway I still love being mean to bkdk

[chacusha]

Dreamwidth pitch

Sometimes I wish more people would talk to me on Dreamwidth but then I don't really talk about Dreamwidth and why it's good or how it works, so maybe it would be good for me to do that??

So I guess some of the basic selling points about Dreamwidth:

Signing up is free and quick. (Also, I believe you can have any number of accounts associated with the same email address.) It has a similar vibe to Tumblr -- a geeky/fannish space.

It is a journaling website based on LiveJournal. By this I mean that it's almost like having a diary where you can choose to make some parts of that diary public or semi-public (at which point it becomes a blog). Counter to the direction of a lot of social media sites which increasingly focus on metrics, engagement (in a numeric form of views/likes/notes/retweets/etc.), and wide availability and easy (or automatic) sharing of content so as to maximize those metrics, Dreamwidth goes in the opposite direction with a focus on privacy. Each post you make has three possible privacy settings: public (viewable by anyone visiting the site), friends (viewable only to people who you have intentionally granted access to your friends-only posts -- you can also freely define custom friend groups to select subsets of friends, although I don't usually use this level of compartmentalization), and private (viewable only by you). It's very easy to check which privacy setting you've used for a post and to change them after the fact. Because posts on Dreamwidth cannot be shared or reblogged, when you revoke access to your post, it is immediate and total because you control the only copy of the post. Usual internet exceptions apply: People may screenshot your post; the internet archive may manually or automatically take a snapshot of older content; or a person might still have "friends" access and then leak the details of a post outside of "friendslock", which would make semi-private material accessible to the public again even though you've tried to lock it down. But for the most part, you much less run into the issue where something you wrote when you were 16 is still public knowledge and can't be scrubbed from the internet. And because privacy settings are such a big feature of the site, there are strong social norms against violating someone's privacy by sharing details they've posted semi-privately outside of that space. I really like this aspect of Dreamwidth because being able to write up my thoughts on very personal things I'm thinking about or going through and have some close internet friends who I trust share their thoughts in response has been so helpful to me throughout my life. There are a lot of mental health benefits to keeping a diary and even more so when you can get semi-anonymous advice from people you know and trust on the internet. I cannot tell you how invaluable it has been to panic or vent about some situation I'm encountering for the first time and have an older and wiser friend give me some advice on how to approach it. I've really grown as a person through first LiveJournal and now Dreamwidth as its replacement because of the semi-anonymous (pseudonymous) AND semi-private way you interact with the site and other users, and I don't know any other social media website that can do this, except I suppose through DMs, but that always feels like having a side conversation whereas doing it on a journaling site makes it the main conversation, where it's easier to organize/search/sort through.

Dreamwidth was forked from LiveJournal many years ago by a small group of people who are very thoughtful and intentional about site design and purpose. You can see in the way DW and LJ have diverged since what the value is in having site runners who have a philosophy about approaching websites that's more than just "make money/break even." Dreamwidth is very "shoestring budget" in its feel -- it has fewer features, development is slow and (I'm guessing) largely done by the site founders or volunteers, and bugs are slow to fix. But on the flipside, the site is simple and loads quickly, the default look of the site is very clean and easy to read, and in addition, the site allows you to fully customize the default style in which content is displayed to you, something that other social media sites will never do (aside from a "dark mode", I suppose) because being able to establish and fully control the site look is key for a company's/website's branding. However, Dreamwidth goes another direction, because accessibility and accessibility features have been a value of the site owners from the founding, and they take that seriously. Dreamwidth is also very intentional about its content policy and takes pains to maximize free expression while still maintaining a safe environment conducive for dialogue and debate for its users. Finally, there are no advertisements on the site anywhere at all. Zero. How does the site support itself, then, you ask? It's based on a paid subscription model where a core of passionate users are willing to pay some money each year so that the site is able to support the amount of users/traffic it gets. This funding model means that the site remains the product being sold rather than the users (and their data/eyeballs). This is a good alignment to have because you want the site to be incentivized to be useful and valuable to users rather than to harvest as much as it can from its users so as to be useful and valuable to advertisers. Dreamwidth takes security seriously and keeps its users informed about potential security breaches (e.g. one where LJ's passwords were compromised, which led to DW accounts using the same password being similarly compromised). A comparison of what Dreamwidth and LiveJournal are like now is illustrative -- I find LiveJournal almost unusable because of the ads, loading times, and just general janky interface; LJ has also been subject to multiple purges and controversial content policy changes over the years. Being on Dreamwidth is almost calming and relaxing by contrast, even though it is clearly missing some obvious and sometimes very useful features like post-/comment-liking, video uploading, post scheduling, etc.

