Hello, just a passer-by! I actually was just looking at waterfall and was considering using it(I'm just looking for new websites to us and be cringe on) when I saw your post recommending not to!
I'm curious, what happened that was so bad???
The admin Thell/Thelle doesn't plan to develop Waterfall.Social anymore. He said he plans to keep it on while he creates something else but its not worth the time. Trust Me. (And waterfall apparently is down half the time nowadays)
People paid for this website on gofund me or whatever patreon website so you'd expect a bit of professionalism but Thell is not and he's ready to blame the users on his own shortcomings.
The ToS at the beginning had some bull like "no need to tire you with legalese" (paraphrasing it here) at the beginning of it. which Obviously had to be changed later. But it was a red flag i suppose.
Back when i joined waterfall years ago it to had some nice ideas, but longterm it fell Apart due to Thell being a mess of a single admin.
Thell created us an art marketplace on the website and then took it down few months later bc it wasn't profitable and people wouldn't abide the rules.
Which, in all fairness, the website was small, and he'd refuse to hire more staff idk. hard to see it profitable if it's tiny
Like, he'd give us featured art frame like on Tumblr desktop except it was random art so everyone got the chance to use it. Everyone loved it bc of that. Maybe feew years later though he broke the feature down
Why? Bc, at least to him, People would register to the website, see "bad art" and then walk away from the website. (Ways to insult userbase💖)
Not that the website itself was kind of bare and laggy and bunch of people was on it :))
Thell changed the featured art frame into 'only artworks above a treshold of notes get in there'. And it was some bull amount bc all you could see was few artworks circulating on repeat 'for another year'
I also heard the coding of the website was a mess but i'm not an IT person so idk
he also promised an app for Waterfall but then it turned out he'd have to have more staff to post it in appstore lol
Thell would even sort of threaten at some point to take away NSFW? the very reason why the site existed
Saying that people don't tag nsfw and this is why other websites got it banned and he doesn't want it to happen here.
A year ago Waterfall stopped working for a few weeks.
And so i was curious and i started digging. (it was actually also after announcement that Thell was thinking about ditching the website altogether for maybe a new project but couldn't decide)
Invites for official discord server weren't working.
Official twitter was gone
Official tumblr account was gone
Except i only found some roleplaying cherp drama on tumblr dunking on Thell i guess, bc offtopic, but apparently he was an admin on it and they accussed him of pretending to be 2 people in the same time, god complex, narcissism, bad coding and telling one of the Discord members to kill themself.
At the beginning i also remember being able to look at notification board.
And later it disappeared for some reason.
Thell took it down after a year or two I Suppose
Lack of communication, one big indecisiveness, lack of transparency, taking away what was already in there, lack of planning skills while not getting more people on board, etc.
And honestly the red signs were already there even before Waterfall. Before this site, which is supposed to be for leftist minded people, he was creating a website for rightists which also failed lol (you should be able to find more about it while browsing through waterfall tag more). People can change. But it seems Thell didn't change that much for the better beyond changing bunch of views.
If you'd like receipts, they should be available on Waterfall's Staff blog on Waterfall social bc Thell wrote updates through time.
If Thell creates another website ever again i Hope Tumblr will crush it to pulp.
If you'd like something that's more stable i can recommend Pillowfort and send you an invite code if you'd like. They also allow nsfw.
I heard there was some drama with it and staff aswell though i have no details about it, and i bet it wasn't as ridiculous as waterfall. I know they were fakely accussed on allowing cp tho. Even despite their website being one of the most anti-cp (even fictional is a No) i've seen. Heard they are too jumpy with implementing this ban, which is not good if you get fakely accussed, but well, maybe it changes. You don't have to pay for it to necessarily use it so at worst its just waste of time. o/ Pillowfort grows and seems to get regularly updated and it has a team behind it.
If you are an artist or an art enjoyer, Artfol is a cool new app for that. You can view it also from desktop. They are currently developing the option to post artworks from website. A very organised small team.
Other social media i somewhat heard of were mastodon (decentralised Twitter?) and Inkblot (another for artists)
If anyone knows more websites, please let me know!
Otherwise? Just not waterfall. Not it. The admin is way too unreliable
Edit: the website previous to Waterfall was racist. idk if rightist but for sure racist.
