What Does Dreamwidth Mean?
Fandom CultureA journaling platform forked from LiveJournal's code in 2009, built with explicit pro-fandom policies. It became the refuge for journal-based fandom after LiveJournal's trust collapsed, and still hosts kink memes, exchanges, and long-form meta.
Dreamwidth in Practice
Dreamwidth was founded by former LiveJournal staff in the wake of the Strikethrough deletions and subsequent ownership turmoil, with content policies and a no-advertising model designed to win back burned fandom communities. Migration came in waves as each new LiveJournal controversy pushed more users out, and Dreamwidth inherited much of journal fandom's infrastructure: kink memes, anonymous memes, fic exchanges, and the culture of long comment-thread conversation. It never reached LiveJournal's peak scale — Tumblr and AO3 absorbed most of fandom's growth instead — but it remains the living continuation of journal-era fandom. Many longtime fans keep a Dreamwidth precisely because it still works the way fandom's social web used to.
Example usage
"The exchange runs its signups on AO3 but all the real discussion happens on the mod's Dreamwidth."
Related Terms
LiveJournal (LJ)
The blogging platform that hosted fandom's social center through the 2000s — communities, kink memes, fests, and friendships lived on LJ before the great migrations to Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and AO3.
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Strikethrough (LiveJournal, 2007)
The 2007 incident in which LiveJournal mass-suspended hundreds of journals and communities — many of them fandom spaces — over listed interests, with deleted names displayed in strikethrough text. A formative trauma in fandom platform history.
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Kink Meme
An anonymous prompt-and-fill community — historically a LiveJournal or Dreamwidth comment thread — where users request fic (often but not exclusively adult) and others write fills anonymously. A foundational fandom institution of the 2000s and 2010s.
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Friends-lock
The LiveJournal-era practice of restricting a post to your approved friends list — 'flocked' posts were visible only to mutuals. The mechanism shaped how journal fandom managed privacy, gossip, and adult content.
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More Fandom Culture Terms
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