Have you heard of sonder? It's a neological emotion I find myself feeling often. Watching an elderly man on the LRT mouthing to himself by the window; scrolling past a comment thread in a language I can't read; standing on Centre Street at dusk while the city hums with the ten thousand private emergencies of strangers. What are the million people in my own city doing, right now, this instant? Let alone the over eight billion across more than 190 countries. I could write entire posts dedicated to Tajikistan, or Guinea-Bissau, or Tuvalu, or Comoros. Worlds I will never brush against. There is so much I don't know, and so much more that I don't know that I don't know.

Two of my favourite documentaries are Life in a Day (2010) and Life in a Day (2020), both crowd-sourced films assembled from roughly 80,000 clips submitted to YouTube. One single ordinary day filmed by people on every continent. I find watching these medicine for sonder, though even they still show such a thin splinter of life. A curated, translated splinter missing so much.

You would think the Internet in general would be medicine for sonder. There are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and 3 million posts per day on Bluesky. But corporate social media seems to actively resist the sharing of humanity I crave—the slow, mundane texture of everyday life is no match for the viral, or the rage-inducing, or the celebrity worship. The ambient hum of other people drowned out by the hypernoise of overstimulating neon.

This is a large part of why I adore the IndieWeb, because I get to glimpse into the lives of others as-is. I browse the trending posts on Bearblog, I lose afternoons on Neocities, and I scroll my Fediverse timeline after following people I found through the Fedi Directory. A slow channel of boat photos, bread-baking, midnight math frustrations, and grief. Like sitting in a café and holding the understanding that the person at the next table has an entire interior life.

But even still, I feel this sadness of missed connections. I cannot possibly wade through every post written, every website created. It breaks my heart.

Beyond that, there are entire communities that are completely sectioned-off from me, and I'm not just talking about the silo'd web, but behind years of earned intimacy in corners of the web I haven't been part of building. Sure, I get far more interaction on Medium—it is a social media platform as much as it is a publication, after all. But there is a laissez-faire, free-for-all aesthetic to the platform.

I love running my own independent site—I have full control over everything, and have added every feature I want to add! RSS, WebMentions, IndieAuth, WebSub, h-card, h-entry. The works. I know there is additional functionality I can add, such as threaded comments on posts and in my guestbook, and I've heard from others that such a feature is really important.

But even with every possible pro-social IndieWeb function I can add to my website, it is still an island unto itself. I try to do the whole "social media" thing by sharing and syndicating my posts on Bluesky and Threads, even LinkedIn if they're professional enough. And I use the lovely EchoFeed to automatically share to my social.lol Fediverse account.

Maybe it's obvious, but I'm rather neurotic about writing and where that writing exists. Tumblr has always made sense for my poetry, deviantART made sense for my photography, 750words for my private writing. And, for a long time, Medium made sense for my essays.

But during all those years I looked over and hemmed and hawed about other platforms:

• I absolutely loved Ghost.org's mission but I didn't have the knowledge to self-host or the money for Ghost Pro.
• I ran a WordPress blog for several years at WanderNotebook.com but again, it was expensive and just a mirror of my Medium archive.
• I was really tempted by Substack seeing all the intellectuals start making money on the site, but the platform was way too comfortable with neo-nazis. Recently, Andrew Tate became the #1 creator on Substack, further confirming I dodged a bullet.

Nowadays, I'm much more tempted by independent platforms like Pika, Pagecord, and BearBlog. But I run my own blog for free, so I don't need a platform at all.

All of this to say that I'm not looking for a platform, or increasing my metrics, or being more widely-read. What I want more of is conversation, dialogue, and community. That's a different problem.

And I think this is where platforms such as Dreamwidth really shine. And, really, Dreamwidth has been living in the corner of my mind for years, quiet and patient as a held breath.

A Brief History of Online Journalling

Dreamwidth was born in 2008 out of frustration. Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith were both former LiveJournal employees—she'd handled customer relations and user advocacy for years, he'd been one of the platform's original developers. They watched LiveJournal drift under its Russian corporate ownership toward advertising, censorship, and erosion of the ethics that had made it feel like a home.

