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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.

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Aha. I was curious.

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. :)

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

I was shocked to find out!

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

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.~~

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

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

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

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

Hello!

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.

Hello!

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.

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

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...

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?

Yeah, I suspect that's pretty common.

AO3 did something that you couldn't do anywhere else (and, afaik, still can't): archive /all/ your fanfic. Yes, even that one. And that one. For mostly monofannish people, or people who didn't write above R-rated, it was probably not a big thing, but there was a huge group of people (readers and writers) who really needed that.

None of the "we will fix social media" people seem to have found any equivalent unmet demand to meet - "ethics" and "not being awful" aren't good enough to overcome inertia.

Twitter, from what I've seen as a non-user, seems to be starting a downswing (oh I hope), but it never managed to really be a home for creative/longform stuff anyway.

But yeah, Reddit, afaict, already has thriving creative-fandom communities-they're just almost entirely isolated from the ones elsewhere, probably because of Reddit's bad sj rep. But they've been working on that since the election, and what the many-moderated-message-boards setup does is make it really easy to wall off the toxicity in a way it's really tough to do in traditional social media. Similarly it's setup to encourage link posting, which gives a pathway /other/ than reblogging (with all its pitfalls) for non-content-producers to establish themselves (which is, I think, the main thing dw lacks - there are tumblr people used to creating a presence based entirely on curating their reblogs, and that's not a thing you can do on DW-type sites, you have to actually produce your own content. But nobody has yet solved the 'allow reblogs without going toxic' problem).

Idk, I have never wandered into Reddit's fannish corners, but I have been spending a lot of time there at work because my boss thinks it's a serious website, and have a friend who has basically quit all other social media in favor of a feed containing every single "cute animals" subreddit - I am pretty sure I will be at home on dw as long as d keeps it running, but if I had to leave here it would probably be for reddit.

Edited 2018-05-31 13:59 (UTC)

Hmm.

I think it probably makes sense at this point for AO3 to offer a markup(Markdown?)-based share option, because more and more sites are using it instead of html, but it's totally a pain for html-fluent people. :/ I do think one thing a fannish-killer-app needs is to be highly customizable and flexible, because the most important thing for fandom social media is the ability for fandom to twist it entirely outside its original intended usage, and I don't think pillowfort is there, either.

I just poked pillowfort and I can't figure out how to crosspost there either, sigh. They don't even have the link post option that tumblr has. Meh. It's not like I needed a fourth place to crosspost.

...it probably is called Markdown. I am good at internets. I'd whine "it's not like html is all that hard" except that I did actually spend 3+ hours on Monday coding a bunch of nested lists for a fic so, uh, yeah. (That one was my fault, though. I trusted Scrivener too much seven years ago and ended up having to use Excel to fix it.)

If you have an account, you create a feed of subreddits that's basically like having a comm-centered lj feed - it's not like the old days of having to navigate between a bunch of different forums, and people's identities carry over between comms and are really easy to follow between comms; it really is a lot more like a huge world of very active LJ comms (which I did not realize at all until my friend with an account started showing me all the cute animals on her reddit feed).

But yeah, it lacks almost any personal-blogging capability - everything is done in the communities; people who really want a personal blog do create personal subreddits, where they're the only ones who can post, the same way people used to create personal fic communities, but I don't think that's ever really taken off as a major part of the site.

I think the reason fewer sites use HTML isn't so much ease of use (markdown is not exactly simple than HTML for basic formatting.) it's a security and usability thing - there are ways to hack a site via text input fields that accept html, which you then have to make sure can't happen, plus it can interact weirdly with the rest of your page's html depending on the browser, whereas stuff like markdown lets your text input be more of a walled garden. But yeah, it's super annoying.

What do you mean by crosspost? Clearly something other than copy-pasting into the post box, which is the only way I ever crosspost...

Thanks for the info on reddit... sounds like I should be reading there. Maybe later in the summer when I have more time I can investigate.

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