unspeakablehorror | Entries tagged with pillowfort

Pillowfort is back! I should really try to copy more of my posts from there to other social media, though.

Glad I went and copied a bunch of the action items for Palestine to my website before Pillowfort went down. The thing about Pillowfort downtime is it is unpredictable. Sometimes it's short, but sometimes it takes a while for them to get the site back up.

I haven't been able to access Pillowfort today, so I guess it's having some downtime. Guess I'll just spend time on other social media until it comes back.

Just FYI, if anyone wants a Pillowfort invite, just let me know. They are currently trying to raise money so they don't face an imminent shutdown, and are currently 89% of the way to their $25000 goal, which they need to reach by Dec 31.

As discussed in this post, there's a prize for people who invite 10-25 users, which...I think I am not remotely well-connected enough to do, but I'd like to see if I can help out anyone who's interested in trying a social media platform that's not reliant on venture funding or corporate ads.

If you join, you can say hi to me on my Pillowfort account! You don't have to, though. I'm happy to give an invite to anyone who wants one.

A Letter From Julia Baritz

To the Pillowfort Community,
Transparency from myself and my Staff is part of the foundation that makes Pillowfort so great. The news I am about to share is not easy. But it is important for you, our community, to know what is going on.
Pillowfort has always relied on the generosity of our users. We are proud to be user funded. Over the years we have been able to operate using the funds from our 2018 Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $60,000, in addition to ongoing payments and donations from you. I am extremely grateful for the support we continue to receive.
However, despite cost-cutting efforts, we have struggled to break even in revenue since 2021. The funds from the 2018 Kickstarter have been depleted to cover operating costs and to ensure our Staff receives the compensation they deserve. I will never ask my Staff to work without being compensated.
We are now at a point where Pillowfort is in danger of exhausting all current finances in the next six months if we continue the current funding/spending trajectory. This is not hyperbole. This is the unfortunate reality of what the platform is facing. If we do not change course now I will have to end contracts with our entire team soon and, eventually, Pillowfort would no longer be able to operate.
For the past two years I have not compensated myself for my work on Pillowfort. My commitment to Pillowfort is not for personal gain. I was fortunate enough in my privilege to have adequate savings to cover my own personal expenses for a while. I sacrificed what would have been my own compensation in order to ensure my third-party contractors (Staff) could be paid.
I take full responsibility for the current state of Pillowfort. It has been challenging being a first-time business owner in such turbulent times. Looking back now there are ways I would have managed things differently with the knowledge I have now. If we can recover from this, I will continue applying what I have learned these last several years to make sure we do not reach this point again.
I knew Pillowfort was going to be a difficult enterprise due to the very things that I believe make us great: we don’t have shareholders or venture-capital investments (which often leads to shifts away from a company’s primary mission as they are directed to achieve revenue and profit growth to benefit investors); we don’t compromise your privacy by selling user data to third parties; and we don’t host third-party ads that would disrupt your experience. We also pay much higher payment processing fees because we host adult content. Compared to other social media sites that have millions of dollars in corporate investments backing them, things are much harder for us.
In spite of every hurdle we face, I truly believe Pillowfort deserves to exist. I believe in Pillowfort’s mission and I am determined for this platform to succeed. I am not going to abandon this platform until every possible option is exhausted. That is why I have decided it will be necessary to initiate another, more ambitious fundraiser. Our goal will be to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2023.
This amount is based on the following:

We are at risk of the IRS reclassifying Pillowfort as a hobby instead of a business because Pillowfort has not been profitable for several years. If we are reclassified as a hobby this would prohibit us from deducting expenses which will make our financial situation more dire. The $25,000 amount will make up for our existing year-to-date losses as well as cover our projected expenses (Staff Compensation & Operating costs) for the remainder of the year.
Raising this amount will also buy our staff the time needed to complete the following projects geared toward increased long-term revenue:
Finish Progressive Web App development to allow Pillowfort to reach a much broader audience on mobile platforms.
Add the ability for users to pay to promote their posts.
Add the ability for users to gift Pillowfort Premium to other users.
Once these features are in place, Pillowfort will be in a better position to bring in reliable revenue than we have been recently and will hopefully be on the road to continued self-sustainability.
If you appreciate that Pillowfort is beholden to its users instead of shareholders– if you believe in Pillowfort’s core principles of user privacy control and freedom of expression and creativity– then I ask you to consider supporting this fundraising effort.
We will post more information soon regarding rewards for reaching our goal (yes, we will be offering a profile badge to donors, and more!), so stay tuned for details. This time around we are also planning to have rewards geared toward users who help spread the word about us too. We understand that not everyone can support us financially right now.
If you can’t donate to the fundraiser there are still many ways to help us. Here are some examples:
Talk about us to your friends and family.
Write about or make a video about us. (Psst: Use #Pillowfort on other platforms like X, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Bluesky so we can find your posts!)
Invite your friends, family, and colleagues to Pillowfort using your Invitation Keys to allow them to join immediately.
I am forever grateful for your past and continued support. Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this message. Let’s work together to make Pillowfort a robust site for years to come.
Best Wishes,
Julia Baritz
Founder & Lead Architect

