(no subject)

[melannen]

So I am on vacation, and so far accomplishing very little, except making friends with a goat, which was basically the idea I guess!

I did get my pillowfort.io beta invite, so I now have a pillowfort.io account. So far, I am having trouble finding anything about it I like better than DW, so, not super excited, but I am there, under the usual name. I made a community for dreamwidth people (which is, excitingly, called dreamwidth) if you, also, have a pillowfort.io account, new or old, and would like to join me in playing around on it.

I was going to go through my DW people to see who I could find who is already there, but then I got distracted and ended up just adding a bunch of DW people on DW instead , so if I just added you back, hi! I have probably been reading you via Network already and didn't actually realize you weren't added back until just now.

Comments

[batrachian]

Aha. I was curious.

[melannen]

Oh, good, it worked! The manage circle page kept throwing me an error when I tried to save, but it looked like the save at least went through.

I figure if I'm going to keep talking about how DW is better than the other options I should at least make some effort to keep expanding my circles here. :)

[sassbandit]

Cosign! I've been on a similiar kick, for similar reasons, this week :)

[highlander_ii]

you'll never guess my username over on pillowfort... never in a million years XD

[melannen]

I was shocked to find out!

[jjhunter]

Heh; probably time for someone to host another DW circling meme!

Self, you don't have time to volunteer host right now. Maybe in a few weeks if no one else steps up first.

[melannen]

I could host one on pillowfort! :D "Find new people to follow on DW" sounds like a great use of pillowfort.

[princessofgeeks]

Is pillowfort the next fannish thing that Is Not Tumblr, in your estimation?

[beatrice_otter]

I dunno, it may be! (Oh, please God, may SOMETHING be.)

[melannen]

It would really, really like to be the Next Fannish Thing That Is Not Tumblr! That is its goal and dream. It is being made by a fandom-community person whose explicit goal was to do for fannish social media what AO3 has for fannish archiving. It would be nice if it was.

I strongly suspect it's going to be more like the next Imzy, though. I think it has better leadership than Imzy and a better idea of what it wants to do, but I'm not seeing the thing that's going to draw fandom there, tbh.

It seems to be taking the basic format of LJ (personal journals and communities, threaded comments, good privacy options) and adding reblogs, although IIRC LJ has reblogs now too, so that's not even all that different. And so far it's got a lot fewer other features and options than either of them. So there's really nothing new and different to pull people there if they're already established somewhere else, and without a critical mass of users, reblogging isn't that useful anyway.

Also, I think it has really shot itself in the foot (much like Imzy did) by locking everything away from non-logged-in users during beta - this should be when we're linking to cool pillowfort things on our other social media to bring buzz, but instead it's just a blank wall, which is super-demotivating in terms of putting in a lot of effort. It also really limits the use cases - you can't use pillowfort as your main online presence or archive if you can't link non-users to it. Maybe they're planning to change that after beta, but it's also been a fairly slow development process (like, in a reasonable world, three years in development/closed beta is great! But for an internet startup, it's not exactly going to take the world by storm that way.)

Honestly, I am more and more coming to suspect that the next fannish thing that Is Not Tumblr is Reddit.

[sholio]

Yeah, "the next Imzy" is my impression as well. I DO have an account on there - namesquatting and wanting to check out the place, mostly - and I don't want to shoot down anyone who's excited about it, but between the glacial pace of development, the fact that you still can't make posts that are visible to anyone who's not logged in, and a name that I strongly suspect is going to have a lot of trouble catching on outside an extremely limited subset of fandom ... I feel like it might already be past the point where it could have caught on if it was going to.

(But what do I know; I remember being extremely pessimistic about AO3 ever becoming an actual thing, plus "why do we need somewhere new to post fic, we've got lots of places already" - and now I absolutely love it. So.)


Honestly, I am more and more coming to suspect that the next fannish thing that Is Not Tumblr is Reddit.

AAAAAAAUGH .... but I actually think you're right; well, that and Twitter. I mean, in the less demographically Tumblr-leaning segments of fandom (older; more male; more casual-fandom and less fanfic-fandom) it's been THE big fandom hangout for a long time now, ever since message boards stopped really being a thing.

[lannamichaels]

The thing that killed imzy for me, for me not even trying to post there anymore, was that I could not figure out how to just paste in the Share code from ao3 to post my fic. I couldn't figure out html at all. I think it wanted markup? Whatever it was, too labor intensive, so I didn't bother. (tumblr at least lets me change the coding of the post to html, paste the share code, and then change back to rich text so I can remove the line breaks it magically decided to add).

I have not tried this on pillowfort. Maybe I should...

[princessofgeeks]

I have read things on Reddit and I guess it's back to the topic-central forum instead of a person-centered or comm-centered journal model?

[ratcreature]

by locking everything away from non-logged-in users

I don't think this is true? I mean, there is the off putting "you have to join" wall on the front page, but I've looked around a bit now over there, and it does seem that you can link to individual items and blogs/comms, and others can see them without being logged in. At least I can open pillowfort stuff in incognito tabs?

[beatrice_otter]

I'm there, and I just followed you. Same username, yadda. https://pillowfort.io/Beatrice_Otter

[melannen]

Hello!

[thawrecka]

Hello!

[melannen]

Hello!

[lannamichaels]

I have the same username over on pillowfort, but I, um, haven't logged in since I made the account.

[melannen]

Yeah, I suspect that's pretty common.

[sciatrix]

Wellp, I looked into signing up for it and it looks like now you gotta pay to join. Interest level: immediately nil.

[melannen]

Huh, where did you see anything about pay-to-join? Right now it's closed beta, you have to request a beta invite and then wait for the next round of beta invites to come around - I requested one back in the previous round last winter and they just sent out the new invites now, which is why people are suddenly talking about it again.

If it's going to be pay-to-join once it's out of beta, that's definitely a bad sign.

[ratcreature]

I just got my beta invite, and set up, unsurprisingly as "ratcreature", for now mostly to namesquat. (Though you really need to do it on the mundane sites with potential, like, I still remember setting up my Tumblr in 2007 and it took until 2011 before I ever got any fannish use out of it... but meanwhile I still regret not reserving my name on Instagram. I couldn't imagine that having fandom appeal.)

[melannen]

Yeah, it's weird the places that I never thought I would want to namesquat, and end up wishing I had. Although a lot of the more "mainstream" sites these days allow duplicate usernames, so it's becoming less important.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this meaty discussion.

Shockingly, I use the same name everywhere.

I just dinked around again with the usernames helpfully supplied here. The only way I can find to add someone/follow them is from their name-link; can't do it on posts.