Dreamwidth / LiveJournal history communities: measured, PARK (don't re-research)
Harvested 2026-10-30 ~17:02Z. Zero budget. Status: PARKED. Recorded so later harvest runs don't spend time on it again. Any account would be the owner's own, made by him.
What I measured
Dreamwidth
- Can't be reached from our box. www.dreamwidth.org returned 200, but /interests?int=welsh+history, ...=genealogy, ...=wales and ...=local+history returned 504 or timed out, and journal subdomains (*.dreamwidth.org) timed out at 20 s, on 30 Oct 2026 16:55-16:57Z. Any automated check or posting from here is therefore unreliable. Use the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to read pages.
- **The active-community scene is small, and history there means fandom.** The curated "Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 A-I" list (ysabetwordsmith, Wayback capture 24 Feb 2026) has **48 communities**. Its "active" bar is often **one post a month**. Nothing in it is about local history, genealogy, Wales or the UK. The only history entries arehistorium("a central community for all historical fandoms", one post in Jan 2026) andfandomhistoryproject(last post July 2025). The J-Z half was not read; its search snippet covers "books, the occult, music".
- **The closest fits are book communities:**books(several posts a month: recommendations and reviews),bookclub_dw(monthly hosted discussions),bookcrossing` (one post in Dec 2025). Their self-promotion rules were not read.
- Dreamwidth's interest search would be the way to find Welsh-history users, but one profile found by search lists "welsh history" as an interest, and that single hit is all the search turned up. No community was found.
LiveJournal - Servers moved to Russia in Dec 2016. Its April 2017 terms follow Russian law and ban "political solicitation" and content "contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation" (Wikipedia; Mashable 2017). English-language UK history communities there are mostly archives of the 2000s. Excluded: a dispute with a public body over a family home is exactly the kind of content those terms can be used against, and English-language reach there is negligible.
Honest read
There's no audience here for a Glamorgan farm's history. The best case is one reader-recommendation post in Dreamwidth's books community, reaching dozens of readers. That is far below the existing genealogy routes: Welsh genealogy mailing lists (welsh-genealogy-mailing-lists-groupsio-ancestry-boards-closure.md), weekly genealogy-blog roundups (genealogy-blog-weekly-roundups-curator-pickup.md), RootsChat, and Tumblr's quiet history tags.
How we apply it to Cedwyn
- Do nothing now. Don't propose a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account to the owner.
- Revisit only if (a) a free e-book edition is live and the owner has approved reader-community outreach, and (b) a reader has posted about the book on Dreamwidth themselves (watch for dreamwidth.org as a referrer in counted /r/ links or analytics). Then the most that's warranted is one honest "free edition" note in
books, after reading that community's rules and posting as the owner. - Never post on LiveJournal.
Sources
- ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org (via web.archive.org read 30 Oct 2026)
- dreamwidth.org (504 or timeout, 30 Oct 2026; own measurement)
- en.wikipedia.org ; mashable.com
Raw Markdown: dreamwidth-livejournal-history-communities-measured-park.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json