Considering trying Pillowfort again. Back when Tumblr was dropping the first of several live grenades at their feet I signed up for it while it was $5 a pop for an account, made a handful of monthly donations, too. This was also before they had to take the site down for a significant amount of time due to the many, MANY security flaws it had. For a while you could have accounts that were single unicode characters. I'm not saying that to dunk on it, I'm blatantly flexing my historical knowledge and "I was there".
They cleaned that up as far as I can tell, but I still dropped off over time because the vibes were just off for me and eventually turned rancid. No big "I'm leaving for these reasons", I just stopped posting. I'm not going to make this a laundry list of complaints. There's one thing that got to me, though, in specific. At the time I was still active on it, there seemed to be a lot of friction between the site's marketing leaning into "we're like Tumblr but we allow porn" and people who absolutely did not want that trying to be the site's tastemakers and shouting down things they didn't like.
I got a lot of content cop types popping up in my comments telling me exactly how I should tag things to their specifications, and eventually I just made sure comments were off on all new posts I made because I associated comments with complaints. And then I just stopped bothering altogether because there were better alternatives (hi, Cohost) that didn't feel like there were people sharpening their knives, ready to pounce.
Part of the problem was the overlap with the site's communities system. Having feeds of posts that people make to individual groups seems like a good idea on paper, and I can only hope it's smoothed out since I last used it (you'll forgive me for doubting that), but it made publishing one post to all those groups a pain. I've posted this, I guess I should share it to the one labeled Art. And Digital Art. And Pillowfort Artists. And Artist Alley. And Artists on Pillowfort. And so on.
I don't want an algorithm. And Pillowfort does have tags. The thing that bothered me was the feeling that tags on their own felt ineffective because of the emphasis on communities, and it put more pressure on the individual to try to get in front of as many of those groups as possible, rather than encouraging people to search for and discover the things they want to see. What I've realized processing my thoughts years later is that this increased the surface area for complaints without any real benefit in return.
I'm just armchair psychology-ing things here, but I can imagine with those community feeds, people feel a stronger sense of ownership even if they're not the admin, or maybe specifically because they're not the admin who probably abandoned the feed years ago, and they feel like it's up to them to police things to their tastes. Honestly I get the impression the communities system was made for fandoms, not art. It's not really want I'm looking for from the whole experience.
So if I do start posting there again, I'm gonna skip the communities. But I still don't know if it's worth the effort.
(Bonus thoughts: While it's not the core part of my issue, honestly, I never clicked with the name. Just by definition you're trying to put out that you're cozy and comfortable, which doesn't really gel with what's on offer. It's like self-describing as "wholesome" as a personal brand. Like, yes. I'm sure you are. It still masks the complexities that make up a person or a collective.)
