Also this is a reminder that if you write erotica, you are - as far as corporate bullshit is concerned - doing sex work. I see so many erotica authors elsewhere trying to dismiss sex worker problems as not applying to us and this is a reminder that they do. All of this comes back to advertisers, credit card companies, and laws that are targeting sex workers, and we are part of the target group.
Surely there has to be, right?
Like obviously you can use a cohost draft, personal discord channel, private itch page, etc, but those are all less than ideal.
and also because I am also now looking for an alternative to Google docs with the same functionality between browser and mobile.
I need the multi-device access really badly and also preferably a dark mode
I write erotic longfics and share them with my beta reader. I can't have this happen to me. I'm backing up my work today, but I still need a new word processor to work from
A friend-of-a-friend has direct knowledge on this topic (not specifying how to protect them from potential reprisal), and they're of the opinion that this concern is... not overblown per se, but definitely not the whole story. From their perspective, sharing docs is a known spam/abuse vector, and Google has had to moderate porn spam waves on Google Docs in the past. This means their burst of sharing for alphas/betas may have tripped a spam detector if they were sending it to a bunch of people, and because it was explicit content it was assumed to be porn spam instead of personal work/review. It's also possible that they got in trouble for other reasons (e.g. sharing things that looked too close to CSAM for automated tools, or a bad actor putting CSAM on their account w/o their knowledge), but it only hit them after they tried to share alpha/beta reads around, so recency bias took hold.
That all said, the advice for how to protect yourself is the same regardless of whether or not some obscure piece of policy is suddenly being enforced more strictly w/o an obvious paper trail: store local copies of your work, have an offline word processor (I personally use LibreOffice if you need a suggestion), and don't use the same Google account for your fandom work as your personal existence. Like any digital footprint, it only exists so long as the companies and technologies it depends on permit it to exist, and the more you can distribute it around the safer you're likely to be – whether from a company changing policies or some dingus maliciously reporting your work.