How tagging works on Dreamwidth: This is probably the biggest difference in how Tumblr/AO3 and Dreamwidth work. On Tumblr and AO3, tags are universal across the whole site. When you tag a post with something, then it will appear in global searches for anyone browsing that tag. Heck, on Tumblr, it might pop up unsolicited on someone's dash if they follow that tag. Tags are the main way people find and are recommended content from people they're not already following. On Dreamwidth, though, tags only apply to your blog. There is no universal tag search. I mean, you can search Dreamwidth for content you're interested in; you can also search users based on what tags they've listed in their "Interests." In my experience, though, this tends to not really turn up much useful stuff; you'll likely get a lot of weird/niche content probably not meant to be viewed by a wider audience, as well as users and communities who haven't updated their journal in, like, five years. Not very useful. (In general, content production and content discovery are extremely anemic on DW, a downside I discuss more fully below.) However, what this means is that tags are 100% geared toward the function of helping you organize your own blog. You have full control over your tagging scheme. Much more than any social media website I can think of (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram for sure), Dreamwidth facilitates having a complete record of every post you've written and helps you easily find specific content again even if you wrote it years in the past. This is why I say the site is very good for journaling. It's easy to double-check things like: "In order for people to understand this part, they need to read that post where I talked about that grocery store incident. Where is that post?" "How long have I been having this issue at work? Oh wow, my first post on this was eight months ago." "Where are all the posts I've made with my TV show reviews?" (Tip: The default setting on Dreamwidth is to display only a selection of the most frequently used tags in alphabetical order on your main journal page; I would recommend overriding this immediately to set it to show all tags because your tags are going to be a SUPER useful navigation tool for sorting through your own posts.)

Features that support having actual conversations with your friends rather than shouting one-sidedly into the void and maybe getting a supportive like in response IDK: Fully-threaded comments (and also, no "like" button). *old lady voice* Kids these days don't appreciate the value of a fully-functional comment threading system! Okay, so Dreamwidth allows you to start new comments in response to a post and reply freely to other comments, creating a kind of hierarchical tree structure. All the discussion associated with a post is viewable on a single page, and this means you can have a pretty detailed back-and-forth with the author of a post without coming off as hostile or without awkwardly spamming your followers with one half of the conversation, which is how conversations work on Tumblr. The comment character limit is 16k characters (~2500 words) so you can reply fully to a post rather than needing to condense the essence of your reply into a brief comment. You can talk not only to your friends but also to your friends' friends who are contributing to the discussion too. Separation of public and private spaces: I won't go into this too much but Dreamwidth has "personal blogs" (private spaces) and "communities" (public spaces moderated by the leader of the community) that work very differently (have completely different mechanics underlying them). Unlike Tumblr and Twitter, this means there is a clear separation between public and private spaces, behavior norms in each, and who you're accountable to when interacting in each space, which does a lot to ease social interactions and make them less fraught and contentious. And unlike sites like Reddit, you actually GET a private space without having to interact entirely in communities/special interest forums. These sets of features means that you can have a very deep, easy-to-follow conversation in a semi-public forum on a wide variety of topics while keeping the conversation all in one place and allowing interested people to follow the conversation. It's just a set of features that prioritizes responding to content with high-quality conversation rather than the mere sharing of content without comment.

