Hi Pillowfolks. The moment you all have been waiting for is arriving next month! Pillowfort.social will be opening up public registrations to everyone on January 15, 2021. That’s right: Pillowfort will be entirely free for everyone to join. Hooray!

As we stated in our October Community update, we were met with unexpected challenges in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This changed the trajectory of our development & release schedules. Despite the setbacks, we believe that in a world where things are rapidly changing and safe spaces for creative freedom are disappearing more frequently, Pillowfort needs to be accessible to all.

Opening up public registrations would not be possible without everyone who has supported our platform since the very beginning. Your generosity in supporting a very small, independent team of passionate creators has been invaluable, and as a thanks to you, all users who create or have created an account before January 15th will have the option to display a “badge” on your user page that indicates you were a user in our beta!

Hi Pillowfolks. The moment you all have been waiting for is arriving next month! Pillowfort.social will be opening up public registrations to everyone on January 15, 2021. That’s right: Pillowfort will be entirely free for everyone to join. Hooray!

As we stated in our October Community update, we were met with unexpected challenges in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This changed the trajectory of our development & release schedules. Despite the setbacks, we believe that in a world where things are rapidly changing and safe spaces for creative freedom are disappearing more frequently, Pillowfort needs to be accessible to all.

Opening up public registrations would not be possible without everyone who has supported our platform since the very beginning. Your generosity in supporting a very small, independent team of passionate creators has been invaluable, and as a thanks to you, all users who create or have created an account before January 15th will have the option to display a “badge” on your user page that indicates you were a user in our beta!

Hi Pillowfolks. The moment you all have been waiting for is arriving next month! Pillowfort.social will be opening up public registrations to everyone on January 15, 2021. That’s right: Pillowfort will be entirely free for everyone to join. Hooray!

As we stated in our October Community update, we were met with unexpected challenges in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This changed the trajectory of our development & release schedules. Despite the setbacks, we believe that in a world where things are rapidly changing and safe spaces for creative freedom are disappearing more frequently, Pillowfort needs to be accessible to all.

Opening up public registrations would not be possible without everyone who has supported our platform since the very beginning. Your generosity in supporting a very small, independent team of passionate creators has been invaluable, and as a thanks to you, all users who create or have created an account before January 15th will have the option to display a “badge” on your user page that indicates you were a user in our beta!

Hi Pillowfolks! Our developers just pushed a large update containing several anticipated new features as well as a number of bug fixes.  Here is what has been added & improved on our platform:

New/Improved Features

*NEW* LIKING Comments - Added the ability for users to “Like” individual comments. Users will be notified when one of their comments receives a ‘like.’

*NEW* NSFW Labels for Communities - Added a new privacy label setting for Communities. Community Moderators can now label an entire community as NSFW. This filter option can be set when creating or editing a Community’s details. Communities marked with the NSFW label will be hidden from accounts that choose to filter NSFW content and from accounts belonging to minors. We recommend that Communities that are dedicated primarily to sharing NSFW content mark themselves as NSFW, but it is up to Community admins how they choose to label their Community. Note: Users are still required to mark their individual posts containing NSFW content within the Community as NSFW even if the community contains a NSFW Label per our Terms of Service. 

*NEW* Filtering Posts from Non-Logged In Users - Added a new privacy setting in post creation. Users can now choose individual posts to be visible for only logged-in users when they create or edit a post. If this setting is selected, only users who are currently signed in to Pillowfort will be able to view the post in question.  

*NEW* Optional E-mail Notifications for Community Moderators - If a Community moderator is banning a user or deleting a post from a Community, they now have the option to send a notification e-mail to the disciplined user about the action taken. 

Improvements to Community Moderators Panel - Community Moderators can now see the record of resolved flags for a community. Click the new ‘resolved’ filter button in the Community Flags page to see them, and click ‘unresolved’ to go back to viewing open Community Flags. We have also added pagination to the Community Flags page to improve load times and ease of navigation.

Better Warning Pages for Blocked Content - If a user navigates to a page that they are unable to view due to the page’s privacy settings, their own blacklist, etc., a more informative page will now display instead of the prior “404 error” page. Improvements to Admin Tools -  Added several improvements to Staff admin tools so our customer service team can better address user inquiries. Improvements to Staff Moderator Panel - Added a feature to improve the efficiency of Staff moderators when reviewing moderation flags. Unfollow Button on Followers Page - When viewing your Followers page, there will be a button provided to unfollow a displayed user if you are currently following them.

Bug Fixes

Missing Posts on Home Feed - Fixed a bug that caused posts to fail to be displayed on the home feed when they should have been. Please contact Staff if you are still encountering issues with posts being incorrectly hidden from your home feed. Be sure to include as much description as possible to help our team investigate. Reporting Posts in Search Results -  Fixed a bug where the report button was not working on the search results page.

Hi Pillowfolks! We are back with a brand new Pillowfort Community Update where we let you know what Staff have been doing behind the scenes, happenings within the community, and a preview of what’s in store for our platform.

Since December 2019 we have…

Begun work on the Site-Wide UI redesign.

Begun work on Improving Communities (details here).

Upgraded our Community Moderation System (details here).

