Dreamwidth

Like bandwidth is a measure of how much information can be transferred, dreamwidth is a measure of how much creativity can be transferred.

(Okay, we're making that up. But it sounds cool, doesn't it?)

Who We Are

Dreamwidth Studios (a production of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC) is an Open Source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Our mission in life is to make it easy for you to share the things you make, and easy to find the people who are making the things you want to enjoy.

We have all the features you've come to love in social networking sites, including privacy and security features, community interaction, content aggregation, multimedia support, and more. We're committed to adding features that you'll find useful and relevant, as well as working to integrate our site with the other Internet services you regularly use.

By the time we launch, we'll also have:

• No more complex trust workarounds -- we've split the concept of the "friends" list into "people whose content you want to see" vs. "people you trust to see your content", and we've made it even easier to manage your relationships with people.
• Better integration of OpenID and RSS syndication, so you can interact with your friends on other sites more easily.
• Better management of your presence on other sites and other content providers, allowing you to tie everything to your Dreamwidth account -- so people can more easily find all the creative content you produce.
• One-step import of your content from other sites, to make it easier for you to move in with us. (We'll support importing from LiveJournal-codebase sites on opening, and add others as we can.)
• Global site-wide bookmarking, so you can save interesting things for later -- and see what others have found interesting enough to save.

Open Expression

We value creative expression of all types and kinds. We will never place a limit on open expression, except as required by United States law or as required to protect the health of the service (such as by removing spam).

We believe in providing you with the tools you want to make your chosen form of creative expression easy. We'll provide you with the tools -- what you build with them is entirely up to you.

Open Source

Dreamwidth is based upon the LiveJournal codebase offered by Live Journal, Inc. In the spirit of the Open Source ethos, we will release every code change we make and every product we develop under a generally-accepted Open Source license. We will follow open standards and work to improve and extend those standards.

We are committed to maintaining a healthy and vibrant Open Source development community, and we're committed to making it so that you don't need a Ph.D. in computer science or five years' experience to install the product we provide to you and make it run the way you want. We're updating and modernizing the LiveJournal codebase to function under the most recent versions of Apache and MySQL. We're streamlining the code, improving the server-side documentation, and making site architecture changes so that you can easily install the product locally and make it as simple or as complex as you'd like.

We'll work with Open Source developers to accept, review, and commit patches and plugins -- whether they're one-line bugfixes or giant new features. And we'll make it easy to contribute, whether you've been programming for ten years or just started last month.

Open Operations

We know we can never be all things to all people, and we're not going to try. We are, however, hoping to be the best option available for people who want to make things and share them with other people, and we want you to have confidence in our operations and our decisions.

We believe that you should always be able to figure out why we make the decisions we make. We'll communicate with you, openly and honestly, as people and not as a corporate face. We'll make our decisions and our process as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback and opinions at all stages. We think you should always know what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what we hope to accomplish.

We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don't own you or your content -- we hope that you'll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.

We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it's possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship -- and we're committed to showing you what we're taking in, what we're spending, and where the money's going.

Learn More

We're not open for business yet -- but we will be soon. We've set up some mailing lists that will let you keep up-to-date with our progress:

• dw-discuss: An unmoderated mailing list that will allow you to ask questions and offer feedback. We can't promise to answer everything, but we want to hear from you and find out what you want to know more about.
• dw-progress: A moderated mailing list for us to give you biweekly updates about what we've accomplished and what we're doing next.
• dw-help: A moderated mailing list for us to post volunteer opportunities -- in case you want to lend us a hand.
• dw-launch: A moderated mailing list that's the definition of low traffic -- we'll post here once when we're moving into closed beta, and again when we launch to the public.

To subscribe to any of these lists, visit our Mailing Lists page. (You can unsubscribe at any time, and we won't harvest your email address or use it for any other reason.)

For those looking for a more real-time conversation, we're in the channel #dw on irc.zhzh.org. We may not always be around for chat, but feel free to talk to each other about the project -- we'll read what everyone has to say, even if we're not in front of the screen!

To start off the discussion, we've posted our draft Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Abuse Policy, Guiding Principles, and Diversity Statement for you to look over, ask questions, and help us identify any potential problems or things we might have missed. You can also read our Staff Page to find out who we mean when we say 'we'.

Dreamwidth Studios: In Development!