If you're interested in joining Dreamwidth, here is a word of warning and then advice:

The warning is that, unlike Tumblr, it is very hard to make friends on DW. On Tumblr, you can make friends by browsing tags and journals of people who post things relevant to your interests or who interact on the posts YOU'RE making and sharing; you can follow someone whose content you enjoy and want to continue seeing and maybe they follow you back and start interacting with your posts! Cool. Easy. DW makes this process problematic in many ways: (1) as mentioned earlier, content discovery is difficult, (2) in some cases, most or all of people's content may be friendslocked which means you cannot preview it before you decide to approach someone suggesting to be friends, (3) assuming you do find a stranger whose (public) content is interesting, you can "subscribe" to them (the equivalent of following on Tumblr; their content now regularly shows up on your dash ("friends page")) and/or "friend" them (this will give them access to YOUR friendslocked posts); the person you subscribe to or friend will get a notification of this action, but this doesn't actually mean you are or will be "friends." You see, in order to be friends, someone needs to subscribe and friend you back. For the first thing, that means being interested in your content (usually not an issue; even if you don't have any content, people are willing to take a chance on you and subscribe back). But the second thing is more important -- by friending you back, that will grant access to all the friendslocked entries. Just because some stranger on the internet is interested in what you post and is like "Friends?" and give you access to their friendslocked entries doesn't mean you actually trust that person enough to give them full access to your years and years of friendslocked writing, you know what I mean? So making a random friend request might just result in being completely ignored. Instead, you often need to give someone the context for why you are interested in being friends, introduce yourself, and ask for their permission to friend before hitting that button.

Okay, so what this means is that it is very hard to find potential friends on DW and trying to friend people can be way more work than creating a new account and clicking some buttons on people's profiles. So how do people make friends on DW?! In order to get around this, people have come up with several things:

Friending memes: These are activities that happen every so often where someone gives people a form to fill out (where you talk about various interests and type of things you post about on your blog, potential dealbreakers in your content, etc.) and people browse through other people's comments and when they find someone who looks interesting, they can reply and be like "Hey! You seem like an interesting person. I also post about camping and photography. Want to be friends?" It's like, uh, speed dating but for online friends? This is much better than a cold approach as described above. In particular, every January on Dreamwidth, a group of people runs an activity called the Snowflake Challenge, where they have various fannish activities and challenges and you can choose to participate in whichever ones you like. A lot of them act as kind of icebreaker questions, and you can strike up conversations with other people by browsing things they've posted, and at some point in the activity, there's always a friending meme. Usually reccing active communities and helpful resources on DW is also part of the Snowflake Challenge (which is SUPER useful because being on DW can be like walking through a graveyard sometimes), so it's great for people who are new.

Stickied friending posts at the top of journals. These posts will often explain what kind of journal the person keeps, what content they post, how much of their journal is friendslocked, requirements for friending, etc. Comment there to introduce yourself, explain why you are interested in friending this person, ask to be friended back, etc.

Participate in public-space "communities" first and use that to find friends. Okay, okay, a bit difficult because there are a lot of communities on DW that are *tumbleweed blowing in the wind* -- dead. Abandoned. So quiet and unresponsive that it's almost worse than being fully dead because there are people there who will sometimes give you a bite but it's just not enough to feel worth the time and now you're all embarrassed for yourselves and each other. Here are some recs of active communities: dw_community_promo (for finding (newly) active communities, not necessarily fannish in nature); fandom_on_dw (any kind of fannish activities/communities); fandomcalendar (fannish events); thefridayfive (a currently active community that posts a collection of five questions each Friday; great for icebreakers and you can browse other people's answers); addme_fandom (if a friending meme were a community instead; this comm also has a lot of resources for new joiners of DW in its sticky post). Active but maybe a bit drama-llama-y (you may or may not enjoy these): fandomsecrets (an EXTREMELY long-running community run by maybe the most tireless/superhuman mod I know of; you can anonymously submit images containing a fandom-related secret you have, and they get posted in random order over the following week and people discuss in the comments -- it's a great multifandom space, especially if you want to vent about some fandom drama you're going through or an unpopular opinion you have, but can be intimidating to interact there non-anonymously due to the nature/contentiousness of the secrets/discussions sometimes; also, sometimes people are mean :(); fail_fandomanon (a fandom gossip comm, essentially, but also a good multifandom discussion place; very difficult to find friends, though, due to the anonymous posting requirement but it's very active and gives you plenty of reading material if you largely like to use social media to read interesting stuff you didn't know about before. Also, its "Ask meme" threads and its personal posts are great for getting anonymous help and advice -- like you know those newspaper advice columns or r/AITA or r/relationships? That kind of thing. You can be very detailed about an issue you're having in your personal life and people will give you advice. Even more so than fandomsecrets, "lightly bitchy and petty" is kind of the vibe of this place, and anonymous trolling is commonplace (one rule of the comm is "don't be THAT much of an asshole" which kind of gives you an idea of what baseline level of politeness we're talking about here). It's got a complicated set of norms that have developed over time (see, for example, the elaborate comment titles and the sheer number of acronyms flying around), which can make the learning curve for delurking pretty steep.

