I actually have a whole manifesto on "Why Dreamwidth is Not Catching On (and it might be too late but gosh we should try anyway)"
Basically, the big two problems (IMO) are the lack of good graphic support and terrible mobile options. Tumblr really excels in visuals. IIRC, fanart starting moving there first in fandom. And people love fanart! And manips and gifs. Which tumblr is frankly awesome for, and LJ/DW was never built for.
And DW doesn't have an app. And as far as I know, there is only ONE app that lets you post to DW and it's not great and it's Android-only. :/
So many people these days are using mobile for their primary computing device and tumblr is great for passive scrolling while hitting "like" buttons. It looks great on mobile view and I'm pretty sure there are lots of apps that work with it.
Dreamwidth is good for text. Really, really good for text. But with AO3 there to host fic, fans can sort of lose the long meta posts and in-depth text conversation because they are getting pretty pictures and seemingly never-ending easy-to-get content instead.
Also, the youth found tumblr first. Anything that looks like LJ is so circa-aughts to them.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: Nov. 16th, 2015 03:13 (UTC)Basically, the big two problems (IMO) are the lack of good graphic support and terrible mobile options. Tumblr really excels in visuals. IIRC, fanart starting moving there first in fandom. And people love fanart! And manips and gifs. Which tumblr is frankly awesome for, and LJ/DW was never built for.
And DW doesn't have an app. And as far as I know, there is only ONE app that lets you post to DW and it's not great and it's Android-only. :/
So many people these days are using mobile for their primary computing device and tumblr is great for passive scrolling while hitting "like" buttons. It looks great on mobile view and I'm pretty sure there are lots of apps that work with it.
Dreamwidth is good for text. Really, really good for text. But with AO3 there to host fic, fans can sort of lose the long meta posts and in-depth text conversation because they are getting pretty pictures and seemingly never-ending easy-to-get content instead.
Also, the youth found tumblr first. Anything that looks like LJ is so circa-aughts to them.
(BUT DREAMWIDTH IS THE BEST THEY ARE WROOOONG.)