So they forked the code. No advertising. No venture capital. No shareholders demanding hypergrowth. The goal, as Paolucci described it, was to build a safe, welcoming space for creative expression. To build it properly with the hindsight of knowing what the shambling horrors of the original codebase actually were. The site opened in open beta on April 30, 2009. About 75% of its early developers were women, in a field where that percentage was closer to 1.5%. It has never changed ownership.

The platform's ethics were tested almost immediately, and held. In 2017, LiveJournal moved its servers from California to Russia and pushed out a revised terms of service that required compliance with Russian law—which, practically speaking, meant any content touching on LGBTQ identity could be deleted without notice.

A mass migration followed. Fandom communities, Queer writers, diaspora bloggers, anyone who'd spent a decade building a home on LiveJournal's servers arrived at Dreamwidth in waves. The platform absorbed them. It didn't pivot to monetize the influx, it didn't discover that "community guidelines" needed to be rewritten for scale.

What Dreamwidth inherited from LiveJournal's culture prior to its downfall, and carefully tended, was something harder to describe than features: a commitment to the journal as a form. Not a blog. Not a newsletter. A journal. Journals have entries, not posts. Journals have locked entries, things written for a smaller circle, things that assume a reader who has earned some context. Journals are where you work things out before you know what you think.

Today, Dreamwidth hosts over 70,000 active communities. Groups organized around chronic illness and disability, obscure fandoms, poetry, mathematics. There are communities that have been posting continuously for fifteen years, threaded comment sections that read like long-running correspondence. Communities for people writing through diagnoses, through transitions, and through experiences which corporate platforms either monetize into oblivion or quietly push out.

The term "queerplatonic relationship" (QPR) was coined within Dreamwidth's community in 2010, in the comments on a post by an asexual blogger named Kaz—a conversation between two people working out language for something they were living that no existing word fit. Dreamwidth is a place where new language gets made because people have enough space and safety to think out loud.

Design Language

The first thing I noticed about Dreamwidth was its warm, red spiral logo. ꩜ Reminiscent of the similarly-named SEGA Dreamcast, my first-ever console. Spirals seem to hold a special place in my life, but that's for another post entirely.

The first thing you might notice about Dreamwidth is that it looks like 2009.

There's a navigation strip across the top with text links—Create, Manage, Read, Explore—in the plain, slightly bureaucratic typography of a CMS that was built to be functional first and beautiful never. The default site skin is clean and spare, mostly white, with a red header bar.

The comments are threaded, nested inside each other as deep as the conversation goes, each reply indented so you can follow the exact chain of who-said-what-to-whom. It looks a lot like the older web—the web before infinite scroll, before the attention-extraction machinery had fully colonized the interface.

The interface doesn't compete with the content. It doesn't reward you for being there with small dopamine hits. The sidebar shows your circle, your communities, your tags, your archive—the infrastructure of a reading life, laid out flat. No suggested accounts. No trending topics. No notification badges designed to feel urgent. You have to go looking for things, which means when you find them, you found them.

Users customize their journals heavily. Layouts with names like Tabula Rasa, Practicality, Crisped—built and shared freely by community members, installed via layers of CSS, inherited from a culture of collaborative tinkering that was IndieWeb before IndieWeb had a name.

Some journals are skeuomorphic notebooks, with narrow columns and handwriting fonts. Some look like old Tumblrs, heavily illustrated. Some are sparse as a text file.

Then there are the userpics. Each account can have a small collection of icons—small square images, 100 by 100 pixels—that you attach to individual entries or comments. A photograph, an illustration, a piece of fan art, compressed into a thumbnail. A form of expression that feels almost archaic now, but on Dreamwidth, flipping through someone's userpic collection tells you something.

And the "current mood" and "current music" fields still exist. Optional metadata for each entry: what you're feeling, what you're listening to. Unbearably earnest and very good.

Dreamwidth's Circle system is the separation of subscribing (seeing someone's posts) from granting access (letting someone see your locked ones). It's built around earned, granular intimacy. You can open your journal wider or narrower depending on how well you know someone. There are people on Dreamwidth who have maintained "access-only" journals for over a decade, writing behind a closed door for a circle of thirty people who've followed each other through marriages and illnesses and moves across continents. The internet's ambient publicity doesn't reach them there. They chose who gets in.

