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Trying out Pillowfort (again)
Dec. 26th, 2021 09:23 amWhen invites first started going around, I signed up for an account, looked around the site (what I could see past a sea of 500 errors), and decided I kind of hated it.
I think a big part is the name. I still hate the name. It's part of this trend of infantilising the internet that I've always found really cloying and uncomfortable. And now that trend seems to have largely passed, and welp. They're stuck with it.
But with Tumblr completely shitting the bed this week, people started talking about Pillowfort again and I figured I'd give it another look. And... I'm still not sold. It's not very intuitive, its TOS is vague as hell, and something about it just seems off. And that's all completely aside from the fact that it's pretty dead. I joined a bunch of communities way back in the day, and some of them have never been posted to. A couple have fairly decent member numbers, in the thousands, and there are still weeks between posts.
What I find particularly odd is the way it's trying to be two different things at once. It's trying to be LJ with the communities, and Tumblr with the feed and reblogging. And it's not a very smooth melding of the two. I made a few posts just to see how it works, and what particularly caught me off-guard is the way reblogging to communities works. First I made the mistake of posting directly to a community, and realised that no record of that post existed on my own account. Even on LJ, you could see that a person was active in communities, even if their journal was empty. But when I posted to the community, if I wanted my own followers to see it as well, I had to reblog my own post to my blog. That was weird. Didn't like that.
So then I turned around and did it the other way; made a post to my own blog, and then reblogged it to a community. I suppose it makes sense that I'd have to re-add the tags when I reblog, but it seems funky to me that a site that has built itself up very heavily on the way its tag filters work, the tags would carry over.
If I do continue to use this site, I can't see myself using the communities very often, in all honesty. It's a weird faff that's awkward enough on desktop, and I wouldn't even want to try it on my iPad.
And that's another thing that vexes me. The fuzzy dates. The site's tip page says to hover over the stamp to get the exact date, but I do most of my internetting from my iPad. I'm only at my desk when I need to edit or format something. I don't like fuzzy dates. Especially when they only go as high as months, so I'll see a post from 37 months ago, instead of... what is that? Two and a half years? I hate that.
You can follow me if you want, and I've been following people back. Mostly, I'll likely just be announcing fic over there, and doing little else though.
I think a big part is the name. I still hate the name. It's part of this trend of infantilising the internet that I've always found really cloying and uncomfortable. And now that trend seems to have largely passed, and welp. They're stuck with it.
But with Tumblr completely shitting the bed this week, people started talking about Pillowfort again and I figured I'd give it another look. And... I'm still not sold. It's not very intuitive, its TOS is vague as hell, and something about it just seems off. And that's all completely aside from the fact that it's pretty dead. I joined a bunch of communities way back in the day, and some of them have never been posted to. A couple have fairly decent member numbers, in the thousands, and there are still weeks between posts.
What I find particularly odd is the way it's trying to be two different things at once. It's trying to be LJ with the communities, and Tumblr with the feed and reblogging. And it's not a very smooth melding of the two. I made a few posts just to see how it works, and what particularly caught me off-guard is the way reblogging to communities works. First I made the mistake of posting directly to a community, and realised that no record of that post existed on my own account. Even on LJ, you could see that a person was active in communities, even if their journal was empty. But when I posted to the community, if I wanted my own followers to see it as well, I had to reblog my own post to my blog. That was weird. Didn't like that.
So then I turned around and did it the other way; made a post to my own blog, and then reblogged it to a community. I suppose it makes sense that I'd have to re-add the tags when I reblog, but it seems funky to me that a site that has built itself up very heavily on the way its tag filters work, the tags would carry over.
If I do continue to use this site, I can't see myself using the communities very often, in all honesty. It's a weird faff that's awkward enough on desktop, and I wouldn't even want to try it on my iPad.
And that's another thing that vexes me. The fuzzy dates. The site's tip page says to hover over the stamp to get the exact date, but I do most of my internetting from my iPad. I'm only at my desk when I need to edit or format something. I don't like fuzzy dates. Especially when they only go as high as months, so I'll see a post from 37 months ago, instead of... what is that? Two and a half years? I hate that.
You can follow me if you want, and I've been following people back. Mostly, I'll likely just be announcing fic over there, and doing little else though.
