Too Much Orca

A side blog for Ceylon-Tae. Moving away from tumblr. Find me on pillowfort or bluesky. All posts are tagged. - About - Asks closed due to spam - Advice I wish everyone knew - Tags List

[ceylon-tae]

What's Pillowfort, is it better than Tumblr?

How many details do you want, and how much time do you have?

Haha but seriously. I’ll try to break this down point by point so it is skimmable, but will still have all the details that have been relevant to me as an artist / a regular user.

Pillowfort is a post-and-reblog blogging website that’s sort of similar to Tumblr, but it is run entirely on user contributions, and actually believes in resisting enshittification. You know how Archive Of Our Own is user-funded, has no ads, has no algorithm, has no arbitrary content limits, and virtually no character limits, right? Let’s talk about a website similar to that, but for images / blogging / reblogging / commenting.

For some guides about what Pillowfort is, how it works, and how to get the most out of it, I have a collection of posts over here: pillowfort.social/Ceylon-Tae/tagged/how%20to%20pillowfort

Is Pillowfort better than Tumblr? Let’s talk about:

Money / ads

Censorship

Algorithms

Apps/web browsers

Bigotry

Community

-

MONEY/ADS

Pillowfort is a post-and-reblog social media website that's been user-funded for years now. There are no ads, and your attention is not the product here. If you like their service, then you can decide to throw them a couple dollars, if you want. You can buy a small subscription to optional features like adding more user icon slots, the ability upload images that are larger than 2MB, and stuff like that. You are not paying for a shareholder’s third yacht, you are paying to keep the lights on and the servers up. Pillowfort publishes their workload and funding level regularly.

Tumblr is a post-and-reblog social media website that’s run for-profit, yet is famously unprofitable. This is despite selling ads to put on the sidebar, sponsored features to put at the top of your feed, putting ads at regular intervals between the posts on your dashboards as you scroll, asking users to buy monthly 'premium memberships', selling custom URLs, banning adult material in the hopes of appeasing advertisers / payment processors / app stores... and now they are putting ads in between your posts on your blog pages unless you pay them a monthly ransom subscription fee. (I left deviantART over this "putting ads in with your posts on your page" business.) I hope everyone is running an adblocker on their web browser, but I know not everyone does, and I know some people are (heaven help them) using the Tumblr app. It’s a whole lot of garbage in there. Whether you give them your money directly, or whether you just see their ads, you’re paying for photomatt’s overinflated ego, which will never be satisfied.

Yeah I think Pillowfort is better than Tumblr when it comes to money / ads.

CENSORSHIP

Pillowfort uses payment processors that explicitly allow any legal material to be uploaded to the website, including material intended for adults only. Pillowfort requires that 18+ posts be marked as such, it does not allow users under 18 to view posts marked 18+, and it does not allow minors to be depicted sexually in any medium. Otherwise, you’re free to post as you please. Pillowfort is also not in app stores, so it is not subject to Google and Apple app store rules about explicit material. Instead, Pillowfort has a Progressive Web App for those who want a “mobile app” experience (see the section below on apps / web browsers).

Tumblr is most famous for two things: banning porn at the height of its popularity, and making Yahoo lose almost a billion dollars over it. Tumblr’s third most infamous act is probably “banning female-presenting nipples” during that porn ban. They’ve since walked that part back, allowing nonsexual nudity in theory, but definitely not in practice. If you’re trans, they’ll ban you for fully-clothed selfies. (I stopped posting my art here during a recent storm of this.) We’ll get to that, in the section on bigotry. I’d say this is the fourth thing Tumblr is most famous for. Pretty terrible. The censorship on Tumblr is arbitrary and capricious, and done at the supposed behest of payment processors, advertisers, and app stores.

