Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)
From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal, deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit:
– don’t knee jerk delete. I know it’s tempting to peace out immediately but hang on and do the other steps first. Out right ghosting and erasing everything is how fandoms die.
– archive everything on your blog you want to keep
– tell your followers how they can archive and keep your work too. A lot of fic and art were only saved from ff.net and lj because other people saved it first. If you’re cool with other people saving your work for them to personally keep, let them know this. You can absolutely discourage reposting but I really do highly recommend you allow people to personally save fic and art they like and are worried will disappear forever. Digital Dark Ages are a real thing.
– tell people where you’re jumping ship to. Give links. Keep that info up, even if you’ve left the site.
– go through who you follow and find out where else you can follow them. Save their work if they’ll allow it. It’s tedious as hell but if you want to keep up with people on here clicking on their page to check in is the best way to do it.
– support places like ao3. This is exactly why ao3 asks for donations a few times a year. They are a 100% anti-purging, judgement free, ad free non profit run by an elected board and protected by lawyers. Places like ao3 literally save fandom so please continue to support them and other similar archives. This is exactly why ao3 is so important.
I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).
Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:
If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for.
They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
Posts in chronological order like they should be!
A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.
So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.
If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.
If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can.
This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!
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