Added the ability to Edit Comments (details here).

Tested out a new image hosting server.

Fixed the invitation page and various bugs.

Community Stats:

As of May 2020, Pillowfort currently has over 68,500 registered users and 7,377 communities.

Welcome New Users!

Welcome to Pillowfort. We are so glad you are part of our community. If you haven’t yet, check out Pillowfort101 Getting Started Guide.

We’ve placed the rest of the community underneath a read more.

It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out

You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.

Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.

“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”

No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.

Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made

Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.

Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.

They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!

That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.

Pillowfort is a hybrid of all of your favorite blogging platforms run by a small team of creators on a mission to create a more user-friendly space for creativity, communication and content sharing.

I’m gonna make a pro pillowfort post because I really like it 

I’ve been on the website for more than a year now (I got one of the last free invite at the time) and I know it says on the front page you need to pay 5 bucks to create an account before it gets out of beta but it’s not true anymore because people on there gets 3 invites for free every week and can give them to anyone that wants one, there are a few posts going around were people who have invites and people who want an invite can message each other. 

So if money was your only problem about trying it there is a solution for free now.

So caveat first it’s still in beta meaning from time to time there are some glitches but the team on pillowfort are working on them and the site is improving all the time.

A lot more people are on there now but it’s still way smaller than tumblr 

So the Pros now :

1. N/S/F/W is allowed AND there is a tagging system in place that’s way more efficient when you create a post you can toggle if you want it to be n/s/f/w or not. And you can chose on your account if you want to see those posts or not. So no more stumbling on a dick that you didn’t want to see but if you want to see them now you can.

2. NESTED COMMENT THREADS under posts which is awesome because now you can have real discussion there about the post (and you can get notifications by mail if someone replies to your comment) you can also chose to make a post with commenting disabled if you don’t want any comments.

3. COMMUNITIES meaning you can have forum like experience there and you can make them public or private 

4. POSTS , you can chose who can see your posts, being only yourself, only your followers, only your mutuals or make them public like on tumblr which give you much more control.(here is a more complete explanation) (and the update about mutual only posts)

5.BLACKLIST (there is one there too )

6.BLOCKING USERS , better than on tumblr meaning you don’t see anything they post and they don’t see anything you post even if someone you follow reblog from them you won’t see those posts. (there is still a few things to iron out there but it’s still pretty cool) 

Adding to this if you want to give it a try I still have invites this week just message me. 

Do you know about PillowFort?  Did you find yourself nodding (nay, weeping) about the post I reblogged yesterday about how the tumblr platform sucks for community building?  The one with the quote, “When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.” from  zoinomiko?  PILLOWFORT MAY BE EXACTLY RIGHT FOR YOU.  Lemme explain!

Pillowfort is like the best of the LJ/DW platform and the best of the tumblr platform, if all of tumblr had most of x-kit installed (snort).  (forgive me if this list is long but that’s because PF is fucking amazing - I can’t help it!)

Such as:

following:  you can follow others, they can follow you. your feed will be an endless scroll, like here.

reblogs - you like a post, reblog jand it will show up on your PF blog to all of your followers, just like here.

HOWEVER - if you are the original post creator, you control it. Forever.

if you are the post author/creator, you can delete it at any time - and it will be deleted everywhere. (god haven’t you wished you could do this for some of your tumblr posts where reblogs have content you despise but are now permanently out in the world???)

to reiterate: if you made a post, you are in complete control as to its existence - it never ends up reblogged out of your control, because it’s never embedded on someone elses’ blog as new content, even though it’s visible in the PF feeds of those who reblog from you.

you can tag posts when you reblog them, just like here

you can comment on posts (whether you reblog them or not)

as a commenter, you can delete your own comment at any time.

the comment structure is NESTED - like a well constructed forum or DW or LJ.  If someone responds to you, it shows up indented under your comment. If someone comments on the original post, it shows up as not indented.  Just as you’d expect.

if you’ve only ever been on tumblr you have no idea how much this creates relationships and real community.  That post that I reblogged yesterday that talked about how “When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.” - THAT is what a forum designed for real discussion in a comprehensible visual format creates.

As the post creator, you can delete anyone’s comments.  You are in charge of the vibe on your own original post.  

this creates self-selected community involvement - if you’re a jerk, nice people will un-friend your blog and just leave it alone.  If you foster happy healthy vibes, people will appear and join and comment.

  This fosters a huge golden-rule environment that made some blogs a huge happy success on LJ/DW where mean people were banned and kind people were welcomed and celebrated; and some mean toxic successes - where healthy people went somewhere nicer.  I‘m not even gonna bold that.  Because fuck that dynamic on the entire internet.

you can create original posts your followers can read/see on their feeds

you can make these available to all without restrictions

OR you can make them any of these options:

un-rebloggable

un-commentable

marked/categorized as NSFW to help others screen

or visible only to mutuals

(a feature whereby we can create our own curated ‘friend groups’ is promised. remember, this is entirely new code they’re creating. features are being requested and implemented as fast as they can roll them out in a functional way)

Incidentally, if you have a problem, the staff is actually real humans who really respond to you! Shocking, isn’t it?

there are communities you can join or create - have a particular fandom or RL interest?  find or create a community - search by tags!