I’m gonna make an extra stab at Bluesky, too. In case you thought Bluesky was going to be a bastion of adult content, free from arbitrary censorship. It is anything but. Bluesky has recently banned anything sexual that, to their mods, looks “nonconsensual”. Users asked them to please clarify that nonconsesual/revenge porn should be banned, but not consensual porn that simply plays with dubcon/noncon topics. The people in charge laughed in their faces and basically told them no, this includes dubcon/noncon kink scenes between consenting adults, drawings where the characters look less than happy, and furry/werewolf porn if the mods are having a particularly bad day (they’ll just tell you they’re banning it for “promoting beastiality”). The users are not happy. Patreon is even worse right now. You can’t even say “sucking” on your 18+ Patreon, for fuckssake.

Yeah I think Pillowfort is better than both Tumblr (and Bluesky! and Patreon!) when it comes to censorship. And if you want a subscription service for 18+ content? Get a Subscribestar. I am so serious.

ALGORITHM

Pillowfort doesn't have any algorithms. Pillowfort shows you the posts that your friends posted, in the order they were posted. If you want to see posts, you go to your dashboard feed, you can look at tags, you can look at communities (more on that later), and so on. You decide what you want to see.

Tumblr has been rolling out more and more algorithm features. However, it seems like nobody is sure how they work, and artists have suffered for it at every turn. You could put a tag on your post, but it's a crapshoot if going to that tag will actually show your post. Maybe you haven't posted enough recently. Maybe you've just posted too much. Maybe the algorithm just doesn't like you. But good luck getting your posts to show up in the tags. This is IF people even still look at the tags - Tumblr doesn't link to the sitewide tag page anymore. If you want to see recent posts made with a certain tag (this used to be the fandom standard here), you have to type that into the address bar yourself. Tumblr only wants to offer you an algorithmic 'search' feature. Tumblr’s search feature, famously, sucks. If you search “Naruto”, you will see posts that are tagged with things like “I Love Naruto” and “I Hate Naruto”, regardless of which tag you want to see. As if all that wasn’t enough, Tumblr will also seemingly randomly hide your posts from the dashboards of people following you, even if they’re looking at their chronological feed where your post really should have been shown. No clue why it does this. This is if your followers are even on their “Following” page instead of the “For You” page that Tumblr will randomly assign to your dashboard instead. This is if your followers have even turned off “Best stuff first”, a disastrous setting that decimated the visibility of artists’ new posts when it was implemented on an opt-out basis that most users weren’t even aware of. Tumblr’s automated image moderator (another shitty algorithm) may also randomly decide that your photos of sand dunes are totally porn, and will hide them from everyone (unless you win an appeal, which can take hours to days). So good luck getting people to see your posts if you included a picture, or a link, or a url, or a video, or...

Yeah I think Pillowfort wins by not having any algorithm bullshit.

APPS / WEB BROWSER

Pillowfort has a Progressive Web App, instead of being available for download in app stores. Critically, since it is not in app stores, it is not subject to Apple or Google app store rules about explicit material (see above on censorship). Should you prefer an "app" experience on mobile, use Pillowfort’s PWA. That said, their website experience is good on both mobile and desktop web browsers, so that’s how I always use it. You want add-ons? We got add-ons! Install Tassel and you can get those features from Xkit that you really missed, like collapsing/expanding posts, better blacklists, etc. There are a few bugs, to be fair. My least favorite is if you make a comment on one post, scroll down, and reblog a lower post, the dashboard will scroll you back up to the post you commented on. This is honestly my biggest gripe about the place, which is peanuts.

Tumblr’s app is a joke, especially among its users. Most of the reason I stopped using Tumblr's app completely was due to its completely outrageous flashing/autoplay/loud/adult-themed dashboard ads, which are especially outrageous considering its ban on most adult materials. Then there’s the way Tumblr’s mobile app would randomly scroll you to the top of your endless-scroll dashboard if you turned off your phone screen, or looked at another app. The UI sucked. And the thousand other shitty changes they made along the way. People on here brag about how long it’s been since they updated their Tumblr app because the new changes suck so much. By comparison, Tumblr on mobile web browsers + adblock was almost tolerable. Except recently, doing things with a post (like seeing a different reblog of it) will scroll you back to the top of your dashboard page ON MOBILE WEB BROWSERS TOO.

Yeah I think Pillowfort’s mobile experience is better than Tumblr’s.

