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
