Newcomers to Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth uses Tags for various purposes. These do not necessarily work the same as they do on other platforms, but they are very useful.


Tags are words or phrases that you use to describe content, like "News" or "Star Trek." Your Manage Tags page lets you sort them alphabetically or by usage; the latter is handy for determining what your most common topics are, which may or may not be what you planned. (Friending memes and other introductions often ask what you blog about; this is an easy way to find that.) Your tag settings let you decide who can create new tags, add tags (new or existing) to entries, or remove tags from entries. Blogs usually let only the owner do those things. Communities often let only the administrator do them, but others open that to members or anyone.

To see what people are actually talking about right now, use the Latest Things page. That big mess of words at the top is a tag cloud of current topics that you can click on, like Cohost. A tag can also be turned into a Feed that you can subscribe to.

However, tags on Dreamwidth don't work like Cohost. They are not global. They show you what one blog or community has tagged for that topic, unless you are on Latest Things. Also, the search engine is dumb. It only returns exact matches. "Fan fiction," "fanfiction," "fan fic," "fanfic," and "fanfics" are all different things that won't necessarily come up in the same search.

You can nest tags, like "Fandom: Harry Potter" and "Fandom: Good Omens." However, that does not create a hierarchical "Fandom" tag unless you make and add that separately. It does help keep all the tags in the same category together in a tag list, which is important if you want to use many tags. A free account gives you 1000 tags, a paid account 1500, and a premium paid account 2000.

A quirk of alphabetizing is that "!" will appear before "a" does. Some communities use this to prioritize a few crucial tags at the top of the list. So you will see things like "!admin" or "!calendar" there. You can use the same trick if you like it.

You also need tags to make Memories. This lets you save a page with up to five tags and view them from your Memories page. Say you have a batch of related content, like reposts from Cohost. You could make a tag like "Cohost Reposts," then make Memories of those posts, and they would all appear on the Cohost Reposts Memories page -- which is a link you can use to help people find those things.

It will be easier to find stuff on your Dreamwidth blog or community if you put some thought into organizing your tags from the beginning. Your main topic(s) will probably benefit from a main category and some subcategories. Topics you don't write about often may be lumped together. Look at blogs and communities that have been on Dreamwidth for a year or more to see how they organize things. That may give you some good ideas. You don't have to put in this much work, but it will save some headaches if you do. Trying to fix a messy tag list after the fact is a pain in the ass.