It's been less than an hour...

[alchemicink]

I made a Tumblr account and it's only been less than an hour but I feel like it was a mistake 😂 I do not have the brain power to figure out how to use this website.

Anyway, I just wanted it to be able to promo my fics over there. Uh... we'll see if I can figure out how to do that this week

Anyway, it's alchemicink25 if anyone has an account and wants to follow me there too. I'll figure out how to follow people at some point. Probably

Comments

[linky]

Followed you on there! I'm rosemirmir on there if you see that name in your notifications. ^^

[alchemicink]

Yay! 😊 I followed you back (I think)

[linky]

You did! :D

I've been on tumblr for a long time (even though this blog is newer) so feel free to lmk if you need help with anything sometime!

[bluedreaming]

I’m blue--dreaming there (and will follow you shortly!), but I totally get you 🫂 it was too much for me so I just have a pinned post and mostly just follow people and occasionally leave likes on things people share via discord and Dreamwidth 😂

Happy to help with the how but I never managed to understand the culture at all (except that people seem to say almost everything via tags?)

[alchemicink]

Thank you 😊 I'm sure I'll have some questions along the way

[alchemicink]

Yay! I'll follow you back! Hopefully I'll figure things out by lurking for a bit. The tags seem fun

[bluedreaming]

I’m sure you’ll work it out! I had a bad case of the “can’t manage to make myself bother”, compared to Twitter at the start where I somehow brute-forced it 😂

[alchemicink]

That's fair! I felt Twitter was a little easier to navigate at first compared to this. Mostly, I just wanna be able to share my fics somewhere, and then I don't need to figure out much else 😅 ...maybe

[bluedreaming]

Yeah, Twitter is much more conversational, or at least it was back in 2014 (no clue about these days 😅).

As far as just sharing your fics though, if you click the “share” button at the top of one of your ao3 works, you’ll see there’s a “Tumblr” button in the little box that pops up, and if you click that it should give you something that’s ready-to-post for Tumblr. (And then you can decide if you like how you did it or not). If you don’t like that format, flamebyrd made a bookmarklet you could try (to put together the metadata and draft a post), though it was created in 2012 so I’m not sure if it still works or if Tumblr’s updates along the way have affected anything.

As far as what tags to use on Tumblr, I’m not sure (probably depends on the fandom), and there are some funny things like I think I heard that if you include an offsite link in a post it won’t prioritize that as much as posts that don’t have links (so sometimes people will reblog and add the link then) but I don’t know if that still applies? Or maybe there was something else to it? So definitely take my note here with a desert of salt.

I know some people say that you should include images because images do better, so they’ll use canva or something else to make little fic banners, but I’ve definitely seen people share their work without that. Like anything, I think it’s one of those balance things (and shouldn’t tip over into feeling like a job I’d hope!).

[alchemicink]

Thank you for the tips! I shared one fic as a test, and that seemed to work okay. I might check out what you linked too to try as an alternative.

I don't have the means to create banners and such for fics, so I'll just live without having an image. I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm not expecting much! It's just nice to participate in fic weeks/similar events/etc

[falkner]

I used to be very active on Tumblr back when the site first opened [sound of bones creaking] but I think at the time it was mostly because it was the only website where you could easily share pictures in an organized way (this was long before Twitter even had hashtags, let alone threaded posts...)

It probably varies somewhat by fandom, but Tumblr leans heavily towards yume/self-shipping and OCs nowadays, and at some point I realized I was spending more time filtering out character x reader posts than actually finding content to look at, so I stopped using it at all XD

ETA: looks like I cleaned out most of my blog but still kept the account, so I followed you! I'm hirakoba over there.

[alchemicink]

I was planning to use it mostly to share fics, but being able to post images is very tempting too 😁 I also gotta learn how to filter things out at some point lol

I will follow you back, even though you're not active anymore 😊 thank you!

[autumninpluto]

Gave you a follow :) I'm simyunie on there. I've been using Tumblr on-and-off since around 2011 I think, though my account now is my 2nd main account since I remade around 2014. It's a flaming hot mess and I use it to promote my own stuff, but also I just reblog a lot of fanart and funny stuff, so I kind of just use it like Twitter in that regard.

I do like just saying whatever in the tags—I think that's a kind of culture other sites can't exactly replicate: being able to blab, but in a subtextual way that's not super intrusive lol. Of course, the tags also work as a way to organize things like here in DW :"D

[alchemicink]

Yay! I will follow you back 😊 I do like when people share a hodgepodge of different stuff. Makes me feel like it's twitter back when twitter was still fun

I will probably lurk a bit to see how other people use tags, but I like the concept! And being able to organize like we do with DW tags sounds great