szabgab: (Default)
Gabor Szabo ([personal profile] szabgab) wrote in [community profile] getting_started2009-08-19 04:12 pm

new user - how to get by?

I am new in DW and used LJ only once so I have no idea where to find things and how to do things here.

Following the recommendation of [personal profile] damned_colonial I got on the #dw IRC channel and asked about it. I got a link to this [community profile] getting_started community, to [community profile] dreamchasers, and to support.

So I am posting here wondering how do you start using DW? How do you find people to answer your questions if there is no community yet with your interests?
zvi: self-portrait: short, fat, black dyke in bunny slippers (Default)

[personal profile] zvi 2009-08-19 01:22 pm (UTC)(link)
You can look for interesting communities at [site community profile] dw_community_promo.

You can look for people or communities which share your inerests by searching other people's interests.

If you want to read random people's journal entries, to see if they say anything interesting, you might want to check out the members' page for this comm or the members' page for the community promo comm, which will pull up a cross-section of DW users.

If you are wanting to know how to use the service on a technical level, the FAQ is pretty comprehensive.
zvi: self-portrait: short, fat, black dyke in bunny slippers (Default)

Re: I have a specific question

[personal profile] zvi 2009-08-19 02:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Most of the time, people don't subscribe to someone's journal for a single question, but because they think the person will write interesting entries or host interesting discussions.

One community you would probably be interested in that I forgot, [community profile] dreamchasers, which is specifically for telling people about you and why they should subscribe to your journal.
cesy: "Cesy" - An old-fashioned quill and ink (Default)

Re: I have a specific question

[personal profile] cesy 2009-08-19 03:17 pm (UTC)(link)
As [personal profile] zvi said, getting an answer to a single question is not normally how it starts.

You'll sometimes see people posting questions like that and getting answers, but it's usually because they've already got a large circle of readers who they've built up a relationship with, or because there's an active community discussing related topics. (e.g. [personal profile] synecdochic, [personal profile] damned_colonial or [livejournal.com profile] cleolinda could ask any random question and someone would probably answer, but that's because they've got a lot of regular readers from a fairly wide range of backgrounds. Most people who are active in the community could ask any question related to the topics they normally blog about, or that their readers tend to be interested in - e.g. [personal profile] zarhooie and [personal profile] yvi have recently asked about knitting and got useful answers, and [personal profile] rho asked about software for Macs.)

Dreamwidth, as a social media site, tends to be somewhere half-way between blogging and social networking, rather than something like Yahoo! Answers where complete strangers will answer questions without any other prompting.