Social media platform review: Snoozing on Pillowfort
Even before Tumblr's adult content ban, Pillowfort (PF) had touted itself as an alternative to Tumblr that has the sharing and exposure features of Tumblr but gives users greater control, such as post privacy settings, threaded comments, and user-created communities. Pillowfort was a beneficiary of Tumblr's decision much like Dreamwidth, but with far less ability than the mature and established Dreamwidth to capitalize on the windfall, being a site in beta testing and still working on scaleability and stability issues.
Taking the time and care necessary to get ready for prime time is anything but a discredit to the PF team, of course. Yet the site suffers from other issues that speak to a lack of professional skill and experience in web development, including basic backend failures (the 2,600-character username, anyone?). It remains to be seen whether these issues will be chalked up to growing pains or ultimately hold the platform back. ETA 2/24/2019: There are also reports that Pillowfort has had e-mail leaks and other security breaches as well.
Posts in this social media review series:
- Mastodon and its instances
- Tumblr trouble
- Living the Dreamwidth
- Snoozing on Pillowfort
Summary of Platform: Ever wished Tumblr and LiveJournal/Dreamwidth would have a love child with reblogs, post privacy settings, and a comment view that makes sense? Pillowfort is it, at least in larval stage.
Platform Usage: Tumblr mirror, joining communities and discussions
I was part of the Tumblr exodus to Pillowfort. I donated for a code shortly after Tumblr's announcement and made my account when the site came back up from maintenance. Right off the bat I liked its features, despite its slowness at the time: The site has a combination of Tumblr's sharing features and LJ/DW's community and threading features, as promised. Communities are particularly nice as a way to get content I'm interested in on my feed without necessarily having to follow whole blogs which may have content I'm less interested in. The content in communities is more curated than a sitewide search would be, and if it's not to your liking you can leave the comm and find another--or start your own.
PF also has more granular post access settings than Tumblr's, but no access list or access filters like DW's other than followers/non-followers/mutuals. As a result PF's access controls for posts more closely resemble Mastodon's than DW's. Here's a screenshot of PF's posting access controls with choices between "everyone," "only my followers," "only my mutuals," and "only me."
Here are Mastodon's settings for comparison, with the choices being "Public - Post to public timelines," "Unlisted - Do not post to public timelines," "Followers-only - Post to followers only," and "Direct - Post to mentioned users only." That last setting serves as Mastodon's direct messaging system, which in Pillowfort is separate from the posting system.
Dreamwidth, of course, adds more granular access controls that do away with the follower/non-follower distinction altogether and give users individual control over who will see which posts. Here's the corresponding post access control for Dreamwidth, consisting of the choices "public," "access locked," "private," and "custom filtered."
I think Pillowfort could stand to take a page out of Mastodon's book and add an equivalent to the "unlisted" option to have a post made public on one's own blog but not visible at a sitewide level, since the public availability of what was meant to be for one's blog is how a lot of conflicts get started on Twitter and Tumblr. I'm guessing the followers-only setting is meant to serve that purpose, but sometimes users want greater control, a step between "visible to the entire user base" and "only available to followers who are logged in." The option would be all the more appreciated when Pillowfort is out of closed beta and is visible to the internet at large.
The followers-only option also doesn't seem to have much meaning on Pillowfort because, as far as I can tell, there is no setting yet to lock an account so prospective followers have to ask permission. There doesn't seem to be an option for removing a follower, either, other than blocking/softblocking. (1) By then it might be too late and the unwanted follower could already have seen and possibly screenshotted the posts you hoped to keep to a limited audience, a non-trivial concern in the age of mass internet outrage.
Overall I don't believe followers-only is a terribly effective privacy setting anyway, and in my opinion following public posts should be separate from accessing locked posts. Dreamwidth's access controls are more granular and gives the most control, and it is a good model for Pillowfort to follow since it sells itself as a more privacy-focused alternative to Tumblr and specifically cites the LiveJournal line of blogs as an inspiration.
So much for comparisons to Dreamwidth. In terms of comparison to Tumblr, Tumblr-style sitewide searching/tagging and discovery is one of PF's strengths and would be used to more advantage if there were more content and people. (2) The post and reblog interface is also similar to Tumblr, though without Tumblr's distinctive and potentially troublesome reblog with additions feature. As such, one way I'm using PF is as a Tumblr mirror. I use PF to post content like edits that I would formerly have made on Tumblr, and then mirror them on Tumblr.
Ironically, for image-heavy posts the image hosting is still from Tumblr since PF has almost no image hosting. What I do is draft a post on Tumblr and upload images as usual, then drag the images to the location bar to get their URL. I hotlink those addresses in the Pillowfort post to leech off Tumblr's image hosting, then hit 'post' on Pillowfort and 'queue' on Tumblr. This should work unless and until Tumblr implements a basic hotlinking ban. Corporate and venture capital money has a lot of unhappy consequences for the internet including privacy-violating business models, bans on content that advertisers don't like, and pressure to deliver exponential growth, but that image and video hosting sure is sweet.
One quality that has characterized my experience with Pillowfort is its slowness. At first it was mostly the physical slowness I noticed: I got used to hitting a button and then doing other things while a page loaded or my post went up. (3) When the site reached a usable speed, however, I found it slow in a different way. There are not that many people on Pillowfort, period, and not a lot of content so far. I found that engagement with the discussion posts and content tended to be similarly low, (4) other than unpleasant fandom drama that I could have done without. (5)
I don't spend a lot of time on PF due to this lack of activity; I check back maybe once a week or less to find one answer or no answer to my posts, and it's my least checked and least active of the four social media platforms I have discussed in this series. Once it irons out its present problems and gets out of closed beta, hopefully with a sustainable business model that doesn't depend on mining user data for advertising purposes, it might be an acceptable alternative to Tumblr and a rival to Dreamwidth. That time is not now.
For all PF's present limitations, I do think it has a lot of promise. The combination of Tumblr's sitewide searching and reblogs on the one hand, and DW-like community moderation and privacy controls on the other, is the best of all possible worlds for me and I wish the platform well.
Notes:
1. Softblocking, in case you don't know, refers to blocking and then unblocking a follower so they are forced to unfollow you, but are not prevented from other interactions with you.
2. It would be nice to give people a way out of global search without making posts exclusive to followers, as discussed above.
3. Or not, as the case may be.
4. YMMV, of course. This post is about my own experiences.
5. That said, the drama far predates the platform and rather than exacerbate the conflict I think the platform functions helped resolve it relatively peacefully through the community system. People who disagreed with the way a comm was run were free to leave and make their own, and did so in this case.
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/2019/02/23/pillowfort-review.html