BIGOTRY

As far as I know, the people who run and moderate Pillowfort know when the shut the fuck up. As far as I know, there hasn’t been any unfair moderation that would discourage LGBTQ+ users, furries, kinksters, etc from posting TOS-abiding content on the website.

Tumblr’s CEO Matt Mullenweg aka. photomatt is literally incapable of shutting the fuck up, and will pursue trans users to other fucking websites to harass them if they said they didn’t like how he was running his website. Tumblr was sued for discriminating against LGBTQ+ users, they opted to settle, the terms of that settlement included “stop your moderators from being so fucking transphobic” and they did not listen at all. It bans trans women for posting fully clothed selfies. It bans people for talking about transgender topics. You’re not allowed to tell terfs to shut the fuck up. I can’t even list all the shit they ban you for, all the trans users they’ve banned, all the critics they’ve banned, for absolutely no fucking reason. Go read my tag for this.

Bluesky, as we already discussed, recently changed their TOS. Another one of the changes in there was to explicitly allow malicious users to stay on the website, regardless of whether they orchestrate harassment campaigns agaisnt bsky users, as long as they do it off the website. I explain that here. Bluesky also recently had a bunch of feds and White House shitheads join ahead of the October No Kings protests. They’re the most-blocked users on the website, but evading a block on Bluesky is laughably easy – you just have to log out, and you can see all a user’s posts again. Bluesky offers no options for users to make a post private, or even logged-in-users-only. Fucking shitshow.

COMMUNITY

If you know how ArchiveOfOurOwn works, you will have an idea of how Pillowfort works. Pillowfort wants you join this community! Like really! Join communities! Follow people! Look in the tags! Make shitposts and reblog them to the shitposting community! Make comments on posts! Talk to people! The comment sections on Pillowfort posts are fully nested, so they are organized and easy to follow. I find this to be less stifling than Tumblr or Bsky comment limits, and less intimidating and rapid-fire than Discord. This is how I grew up talking to people online, and this is how I prefer to talk to people online. You have an extensive amount of control over your Pillowfort posts, where they are visible, who can view them, who can reblog them, and who can comment on them. You can post things directly to a community, for example, if you don't want that post on your blog. You can make your own community for whatever you want, including "making a sideblog for just one topic" (I have done this lol). People are also discouraged from being rude in the comments, where your wiseass comments are not visible to anyone who didn’t intentionally open the comments section looking for a discussion, and being a little shit to people will simply get you blocked. Pillowfort doesn’t want you posting AI-generated slop. Pillowfort doesn’t want harassment mobs or callout posts. The one thing Pillowfort SHOULD have that it DOESN’T have right now is a huge userbase, and I literally cannot fathom why not - it wins in every other category. I can understand why we didn’t go back to Dreamwidth, because Dreamwidth didn’t have image hosting. Pillowfort HAS image hosting, which used to be a big deal 15 years ago but is standard for social media now. I want more people to join Pillowfort. With Bluesky and Tumblr both shitting the bed repeatedly, more people are joining. I want more people to join Pillowfort!!! If you want an active dashboard, go follow people and follow communities. Post stuff. Reblog stuff.

Tumblr has communities that, as far as I know, no one uses. Tumblr doesn’t want you looking in a tag. Tumblr wants you to look at shitty algorithmic searches (and ads). Tumblr doesn’t even want you seeing the posts that your friends posted in the order they posted them. They automatically opted you into things like “see best stuff first”, or will randomly open a “For You” page instead of your “Following” page on your dashboard. Tumblr’s userbase isn’t what it used to be, but there’s still a lot of posts and your posts WILL still get buried by the algorithm. Tumblr’s reading comprehension level is famously piss-poor. But hey, at least we can keep circulating the same shitposts back from when we used to be free.

If you want an endless dashboard that rapidly refreshes with more new posts than you could ever hope to see, Pillowfort doesn’t have that yet (unless you REALLY decide to follow a LOT of people and communities – which you can do, if you want). Pillowfort has a community of people who actually talk to each other. It’s where I post my art and hobbies these days. Instead of getting 5 likes on Tumblr, I get 5 likes and some comments on Pillowfort, and that’s if I forget to reblog it to a community on the topic. It’s up to you. But I really recommend you give Pillowfort an honest try and actually talk to people there.