Weirdly, the type of communities in which I have made the longest-lasting LJ/DW friends have been "landcomms," a special kind of competitive fannish activity community. I think they were based on the House Cup of Harry Potter. At least, it's easiest to explain it that way: there are multiple "games"/"rounds" (each lasting 3 months, say) where all the participants are sorted into teams, and they earn points for their team by participating in various challenges and activities set up by the mods. I no longer have time to really be active in any of these but WOW they really help you make friends who you know pretty deeply because you're interacting and strategizing with your fellow teammates, and over time you get to know the regulars quite well. These communities often lock all their content and activities to members only, which means that it's a good sandbox to experiment with fannish creation because the audience is fairly small and a priori quite supportive. You can experiment and put your work out there in a way that isn't like "now everyone on the internet has access to this and can judge it." Anyway, I'm too old to participate in these, but apparently lands_of_magic is an active multifandom landcomm and might be worth checking out.

Some other random features of Dreamwidth that I like, and also the major weaknesses of Dreamwidth as a site:

Strength: You get multiple icons/userpics. It's kind of weird to me that social media sites have done away with the ability for users to have multiple userpics (I suppose it does make it easier to identify who is saying what!), but in any case, this is a weirdly unique feature that LJ/DW have -- you can upload multiple 100x100 little images and choose which one to accompany each post and comment you make (or just use your default icon). Icons on DW, to me, are like custom emoji on Discord. They are ways to be expressive through images without the need for words, they can be quite personal, you get some slots for free, but because a lot of people get REALLY into them, users are literally willing to pay money for more slots that they can use. Anyway, you get 15 icon slots by default, and there are a lot of users and communities dedicated to making icons that people can use. It's fun!

Strength: Dreamwidth has a very powerful and simple HTML editor. Weakness: I have never used Dreamwidth's rich text editor, and everything I hear from people who have used it suggests it is an unusuable eldritch horror. Cannot verify that experience, but even without using it, I am pretty confident that DW's "WYSIWYG" editing ("what you see is what you get" -- that is, however you format a post while drafting it, that's what it will look like to other people when posting) is extremely far behind other social media sites. If I were to post and format this post on Dreamwidth (and I will), I would be able to do a lot more with controlling how the bulletpoints look and are nested, and I could do things like create sections in the post that make it easy to navigate to specific sections, and I could do things like add tables and collapsible sections because I think Dreamwidth allows almost any HTML5 tag (more so than e.g. what AO3 allows). On the negative side, however, it is much harder to do things like arrange images in a photoset on Dreamwidth. In short, you WILL need some kind of HTML knowledge to do anything fancier than paragraphs of text (images, embeds, polls, bulleted lists, etc.). However, if text is all you're doing, it's a really nice editor. And for power users, HTML is a good skill to have and unlocks a lot of possibilities with your posts, and DW is one of the best interfaces for doing pared-down, simplified HTML editing I've ever used.

Strength: Some more on accessibility: So remember how I said that DW lets you control the way the site is displayed to you? This means you can heavily customize how your reading page and blog looks, what links and sidebar widgets are available and where they're placed on the page, etc. But you know, that kind of freedom can be dangerous. As you might know well from Tumblr, what about people with custom blog styles that are a horrendous viewing experience -- autoplay music, flashing gifs, low text-background contrast, color scheme that makes your eyes burn, etc.? Well, DW has thought about that. Whenever you get a link to a DW post or someone's DW blog and you don't like the style, you can just append ?style=site OR ?style=mine OR ?style=light to the URL and voila -- it's readable again. ?style=site will display the page in DW's standard style which is a light grey + red/pink highlights style that is designed to be easy on the eyes. ?style=mine will display the page in YOUR custom style, so if you've made tweaks to the site style to optimize your reading experience, you can now apply it everywhere you like. Finally, ?style=light displays the page with minimal styling so that it can be loaded quickly in situations where your connection is bad. All of these things allow you to have an optimal reading experience.