I want to draw attention to the current Pillowfort situation on other social media. As a long-time user of the site, I'd obviously prefer it not to go under. But beyond that, I'm concerned about further limitation of social media choices by those of us who are tired of the endless ads and abuse that mainstream social media sites force their users to endure.

Well, Pillowfort was up for a bit but now it is down again. Maybe the upgrade needs some adjustments. One reason I am on multiple social media sites is because I do not think it is unusual for a small social media site to have more extended downtime for some things. And I am certainly not going back to any of the big social media sites. Pillowfort has also had extended downtime before. I don't know how long this downtime will be--perhaps it's just a few minor things to work out. I guess I'll find out in time.

The other thing is that smaller social media sites could at some point be completely abandoned either due to the creator losing interest or no longer having the resources to maintain it. For example there was a site called NewTumbl that I only know about because it apparently abruptly shut down for good at some point and I started seeing people from there joining Pillowfort. While none of the sites I've chosen have shut down yet, nothing is forever. Even big sites have a lifecycle, even if their end tends to be much more drawn out.

Pillowfort's upgrade appears to be taking them longer than they expected, so I guess I'll be on here a little more than usual.

Banning AI isn't going to guarantee it doesn't get posted on Pillowfort, but it will definitely encourage people to post it untagged.

I wish Pillowfort had just implemented a tagging requirement for AI art. I am not looking forward to this.

Going to admit, I don't think there's any good way to handle AI-generated materials in external articles with a generalized AI ban.

* If the policy is that a person can't link to AI-generated material such that it gets captioned on Pillowfort as an image or text, you're expecting them to have way more dilligence than can reasonably be expected. Sometimes caption images don't even show up in the original article, and this is one of those times where people don't always look closely at the content.

It's also not doing anything to address the root problem of this material, namely that artists and writers are not getting paid to create it. Even if this was something I thought could reasonably be enforced, it's far too separated from the actual wrongdoers in this equation to be doing any good. None of the places writing these articles are going to have their bottom line affected by Pillowfort's AI Ban policy. The people who should be preventing this kind to exploitation from happening are the government, but realistically speaking, it's often organizations like unions who do the real work in pushing back on this kind of exploitation (eg. the terms negotiated by the WGA).

* And if the policy is that AI-generated articles can be linked to show these kind of AI header images or AI-produced headlines, then the policy is tacitly unfair and by and large targeting people who have no real place in this exploitative dynamic. Saying that people who are mostly just using AI to generate and post images or text they have no intention of selling for a profit are banned, while saying that people who are absolutely involved in this dynamic don't need to be held to the same standard.

I think this is a case of some very exploitative people being nigh untouchable, so instead, for people to feel like they are doing something, they demand punative action on easy targets, despite the fact that this does nothing to actually address the core issue.

In light of Pillowfort's recent decision to ban AI art, I thought I would write up some reasons I don't support generalized AI bans despite having major issues with companies that make software like ChatGPT. I'll also state what kind of AI ban I do think is reasonable.

* AI is a very general term that whose usage has only recently been focused on this particular type of software. It has widespread applications, including in digital art and photography (there's AI software built into digital cameras on phones even). This is not just an issue of semantics, either, but could get into tricky questions of which of these applications is "not the kind of AI we're talking about" in terms of functionality as well.

* Disproportionately punishes the harmless, does nothing against the companies creating the AI software or the companies using it to harm creatives (like those news articles putting up AI-generated art instead of paying an actual artist for their work). My impression is that this will mostly punish the people who are not making any money from this grift but just generating and posting it for their own entertainment. I don't think most the artists actually selling their work on Pillowfort are actually AI-generating it.

