Here I am on Dreamwidth, dazed and confused

[dreamshark]

I signed up, claimed my usual handle (which thankfully was available), and imported my LJ. That went quickly. But now I'm lost. Presumably I imported my friends list. What do I have to do to see my friends' postings?

When I go to "Reading Page" all I see is a long New Years post from the proprietor.
Maybe what I want is "Feeds?" Nope, that's a list of communities or something like that.
Where are my friends???

Comments

[laurel]

The easiest way to do this is probably to go to the Manage Circle page (can also be found in Dreamwidth dropdown menu under "Organize").

From there you should be able to see a list of people you've "granted access to" which should include a lot of familiar names since you imported from LJ, you can then subscribe to them there. Though due to LJ import it's likely mostly a list of LJ journals-- I'm not sure if there's an easy way to see if they're also on Dreamwidth other than manually typing the equivalent Dreamwidth URL (presuming same handle) or checking LJs for "crossposted from/to Dreamwidth" links..

Might be easiest to look at the profile for someone you've already found on Dreamwidth who knows many of the same people-- look at their profile page and then click on the Dreamwidth handles you recognize there for people and subscribe to those you also know.

(Now I'm wondering if anyone's put together a tool to check a list of LJ accounts vs. Dreamwidth for matches, seems like it'd be relatively easy for a decent programmer to come up with something.)

[laurel]

Subscribing to people's journals really is the same as how we did it on LJ, I think? Clicking on or going to someone's journal (or profile page) and selecting "subscribe". There's a little icon for it that may be hard to see, but it's something like a plus sign with a book on most people's Dreamwidth pages.

One thing to take note of that's different on Dreamwidth: if you subscribe to someone that doesn't mean you're giving them access to your protected entries. They split that functionality here, which makes sense, but can take some getting used to if you're used to how LJ does it. When you click to subscribe to someone's journal you're usually taken to a page where you can "subscribe" and/or "grant access". (That Manage Circle page I mentioned above doesn't take you anywhere like that, you just adjust the ticky boxes the way you want and then select "save".)

I'm likely overexplaining. :-)

[dreamshark]

"I'm likely overexplaining. :-)"

By no means. Overexplaining was what I was looking for. The part about splitting permissions is clear enough (and an improvement), but finding the page where you could do it was a real treasure hunt.

What amazes me is that I could find absolutely nothing in their help about subscribing to journals, finding friends, or any number of other synonyms I searched for. I still don't see any way to just type in somebody's handle and view their profile. Is the assumption that anybody that wants you to know they are on DW will send you a URL to click on, and otherwise it is none of your business?

[jiawen]

A given person's Dreadmwidth URL is almost always going to be .dreamwidth.org , if that helps. This is also what clicking on their username in DW should take you to.

It isn't guaranteed that a person's DW handle will be the same as their LJ handle. Some folks took advantage of the establishment of DW to change their handles, for example. But a lot of people are the same.

You can always go to someone's DW profile page and check who in their list you know, on the assumption that handles will be the same, and then PM them to ask if they're the same person ("I think we know each other on LJ. Can you confirm that for me?") or just directly friend them.

[laurel]

In the search box doohickey at the top of most Dreamwidth pages (I think), you can type in someone's handle. The descriptions of things you can search in the dropbox box is a bit lacking IMHO but the one you want that will send you to someone's journal (if there's a journal by that handle on Dreamwidth) is "Site and Account" (would be clearer if it just said "account" or "journal" but that seems to be the one). I typed in "dreamshark" and it took me straight to your profile page (presumably because there was an exact match).