That's relational infrastructure that brennan.day, with its public-only posts, simply doesn't have.

Digital Gentrification

Gentrification in the physical sense describes a process where wealthier newcomers displace existing communities by raising costs and changing the social character of a place, replacing what was home there with something more legible to capital. I write about Indigenous land and the commons, and the prairies under the Treaties have their own long history of arrival-as-displacement.

But the word gets applied to cultural spaces too, online communities included. Jessa Lingel, in The Gentrification of the Internet, argues that what happens when older, community-built platforms are displaced by or flooded with newcomers mirrors the physical process with uncomfortable precision. The original ethic of the space dissolves, the communities that built what made it worth being in can no longer recognize it as theirs, and whoever arrived later extracts the accumulated goodwill without having contributed to building it. The example she uses is Tumblr, which was a platform with over a decade of culture betrayed by an exchange of corporate ownership.

When a loud newcomer (such as myself) arrives in a small, established community, they can pull focus, set new norms, and crowd out the people who actually built the thing. The community reorganizes, or the newcomer extracts the goodwill the community generates without adding to what made it worth being in.

I had this anxiety acutely about Dreamwidth, which has been running since 2009 and has a culture built around journal-form blogging, slow reading, and an earned intimacy between people who've followed each other for years. Who am I to show up here?

But there are different ways to show up:

Action one: syndication. Drop my essays in and wait for engagement. Cross-post the brennan.day archive into new territory. Point the same megaphone at a different wall. This is what most "platform expansion" actually is. Broadcasting. If I showed up on Dreamwidth and just piped my existing content there on a delay, that would be a kind of gentrification. I'd be extracting whatever visibility those platforms generate without contributing to what makes them worth being on. Arriving as an audience-builder rather than a participant.

Action two: participation. Engaging with other people's posts. Writing things that are native to the platform—shorter, rougher, more process-oriented. Reading. Commenting. Showing up as someone who belongs to the community rather than someone who is using it.

The anxiety was real, but it was aimed at the wrong target. I was shy about participating, sure, but I was more so afraid of broadcasting instead of participating.

Modes and Code Switching

Each platform is asking for a different kind of writing than what I do here.

brennan.day is where my work lives. The lyric essay, the cultural criticism, the longform technical autopsy. I've been writing nearly every day since November and the archive is sitting at 174 posts and 360,000 words. This site is the canonical record. A permanent version. Everything here is drafted, edited, considered, linked, sourced, and then committed to the repo.

Dreamwidth is a journaling platform at its bones. And a journal is not an essay. I love journal writing, I've been doing it over half my life. A journal entry is what I produce at 750words before I know what I'm writing. Rough, unfinished thinking. An observation that might become an essay in a few weeks, or might just dissolve. Process notes. What I'm reading that I don't have a full take on yet. Behind-the-scenes of how a piece changed shape between draft and final. Chess game analysis I want to think through but don't have 2,000 words of argument around.

A journal entry arrives the way you arrive at a friend's house—still in your coat, still mid-sentence, carrying what you haven't unpacked yet. In media res. Incomplete. Rough. An expectation that the comment thread will do some of the work the entry left unfinished.

You write, you post, people reply, you reply to their replies. An entry doesn't sit alone and finished.

Dreamwidth is the right scale for the unfinished and the personal. The platform's culture is built around the journal. To read rough thinking and responding in kind.

Right now, my writing functions as essays dropped into a feed. I want to make contributions to ongoing conversations. Shorter, more responsive, more pointed. Addressed to the people in that room.

I know—there's an obvious irony in neurotically writing a post on brennan.day about joining another platform. The meta-commentary is built-in.

Conclusion

Sonder is not really about curiosity. It's about the weight of everyone's interior life pressing on you at once. You are a minor character in more stories than you can count. Everyone around you is the protagonist of their own.

The Internet promised to solve this. Not just to connect us, but to let us witness each other.

The feeling I'm trying to describe—the pressure of realizing there is so much going on that I will never see—requires slowness. It requires sitting with incompleteness, and corporate social media cannot reckon with such incompleteness.

The world is too large and too alive to stand outside any more rooms than you have to. And there's a room that's been lit and open for over a decade, full of people who showed up to be there.

I think it's time I went inside.