-

In summary

If you know how to use ArchiveOfOurOwn, Pillowfort is sort of like that, but for blogging. There’s no ads and there’s no algorithm. It’s user-funded. You are supposed to go find things that you enjoy. People to follow. Communities to join. There's way more than I mentioned here, and this is already really fucking long. Pillowfort is what you make of it, and you can make it really nice.

I’m not going to tell you that you should abandon Tumblr completely and only use Pillowfort for the rest of your life. First of all, I’m not your parents. Secondly, trying to quit a habit (ex. a social media) cold-turkey can be a dicey plan in general. You’ve got to decide what’s important to YOU, and what makes YOU feel happy and safe in your free time. Obviously I haven’t completely abandoned tumblr – I still scroll it at work – but I’ve stopped posting my art here, I’ve stopped spending my free time here, and I’ve certainly never given tumblr my money. And honestly, even just scrolling tumblr at work, knowing that tumblr is going to show ads to people scrolling my blog’s dedicated page is kind of rotting me from the inside. This in addition to the way I feel rotten from remembering the censorship, the shitty algorithm, the shitty mods and their shitty transphobia, and all the other things I’ve mentioned here or didn’t have the time or space to mention here. It feels bad, man. You’ve gotta be able to back away from things that suck. I’m not good at that but I’m trying to get better at it. When I go home and I want to fart around online, I go to Pillowfort. I journal on Pillowfort. I post my art to Pillowfort. If you like Tumblr and you like AO3, think you should try it, too. Follow people and communities, make posts, reblog those posts to communities, and talk to people.

Here’s a multi-use invite link. I'll try to add more in the comments as time goes on. If you don’t want to use an invite link, the queue to register is maybe an hour or so long. Come dive into a website that’s not actively trying to be shitty-for-profit.

pillowfort.social/users/sign_up?invite=VNztIsS_agdozhsJ6CrC9Q

[yume-fanfare]

windows movie maker on the internet archive we are so back

[boomstab-papa]

I think we all know that the real reason Wattpad is banning smut is because payment processors and other such puritans hate it and want to ban it, and this is part of that broader trend... But what bullshit reason is Wattpad bullshitting us with, anyway?

We must protect the children? Porn is bad for adults? Liking icky porn makes you a bad person?

And there it is, all of the above!

Writing or reading anything that exists for the purpose of being horny is "dangerous, irresponsible, and bad for the community"!!

And you'll notice that they don't really care if it's "married sex in the missionary position for the purpose of having children" or "ridiculous shit that could never exist in real life at all" - if you want to read something explicit, purely for sexy purposes, we are all degenerate perverts in the eyes of the censors.

Sex = bad, horny = worthless, porn = dangerous

It's this shit again. It's happened before, and it's happening again, and it will keep happening. Any puritans running the websites or payment processors WILL censor you. A for-profit company will ALWAYS stab you in the back.

Plan accordingly. Here's the advice I endorse.

[the-pen-pot]

It looks like Wattpad has tightened up their content polices to exclude what they deem to be "pornographic" material. I don't post there anyway, but if you do and you think your fics might fall afoul of this change, now is a good time to make sure you've got backups.

I'd love to believe that they wouldn't wipe out a huge slew of fics, but it's happened multiple times before on other sites.

[boomstab-papa]

My favorite part is where they say that writing / reading anything that exists for the sole purpose of Being Horny is dangerous, irresponsible, and bad for the community.

And that ambiguity about whether something is "primarily" written to be horny is going to be nasty

A for-profit company will always stab you in the back. Make your backups wisely.

[rayshippouuchiha]

In light of Wattpad being struck with even tighter censorship rules, I think we all need to make a concentrated effort to be even freakier on AO3

[pjmimi17]

Seeing people on twitter complain that AO3 is “unusable” compared to wattpad will never not be funny to me. You select what you want, exclude what you don’t, and boom, no algorithm pushing sponsored garbage, no ads every three chapters, just pure tag efficiency.