Strength: Polls. If you have a paid account, Dreamwidth lets you make polls. This is probably the number one reason why I have a paid DW account, to be honest, because polls are really useful for running communities and getting feedback. Like, when I mod communities and I want to get the opinion of members, I can post a poll, and my paid account lets me do this in any community as well as on my personal journal. I used to run a lot of fanwork contest type communities, and you can conduct voting pretty easily that gives each user one vote, which is hard to ensure through third-party voting mechanisms. The downside here is that the opposite is not possible -- you can't run a poll that is open to the general public. I believe all poll participants need to have a DW account in order to participate.

Weakness: Dreamwidth's image-posting capabilities are still quite weak. It is only relatively recently that Dreamwidth allowed you to upload images to the site at all. A free account gives you only 500 MB, which is enough if you want to post a graphic or a photo here and there but not a lot if you're posting e.g. your full set of vacation photos or gifsets or reams of screencaps or whatnot. The upload interface leaves much to be desired. It is very difficult to add images to posts -- you either need to use the rich text editor (which comes with its own set of challenges) or you need to be pretty comfortable with HTML and understanding what <img src=""> means. DW does provide some copy and pasteable HTML code to put your image into the HTML post editor, but yeah, putting an image in a post is not the click-and-drag experience that it is on most modern social media sites. When I want to add some images to a post, the process is like this: Open a new tab and go to the DW homepage. Click Create > Upload Images. Upload files. Make sure the privacy settings of the images match my post. Get each image embed code and go back to my other tab where I'm editing my post and paste it in. Repeat for all images. Yay. It is certainly not a simple experience.

Weakness: There is no reblog function. This can have some benefits: as mentioned, you own the only copy of your post -- if other people want to share it, they have to give people the URL to it. However, let me be very frank about the downsides: it means that Dreamwidth is not a low-effort content-sharing website like most social media sites are nowadays, which has two major ramifications: First, you cannot create an interesting blog simply by following interesting blogs and curating an interesting feed. I mean, I suppose you can kind of do this by collecting interesting links and posting them as a DW post every so often, but that's still very different from how modern social media works where you just directly share the interesting content and that IS your blog. What this means is that in order to have an interesting blog, YOU have to consciously craft/draft your own interesting content from time to time; you cannot just rely on encountering interesting content from other people. What THIS means is that your DW blog is inevitably going to be quite personal. This can be pretty intimidating for someone who is starting out. I remember my first LiveJournal post (which even 18 years later took me about 10 seconds to pull up on my laptop -- the archival functions of DW are AMAZING) was essentially me saying "Hm… well I got this LJ but I don't know what kind of things to use this thing for or how long I'm going to keep it…" Anyway, it's always very awkward starting up a DW blog because you can't just find some content you find really cool and just share it and people get to know you and your tastes and your interests that way. Nah, you're kind of thrown into the oversharing deep end here. You're going to have to personally write something if you want people to have something to read. Second, keeping a DW blog can be a non-trivial amount of effort. Like I mentioned, you can certainly use your blog to curate content, but it requires some amount of work and effort to do even that. You can't just scroll and click and bam, you've added some content to your blog.

Weakness: Dreamwidth is very lo-fi and text-based. I mentioned the difficulties of uploading images; I mentioned the lack of a share button. What Dreamwidth is geared toward is plain text posts. I recognize this is very not ideal -- where are the visual aids? The images to break up all the dry walls of text? The whole experience of being on Dreamwidth is doing a lot of reading. And a lot of writing. A LOT. Sometimes people just don't have time for that. I get it. I mean, you can choose how often and how much to write and how much of your reading page you want to read, but regardless of how frequently and for how long you choose to engage with the site, it is never going to be an easy scrolling, filling-a-three-minute-lull-in-the-middle-of-the-work-day sort of experience, IMO. The content can be very interesting but it's got a high barrier to entry.

