# 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 are `historium` ("a central community for all historical fandoms", one post in Jan 2026) and `fandomhistoryproject` (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