It’s not outdated, you’re just lazy. 😭

(This also isn't hate on wattpad, that app was my introduction into the world of fanfiction, and I'm very grateful)

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

people complaining about ao3 site “not looking aesthetically pretty” is so funny to me because it’s super clear these people are used to wattpad and other social media platforms where you can have aesthetic layouts, but what they fail to understand is that ao3 is an archive. it’s a library with the purpose of keeping/storing/archiving fanworks. it’s not a social media.

also, you can technically make your ao3 page look aesthetically pretty by applying your own customized skin/layouts on your own ao3 page. according to people who use their own customized skins, it’s easy once you learn how to do it (I personally don’t know how to do it because I’m not interested in learning or applying any fancy skin, and I just use dark mode there) it may not be as easy as decorating twitter or wattpad layout, but that’s because the purpose of ao3 is to archive fanworks, not to be a place for users to show their aesthetic layouts.

once again, ao3 is a non-profit organization, an anti-censorship archive/library that welcomes all kinds of fanfics/fanworks. it doesn’t prioritize “looking aesthetically pretty” because looking aesthetically pretty like a social media platform has never been relevant to its purpose.

here’s the list of things you need to know if you’re new to ao3

[7-inches-of-satanic-panic]

mfs be like ao3 is disgusting and it’s awful how they just allow so much dark content to exist on there. that kind of stuff just shouldn’t be allowed. anyways isn’t it fucked up how Wattpad just banned smut? censorship is awful

[thats-how-i-like-it]

I just saw the censorship that they're applying to wattpad, fics like the ones where you're being sold to one direction are forbidden now, the fork was officially outlawed from the kitchen 💀

[ghoulbat666]

i haven’t used wattpad for well over a decade but the recent censorship of wattpad is exactly why ao3 is so important and needs to be protected at all costs

[ariamisu]

shared fish braincell

[libertineangel]

Zoot suits look kinda stupid but I gotta respect the cultural context & symbolism of the things

"Fuck the military and fuck the war, look at all this good uniform-worthy fabric I'm wasting on a fuckoff giant suit" is a very solid basis for a subculture

[knxfesck]

I actually really love to talk about zoot suits and their associated subcultures. The amount that the silhouettes of the zoot suit have shaped american fashion and trends of oversized clothes is so understated. And, yk, I'm biased as hell, but it is kinda crazy how influential zoot suit culture was

I always love the og zoot suits made by black americans in Harlem, I really like looking at the changes from these clothes from the 30s to some of the more exaggerated renditions from the 40s. It's also so interesting to look at how fast the subculture spread, and especially in the american west integrated with mexican diaspora and pachuco culture to the point that that's what a lot of usamericans associate them with.

⬆️ long wallet chains and pork pie hats were classic accessories for mexican diaspora zoot suiters. Zoot suits/their components were also really popular with women and were a way to symbolize independence and a choice to move away from strict gender roles on top of the existing countercultural message ⬇️

Anyways it's kind of impossible to talk about zoot suits without mentioning the racism and violence that followed them. On top of a zoot suit making someone a target for individual racial violence, the national reaction of white america to zoot suit culture was part of the beginning of clothing and presentation being read explicitly as signals by police and justice systems, and the broad association of youth of color with gang violence through this specific excuse. Gang culture and how it's percieved in the western US and especially California is very influenced by this era. The most famous events from the zoot suit era are the collective zoot suit riots and the media characterization of all mexican american, filipino american, and black american youth as violent anti-american baby gangsters. Which, even if that was broadly true I mean. I'll take the opportunity to be flippant hell yeah??

As a side note, while making more new zoot suits during war rationing was pretty sick, most people weren't buying from the black market tailor shops and just wore what they already owned because the style had been popular for years already. People bought clothes less often to begin with back then. I think that misconception comes from the reasoning white americans gave to go beat up people of color with baseball bats in the street; i.e. it was racial and xenophobic violence to begin with and the nature of the suits themselves has been mushed around a lot to serve different narratives.

