 © Dreamwidth Studios, LLC |
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| URL | www.dreamwidth.org |
|---|---|
| Slogan | Open Source. Open expression. Open operations. |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Blog/Social Network |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Owner | Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith |
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on LiveJournal. It is a code fork of the original service, set up by ex-LiveJournal staff[1] Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, transparency, freedom and respect[2]. Their diversity statement has been widely praised for its inclusivity[3][4].
Dreamwidth was announced on 11 June 2008[5] and went into open beta on 30 April 2009[6].
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For the most part, features are similar to those of LiveJournal: users have journals, where they may post entries, each of which has a webpage of its own, and on which other users may comment. Dreamwidth also provides shared or group journals called "communities".
Areas in which Dreamwidth differs significantly from Livejournal include the following:
Free accounts may only be created with an invite code, and have limited features. Paid accounts exist on two levels, "Paid" and "Premium Paid", and have additional features[7]. At the time of the open beta launch, a limited number of Seed Accounts were also available.
In response to criticisms of LiveJournal's friending system, Dreamwidth has split user relationships into two parts: subscriptions and access control. Users may subscribe to other users' journals, or grant access for other users to read locked entries, as separate actions. Dreamwidth's terminology reflects this split: for instance the "friends page" has been renamed as "reading page", and "custom friends groups" has been split into "access filters" and "reading filters".
Dreamwidth provides greater interoperability with other Livejournal-based sites, including the ability to import a journal from another site, crosspost to multiple sites, and greater functionality for users who log in via OpenID.
In addition to the search facilities brought over from LiveJournal, paid account users can search their journal. This was introduced on 24 July 2009[8].
The following features, available on LiveJournal, are not available on Dreamwidth[9]:
Dreamwidth is based upon the free and open source[10] server software that was designed to run LiveJournal. It is written primarily in Perl. The majority of the Dreamwidth code is available under the GPL for other sites to use.[11]
Unlike many other social networking sites using the LiveJournal codebase, such as InsaneJournal and DeadJournal, Dreamwidth is a code fork, removing unwanted features (such as advertising) and adding new ones as described above. Founders of the site rejected the advertising model as intrusive. Instead, they implemented a payment system, where users can purchase add-on or premium features.[12]
A 2009 OSCON presentation, saw Dreamwidth identified as highly unusual among open source projects, for the number of women on its development team. About 75% of its developers are female,[13][14] compared with around 1.5% in the field as a whole.[15] Paolucci and Smith have been invited to speak at LinuxConf Australia 2010 about Dreamwidth's development model.[16]
Following the positive reactions to Dreamwidth's diversity statement and model of inclusiveness, various other projects have followed suit, including Python's diversity list and Dreamfish.
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