* Undermines fair use. Having a position that AI is bad because posting excerpts or works based on other works is stealing is to have a position that fanworks and even general fair use is theft. This is a position that megacorps like Disney have historically been very much in favor of supporting as a means to disenfranchise regular writers and artists like the kind who join platforms like Pillowfort. These megacorps are not friends to creatives and engage in contant theft and exploitation of their workers, whose work is *their* IP, and not owned by the creatives themselves.

So, what kind of ban on AI would I support? For me, this would be a ban similar to the spam ban a lot of sites implement, possibly customized to address specifics of these types of AI's. Obviously anything becomes a problem if it is being used to spam a site.

I also very much support sites discouraging AI scrapers by altering their robots.txt (I was happy to see that Pillowfort had done this) and giving their users the option to make posts site only. These measures aren't an AI ban on the site, but rather put up some roadblocks against the companies who are creating this AI in order to try to generate profit for themselves at the expense of all of us.

Mirrored post from my Pillowfort

Just updated my About Me to have external links to epub and pdf files for my longfic. One of my goals is to decentralize my online presence, and making my fic available from more locations online is one way to do that. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that standard social media is a bad format to post longform stories on due to the necessity to manually create links and organization that would exist automatically in a proper interface for such things.

However, linking external files is another alternative. I've just mirrored the ones available from the AO3 interface for now. I'd love to customize them some more if I get the chance, but availability is my first priority. Based on my unscientific survey, people prefer epub and pdf format, so these are the two formats supplied. If you'd like me to make any additional formats available, feel free to let me know, and I'll see what I can do!

Anyway here they are:

Heart of Shadow (epub)

Heart of Shadow (pdf)

Been noticing more new Tumblr people on Pillowfort lately. Sounds like some kind of, ah, additional Livejournal--style changes being implemented on Tumblr are the cause, but I haven't investigated the details myself. Don't know about Dreamwidth but I should probably subscribe to more comms here if I want to see more of what's going on. Or not--maybe I'll just hang like a spider in my quiet corner here, lol. To be decided! Nevertheless, maybe I should check some of the comm activity on this site to see if we've been getting new users here, too.

One of the things I like about smaller social media like Pillowfort and Dreamwidth is that they encourage me to be less passive on social media. I mean, I've always been fairly active in the sense that I would talk about topics of interest to me, but on Tumblr it's easier to just endlessly scroll and not interact with anyone. There's so much on a site like that it encourages less interaction. Whereas on a smaller social media site, the environment encourages a more active and, well, social approach instead of just treating it like television.

One thing I've accepted is that if I want to have the freedom to avoid some of some of the worst social media issues, I need to be willing to make some sacrifices, because otherwise that's never going to be realistic. There are advantages to the big social media sites that it's just not feasible for smaller sites to emulate. But there are also advantages to smaller social media spaces that you will never have on the large social media sites.

Dreamwidth and Pillowfort and Mastodon can't be Tumblr or Facebook or Twitter, but just as surely, Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter cannot be Dreamwidth or Pillowfort or Mastodon. The big mega-corp run sites are all on a race to the bottom in how they treat their customers. While they've pivoted to more of an emphasis on charging those customers money, this hasn't been to improve their experience or empower them.

I thought for a brief time that perhaps Tumblr having paid options might improve it, but on further reflection it was obvious to me that this by itself would never lead to true change. Because the underlying principles and purpose of the service (to the people running it) hasn't changed. Tumblr started out with no ads and with a very generous nsfw policy. But look at it now. How bad will it have to be before people leave? The answer, as evidenced by Twitter, is either completely unuseable or totally nonexistent. It's like the whole being boiled slowly metaphor. You accept it and you accept it and you accept it until you are simply too weak to leap out.

This is why I have to consider whether I should even keep my account on Tumblr, or whether I need to cut the cord for my own sake. I will miss many people on Tumblr, but I will not miss Tumblr in any capacity. What it once was is gone. What it once was was also an illusion, a venture capitalistic dream, built on nothing but empty promises and privilege. It could never have been sustainable in the environment in which it was produced.

I think this month is the first month Pillowfort met their monthly funding goals? This was accomplished by offering to unlock special badges and a winter frame icon for user avatars contingent on whether a person donated or overall donation results. So this seems to have been a successful business choice, at least for now.

