lb_lee: A B-movie blond young man with a pompadour, resembling a Cabbage Patch Elvis, grins weirdly into the camera. (wowzy wow wow!)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-07-07 09:15 am
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LB Dreamwidth Etiquette

We’re getting followed by folks from elsewhere on the Internet and seeing sentiments along the lines of “eep, I don’t know the social rules here,” so here’s how we conduct this blog!

First of all: the public part of this blog is a working blog, so to speak, so subscribe at whim. No introduction or speaking required. Lurkers are welcome. You don’t even need an account! This blog has a full RSS and Atom feed, which you can follow without me ever knowing you exist. If you are only here for one thing, you can play with combo tags RSS so you only get the stuff you want! Furthermore, anonymous comments are generally always turned on (and if I turn them off, I announce when and why). If you prefer to be an invisible being crouched in the bushes like an anthropologist birdwatcher, that’s a totally acceptable way to (a)socially interact with this blog! You are a welcome part of our online ecosystem! Stay safe, shy neighbors!

We have no “before you friend,” no “do not interact,” and we do not play middle school games of “can you BELIEVE this creep followed me?! EW!” Those are social norms generated on websites that are constantly shoving other people’s stuff into your face; Dreamwidth has the opposite problem of “where is everybody?!” If you don’t like what you read here, walk out! You can leave! Real winners quit!

We log IP addresses for all commenters and always will, because it helped us identify a murder victim and add data points to a court case in 2023. If that troubles you, use a VPN or stick to lurking. We track readers not at all.

We have readers with slow connections and visual impairments, so we put most images behind cuts, and we alt text every image on this blog (and if we cannot, we say why and welcome transcriptions in the comments). Similarly, we try to use cut text and tags when writing anything likely to upset people, like the “politics” tag. (We try not to talk about politics on this blog, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult.) We consider it good manners to not surprise people with horrible news, and usually try to apply the rule of, “is this entertaining, useful, or insightful?” before posting. (Our trauma filter is an exception and we try to make it extremely clearly labeled, opt-in, and use cut text liberally.)

If all you want is our work—art, essays, fiction, comics, stupid plural slapfight stories of yore—then you’re all set, but we also have a great deal of locked material on various filters. These filters are us outside of professional persona. They are personal, the equivalent of chats with friends or private parties in my living room, and while anyone may request access (as long as they introduce themselves), we reserve the right to say no or boot someone. If it’d get you bounced from a party, it’ll get you bounced from here! Similarly, it is our rule to make any statement of “I need off this filter,” temporarily or permanently, socially acceptable. Ditto asking in case there’s something you want to avoid: “I have a deep terrible fear of cars, do you ever discuss those?”

On personal filters, conversation is the point. If you request access, never speak, and I don’t know you (or get to know you), I will probably assume your account is defunct or you’re not interested and weed you. Parties are for my friends; don’t be a stranger!

This blog archive goes back almost twenty years. Commenting on old posts (“thread necromancy”) is fine, long as you understand that maybe opinions have changed over the years and that the point has long since been conceded.

I don’t use private messages a lot, and I’ve had problems with them dropping in the past. If you send one and get no response, please try again! I might’ve lost it! (Also, maybe make sure you have your privacy settings set so I can actually RESPOND. You’d be surprised how often someone sends me a DM, only for my response to get a “this user doesn’t allow messages from...” error.)

I don’t block people very often, because I don’t have to. As long as you behave yourself, you are welcome here. Conversely, behave badly and that’s it for you.

We are mostly recovered from years in the tumblr bile mines, but we have zero patience with trauma dicksizing or micromanaging fiction. Our rule is, “does this have a measurable, concrete negative effect on the world?” and most fiction does not make the grade, never mind fanfiction. We frankly have way bigger, more pressing shit to deal with than someone’s ship or fetish.
ghost_ship: A white-haired woman with big booba with her head propped up in her hand (adelaide)

[personal profile] ghost_ship 2025-07-07 07:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Given that social expectations tend to be a struggle for us to understand and articulate, we appreciate this! We've been trying to put together one of these sorts of posts for our journal, and we've been poking around other folks' to figure out what the actual heck to put in it. I like that you give a lot of context and reasoning for everything. That's super helpful!

-Adelaide/Adel

[personal profile] cheliceri 2025-07-08 03:44 am (UTC)(link)
And this is why my group has been friended to y’all in one form or other for god fucking knows how long.
-Angel
pilotsofanewsky: a purple sky with airplane trails framed by black tree outlines (Default)

[personal profile] pilotsofanewsky 2025-07-09 09:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Seconding the appreciation for clear social rules! Thanks for spelling these out. We quit tumblr 9 years ago and we haven't quite figured out how/whether we want to post on DW yet. The constant fear of saying something Wrong (TM) and getting dogpiled still lives on. But it seems much more chill by design!