More zoot suits! ⬇️

They can definitely look kinda goofy- mostly the exaggerated cuts and badly tailored modern recreations- but like you said you gotta respect them.

[blackfilmmakers]

"The ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit" - Cab Calloway

[punkitt-is-here]

dear princess celestia

[tanoraqui]

it’s just hard not to think about the fact that in 1915, JRR Tolkien went to war not with but certainly in the same army and many of the same battles as his 3 best school friends, all nicely upper class young men who had never known much loss, and only he and one other came back alive - and a couple decades later, he wrote a book in which 3 nicely upper class young men (and one very excellent gardener) who have never known much loss go to war together, or at least they start out together, and they all come home alive. (Though one cannot bear it, and does not stay.)

[meerius]

What more it wasn’t just losing his friends, he was a commanding officer of a battalion of working class men. All farmers and miners from the same area of Lancashire. He felt affinity for them, but wasn’t allowed to socialize between the ranks due to military protocol and he hated it. 

 "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."

I don’t think it was even 6 months later that he contracted trench fever and was sent home. 

His entire command was wiped out in one charge shortly after, the majority of a whole countryside’s youths slaughtered while he survived. Youths who were brave and steadfast, but thought of as lesser than their superior officers while still being the ones carrying the actual battle. Youths who deserved fellowship, respect, and above all to go home and dance with their own Rosie.

“My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself”. 

[seriousfic]

[themightyglamazon]

TRIES NOT TO CRY

[jenniferrpovey]

There is a reason Frodo, who represents the English gentry, in the end falls and is caught by Samwise, who represents the common man.

But there is a soldier in Lord of the Rings who does not come back, and I don’t mean Boromir.

I mean the being who was a common hobbit, but who became corrupted by darkness and poison, who’s face is described in ways reminiscent of a gas mask.

The soldier who doesn’t come home, who is poisoned by gas and stress and insanity.

Is Gollum.

[sniperct]

The Lord of the Rings repeatedly stresses the horrors of war. Eowyn's entire arc is about the truth of warfare versus the way it's glorified. She starts out glorifying war and combat and soldiers, even when her own brother is telling her war sucks and is terrible. And then in the end, she sees first hand what war does to people.

Aragorn's entire arc isn't to be the steadfast hero saving the day, it's to hold the line in terror and horror and blood while the overlooked folk are the people who save the world. And then, what makes him a king, is not his skill in battle, but his healing hands.

Which then ties into both Eowyn and Faramir's arcs. Eowyn goes into healing not because she's a weak and meek woman, but because war is horrible and saving lives is better than taking them. Aragorn is glorified within the text for his healing, and so is Eowyn.

Also, tying into the common man thing, in the movies it's Faramir but in the books it's SAMWISE who questions what brings a man so far from home to fight in a war and if he is really so different.

LOTR is anti-war propaganda.

[grier-the-goblin-deactivated202]

"LOTR is anti-war propaganda"

All good war stories are

[misheancolchester]

Also look at how many of the battles are told in flashback

[ursulanoodles]

To everyone complaining about Wattpad’s new rules, do we now see why AO3 doesn’t censor anything? And that any form of censorship is a slippery slope into an outright ban of mature content? This is why we have an archive of our own with a beautiful tagging and warning system, and why we don’t need an app, which would be subject to an app store’s content rules. Best go make your AO3 account now.

[accursedvoid]

So from what I’m hearing, Wattpad users are experiencing what it was like to be on FFN when the great purge happened?

[sanyu-thewitch05]

I had to unpublish my Yandere oneshot book on Wattpad because of the new guidelines and I posted a message about it on my Wattpad message board because it has an announcement to all followers option. Well, as it turned out I had to not put my ao3 link in the message because Wattpad has banned outside links in your announcements. So if you need to announce to your followers that you’re unpublishing a book or not going to be on Wattpad anymore, I recommend:

1. Unpublishing all chapters except an announcement chapter with a link to your alt fanfic site and/or your ao3 username.

2. Just posting your ao3 username in the message board announcement without the link.