There are different post types to choose from:

text

picture

video (currently only youtube, but that will expand)

link (shows a preview of the website you’re linking to, just like here) (incidentally, this will embed an instagram photo or video and the video will play - yes!)

audio (currently soundcloud only, that will expand)

You can send private mail to another member (and mail you write does not vanish into the ether, it remains as part of the conversation chain when you click on it.  kinda clunky, but getting there!)

you can choose to receive messages from anyone, noone, or only your mutuals

You can blacklist content based on key-word

You can filter as well

You can block users (god bless the block button anywhere on the internet)

You can check notifications

you can instantly sort ‘replies’ from ‘likes & reblogs’

There are avatars (do they support animation yet? I’m not sure?)

there aren’t themes yet (give the poor coders time!), but you can change your PF’s color scheme to whatever you like

You can deactivate your account - make in vanish, but without deleting it. handy if you just wanna go away, but not lose all your content - and not have your content be visible while you’re gone

You can delete you account (of course)

You have three invites a week you can give away free!  Though PF needs the $5 life-long one-time registration fee to keep the lights on, this is a way to help someone who’d love to be a member, but hasn’t got the cash :) 

If you want to join PF and cannot afford the one-time $5 fee (which is paying for server & bandwidth ), I am happy to give away my 3 invites a week to any friends on here - where ‘friend’ equals ‘nice people who’ve been nice on here!’  Just DM me, and I’ll give you one :)  Please pay them if you can afford to though!

Pillowfort is a great design for fandom, it’s not owned by some big corporate entity - it’s run by fans.  Remember what that feels like?  Dreamwidth?  AO3?  Like that.  Real humans, who will really respond to you.

I really really want to see Pillowfort become a successful platform - COME JOIN US!  WE’RE HAVING GREAT FUN AND MAKING REAL RELATIONSHIPS :)

PF members - feel free to chime in about any awesomeness I forgot to include!  [any haters, eff off]

Everyone keep in mind, Pillowfort is a brand new platform being created from scratch - updates roll out regularly (if they break anything, staff is all over it and its fixed quickly), requested features are being implemented all the time (and seldom break things - how weird), and Real Humans Such As Yourself are doing all of this, without whopping paychecks [any paychecks] and without being owned by some corporation.  (Incidentally, they could use your donation - whether one time or subscription, amount is your choice)

Okay guys, sorry for uh, talking so much about Pillowfort lately. I do mean it when I say I’m still here to stay until Tumblr totally dies, and I know I’ve been posting a LOT of PF content, but I’m also trying to help tailor an environment over there where this fandom can thrive. Add in momma’s heart attack and coma and my dash has been a hot mess and bare bones of my usual content, and I apologize.

But at the same time I’d like to sort of tell a bit of a flashback story of social media, fandom, and why I really do hope the best for Pillowfort. Some people are too young to remember the slow death of Livejournal, and I’m having like, flashbacks from that. I wasn’t in SPN fandom itself at the time but I was on LJ, so if you’re 

worried about your friends leaving

intent on sticking to tumblr hell or high water

kind of upset at some friends trying to manage both

Let me give a little bit of history to explain what people are doing right now and why.

I haven’t really been on here, but none of you guys moved with me, but with Tumblr’s new stupid policy, I thought it might be a good idea to re-alert you guys I’m on other places. Here are my links:

Pillowfort Main Blog (lavender-sprinkles) / Pillowfort Art Blog (MissSprinklesCreates ; You can have capitals in your URL :D)

Twitter (Miss_s_creates)

As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.

Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that. 

Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult. 

If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there. 

If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably. 

We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more. 

most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this

is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes.  are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.

Do not wait to get your Pillowfort accounts. Do not wait to post where your followers can find you. Do not hesitate to reblog your contact info five times to ensure everyone sees it.

Do not stall on following those exact links and friending people. Even if all you do is that, sign up on a site and friend people, get it done and get it done soon.

I’ve been through Strikethrough and Boldthrough. I watched del.icio.us break with zero warning overnight. There is nothing more stressful than the after-the-fact scramble when you didn’t have warning and everything goes to shit and you have to salvage it.

Get your info up, and make sure you have followed the people you want on other services. Hell, I have a few friends I only know on Tumblr, and I plan on outright asking them for their infos. I don’t want to lose people.

Threaded comments

No pornbots flooding every fucking post

Fandom- and interest-specific communities

The ability to hold forum-style conversations in those communities

The site actually fucking works - even when beta wave 5 slowed the PF servers down, I was still getting adequate site functionality. Whereas the Tumblr desktop site has slowed down to the point of unusability and when I briefly re-downloaded the app, it also loaded images and posts far too slowly. (I deleted the app again.) Tumblr is not a fucking volunteer site built from grass and spit and it hasn’t been in beta for over a decade, it’s being run by a literal billion-dollar company and the kinds of professionals that a billion-dollar company can presumably hire, and yet it’s still catastrophically broken in contemptibly amateurish ways. 

(Neither is PF being intentionally broken to manipulate you into using an app in order to advertise to you.)