I think the people working on Pillowfort are gradually learning from their various mistakes. A lot of those seem to be PR related or business related. I do hope they will continue to improve in those areas. Though they have had various technical issues, I think those can largely be attributed to the scope of the problems when one is trying to build a social media platform practically from scratch with incredibly limited resources. They really seem to be doing a suprisingly good job on the technical end despite their incredibly limited resources, and it's been pretty cool to see all the different features they've added just since the time I've been there. Even though Tumblr essentially did the same thing by designing a new type of social media when it was starting out it also got way more resources because of the more conventional way they operated the business-end of things. But that eventually got Tumblr to where we are today, so I don't have any qualms about Pillowfort deciding not to go that route (there may also be a component of that route being closed off to them anyway, and a recognition of that fact). It currently seems like Pillowfort wants to implement some freemium additions, somewhat like what Dreamwidth has, so we'll see how that goes.

I know there are plenty of people who don't want to try Pillowfort, and that's perfectly understandable, but if anyone I know decides they do, you can let me know and I'll send you an invite.

Pillowfort is back up now. Still going to continue posting here of course, but I'll be posting there as well.

So after it's public release, Pillowfort quickly took the site down after a number of white hat hackers exposed various security bugs in the system. They briefly put the site back up again yesterday (Jan 29), but took it down again the same day after more bugs were exposed. So now they'll be down a bit.

For me, this is not too much of a concern, and most of the security issues, while serious, seemed to be reputational in nature (a user being able to impersonate another) or involving access rather than privacy breaches. Still, I hope this will spur them to consider site security first going forward rather than attending to it after the fact. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, after all.

Meanwhile, I can post and talk with people here, so that's what I'll do. The nice part of being on multiple social media sites is that if one goes down, I can just use another.

Since I'm planning on phasing out ffnet for my fic at some point (though I want to post one more chapter of each fic and then discuss the phase-out in the author's note, so it's sort of a long-term plan haha), I've been thinking about where to put an alternative copy of my fic from AO3. I love AO3 for fic, but I don't ever want to be stuck with only one cloud copy of my stories so I need them to have at least one more online location. Given the reasons I'm leaving ffnet, that somewhat limits my options. But I think Dreamwidth or Pillowfort are two possibilities.

I was originally reluctant to use any kind of general-purpose social media site, but I realized that if I made a blog or community for each of my long fic, I could still organize them chapter-by-chapter in the way I wanted. And the short fic I could just add to my main blog here and link in my profile or something. And as an added bonus, I could add chapter-specific tags, which is a concept I really like because I love enabling more search functionality. Like sometimes I will skim or search through a longfic looking for particular parts of interest to me, and that would really enable that capability to a much greater degree for my fic.

So, that's probably what I'll do.

Did a rules refresh for the Pillowfort Sith comm today so that I could add my own touch to it.

A little while back, I offered to mod a couple of the comms on Pillowfort. This was a really big thing for me, even though Pillowfort comms in general, and the ones I now mod in particular, do not tend to be especially active. I tend to avoid volunteering for anything that may require me to manage a group of any kind, even one as amorphous and informal as a Pillowfort fan comm. But as I feel this relates to my social anxiety and confrontation avoidance, I felt that I should make this small effort to help myself overcome these issues.

Anyway, if anyone wants to take a look at the comms I currently admin and mod, here they are:

Sith Empire

Star Wars: The Sacred Texts

On the one hand starting a community of some sort either here or on Pillowfort sounds like it could be fun and maybe a good experience for me. On the other hand it sounds like responsibility so there's a very significant part of me that wants nothing to do with it lol. Also seeing how dead a lot of communities are or become I think there are certain forces of Web 2.0 that make them difficult to maintain. Perhaps even cultural forces that encourage very atomized behavior and alienation from others are involved with this phenomenon. Which is a shame, because I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with these online communities.

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unspeakablehorror

May 2025

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Navigation

Loftwings and Demons

And Sith and Porgs as Well...

Entries tagged with pillowfort

Pillowfort Returns

Website Backup and Pillowfort Downtime

Pillowfort Downtime

Pillowfort

A Letter From Julia Baritz

Pillowfort Downtime

Pillowfort

Large Sigh

AI-Generated Articles and AI Bans

Why I Don't Support Generalized AI Bans

External Links To My Longfic

Tumblr is Tumbling...Again

A Social Media that's More Social

Tradeoffs in Social Media

Some Pillowfort Thoughts

Pillowfort

Just Some Social Media Jumping

Dreamwidth or Pillowfort as Fic Backup

Pillowfort Star Wars Comms I Now Mod

Online Communities

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May 2025

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