Weakness: Content discovery is very difficult. I discussed this earlier. But Dreamwidth really doesn't do much to shove content in your face. It doesn't have recommendation algorithms. This can be good because it helps you curate your feed to content you enjoy and people you trust, so you rarely have to block people because they are irritating you. You can just not follow them or easily scroll by their posts (DW is very text-based and high barrier to entry, right, so it takes a lot of conscious effort to consume content; it's not the type of site where you can run across the worst opinion you've ever read in your life and by the time you realize what it is, you've consumed the whole post). Spammers also aren't really a thing. But it means that you really do need to build up an interesting set of people/communities to follow or there's nothing for you to read or DO on the site. It also means that people will not just stumble across YOUR posts unless you put forward effort to promote them somewhere (e.g. in an active relevant community, which, you know, may not exist). You're never going to get that dopamine hit of people liking and reblogging your stuff instantly after you post it. And even when you want to share something widely, it can be tricky trying to figure out whether that's possible at all. Strength: On the plus side, I suppose it really is like having a private little sandbox. Like you're over here going "vroom vroom" with your toy cars or whatever, and it's extremely unlikely you'll get some rando barging into your replies talking about how your car-playing is all WRONG and here's what you should do instead.

Weakness: Dreamwidth is "dead." I mean, you can still find plenty of people who are active on DW. I have a great, very active set of friends whose posts I enjoy reading (and they all post different sorts of things; I have enough friends that I can't actually read all the content I'm interested in, but I do try) and who regularly respond to my posts. I'm very happy there. Personal blogs are doing fine. But personal blogs are only one half of Dreamwidth -- the other half are communities (public spaces) and those are not doing so well in my experience. You have a couple of active islands I mentioned above, and if your fandoms are sufficiently big, you can probably find an active discussion comm for them. But if your fandoms are small or even if you're in a big fandom that just doesn't seem to have found a dedicated mod and a critical mass of active users interested in public discussions, then you're shit out of luck when it comes to public discussion venues on DW. Depending on your needs/interests, this might be fine, or it might be a dealbreaker. For me personally, as someone who was on LJ in its heyday, the lack of communities is a bit demoralizing. It's certainly quieter and it has this feel of there being a few towers of refuge in a barren landscape that people are flocking around. And like I said, communities help you make friends. And it's just a different way of interacting with people, which I value in a social media site, and I can't really meet that need on DW with the current size of its userbase.

Weakness: There is no ask system. There are DMs; sometimes people play askbox meme-style games in the comment of posts (someone posts a list of questions, people comment to select the ones they want the OP to answer, OP replies in the comment thread with their answers); and I suppose you could create a stickied post with anonymous comments enabled to act as your askbox, but there's really no equivalent to the big set of functionality that is the askbox system on Tumblr. There's no way to privately ask someone a question, and that question can then easily be published or replied to privately at the discretion of the blog owner. If you'd like to poke someone to check in with them, the only way to do that is with a DM or a comment posted on a random blog entry; there's not really an easy way to ask a question or propose some content to someone's blog with asks the way there is on Tumblr.

Anyway, I think I've covered the main things about using Dreamwidth. I always want more people to come talk to me on Dreamwidth because I feel like that site is the only place that facilitates people getting to know me both on a purely fannish level and on a very personal level (I know people can make the personal + fannish sharing combo work on Twitter and Tumblr, but having everything be out in public just really does not work for me). But I realize it's hard to just start using a site you're unfamiliar with, especially one like Dreamwidth that tends to have a bit of a learning curve and is generally out of step with the direction of modern social media. And especially when you don't have many friends there already, which is probably the case for most people. But it's a site I respect and trust a lot, and I think it facilitates deep, long-lasting friendships. More than anything, I think the main difference between DW and Tumblr is that Tumblr is mainly a site for sharing content with other people and reacting to it, while DW is more geared toward helping you organize your life and your thoughts. They have a lot of overlap in terms of the kind of personal and fannish musings and experiences that can be shared, though. Anyway, if you're interested in joining Dreamwidth but it's intimidating/confusing, please reach out! I have lots more recs for active communities depending on your interests, too!

(Probably the best way to do that is on the Dreamwidth version of this post.)