As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.
Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that.
Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult.
If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there.
If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably.
We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more.
Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.
yes this
most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this
is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes. are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.
but it’s not a ready-made replacement for tumblr. set your expectations accordingly.
So out of morbid curiosity I tried Tumblr’s export feature to download my blog. Pressed the button, waited. After a few hours I got an email it was ready.
For my relatively modest blog of ~5K posts/reblogs, it produced a zip file of about 12 GBs. It didn’t say how big the file was when downloading; I just had to wait until it was done. Once downloaded, Windows 10′s native zip management couldn’t handle it, insisting it was a broken archive. An ancient dusty install of 7Zip popped it right open, though.
Inside were two folders and one .xml file:
“Media” clocks in at 12 GBs and consists of 14K gifs, jpgs, pngs, mp3s, mp4s, and movs. “Posts” has a folder of individual stripped-down HTML docs of every post, plus an xml doc that also seems to be every post in a single 21MB file. (This doc does appear to include my 800 draft posts.) And messages is all your messages/chats (which I admit is nice to have a backup of, though the xml is of course unreadable without some kind of reader).
But the best, the BEST (sarcasm level 8) part of this is that all those HTML/XML post files? They link back to the files ON TUMBLR. They don’t have internal links to the files in that Media folder. So when you open one of your downloaded posts in your browser, the images you’re seeing are from Tumblr’s servers – for as long as those images are posted and you’re online.
So this reblogged post, ‘capped from my downloaded archive:
Meanwhile files in the Media folder are just numbered by the post ID number, not those strings. It would be possible, I’m guessing, to run a conversion, to switch all the media links to using the ID numbers to link to what’s in the media folder – but that’s beyond my limited regex skills. Without that, you’re left with a pile of media with no organization whatsoever, and a folder full of posts with broken media.
(Things like this make me wonder if they’re not trying to repackage the site for advertisers at all but are just trying to kill it quick. Then again, trying to ascribe any kind of firm rational motive to whoever’s in charge of this feels like accusing a clogged toilet of having an agenda…)
Thank you for doing this! (Also … OMG TUMBLR. >__>) To some extent that’s actually somewhat better than I was afraid of, because at least you have all the images and the text of the posts, both in easy to read formats; I was worried it’d be one giant horrible thing that you’d need some kind of decoder program to read, and you’d have to pull out images individually if you wanted them. (I mean, back in Strikethrough days I remember finding a 3rd-party site that would download your journal as a PDF but didn’t include most of the images or comments. This sounds like an improvement over that, at least!)
… but still.
Also, I started a backup running yesterday and nearly 24 hours later it’s still just showing me “backup processing” which is … not promising. (This file is going to be huuuuuuge.)
Oh yikes. Well, that answers my question anyway. Sheesh.
heads up before you spend $$ on pillowfort, especially note the paypal thing. the io domain concern does not seem carefully enforced but is in the TOS so 🤷
These are valid concerns but like. Have we tried not making a call out post to promote hate against a brand new company made by fandom for fandom? This is the same shit that has been pulled on AO3 this year. Contact them and ask them to clarify their content moderation. Ask them about their concerns about Paypal – they’ve already mentioned on their Twitter that they’re changing domains because of the adult content ban on .io domains. They’ve been nothing but open and honest about everything since they were first announced and far more patient than is reasonable with the amount of questions they receive. And the site was down because it was fixing security issues in order to make the site safer for users. They’ve been absolutely transparent about this issue, which is unheard of these days.
Pillowfort will only survive if we support it. We need our own space that isn’t going to get sold out. Do you think Twitter is gonna allow NSFW content forever? Instagram doesn’t give a shit about fandom. And while Dreamwidth would be great, it would be a total culture shock to a lot of people – they have a 500mb cap for images, a tag limit, and communities decentralize fandom unlike Tumblr’s ability to just look at all of the posts under a single tag.
I’ve been reading the comments on “omg” posts a LOT more lately…this is why. XD I know we’re all freaking out and feeling a bit directionless the past couple days, but remember tumblr is the home of kneejerk reactions, so making decisions based on someone else’s hot take may not be doing yourself any favors. Wait and see, or better yet, DIG. 🙂
“Bingley was sure of being liked wherever he appeared; Darcy was continually giving offence” sorry but season two Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt are Bingley and Darcy respectively
this won’t be official policy or anything but it will probably be the aggregate effect, yes.
why does this happen, you ask?
because the site rules are enforced by humans, and humans … are not very good at being 100% fair or unbiased. (at least, not when we’re acting in large numbers. any one person could be good at it, but the likelihood that most of a group is good at fairness drops as the group gets bigger.)
thus,
Even when we’re trying to be unbiased:
material that’s potentially in violation of the tumblr TOS featuring subjects that are not ‘default’ (NOT straight, cis, perisex, white, able-bodied, healthy, etc) have a greater chance of being noticed and reported. it’s more ‘visible’ because of a combined effect of ‘this might be a violation’ and the brain’s increased awareness when something is ‘out of the ordinary’. if straight-cis-white is ‘ordinary’: things that aren’t straight-cis-white grab our attention, and are that much more likely to be scrutinized for violations of the TOS. (see: fandom’s tendency to go after media that isn’t mediocre whitebread content for failing to be ‘good enough’.)
this is severely compounded by:
a lack of internal awareness of privilege/bias/etc amongst those who hold the majority opinion. (it’s the majority opinion because the majority holds that opinion.) if the majority is biased against something, that thing is more likely to get reported as a problem by people who don’t even acknowledge that they’re biased against it.
not to mention:
people who will participate in deliberately biased & malicious reporting. there’s plenty of people who are openly racist, openly homophobes, openly transphobes, etc. you think they won’t take special time to go after TOS violations from content that they openly loathe? because they do – and they will continue to do so.
why this happens in America/on American platforms in particular:
at the admin level: in America, the higher up the management ladder you go, the more likely the people making the decisions are straight white cis guys who do not have a strong awareness of their own privilege and/or bias against people who don’t share their privilege. These are the people who will be responsible for writing & enforcing the rules for nsfw content at Oath and/or Tumblr. they are likely to be unconsciously biased towards content that they personally like and against content they personally don’t like, so in aggregate, their decisions will be more likely to favor straight white cis guy tastes & enjoyments.
at the cultural level: America is obsessive about keeping sexual content from ‘the children’ than violent content, because our cultural values are very much rooted in puritanial Christian morality. We also still have a lot of racism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. baked directly into our culture. so if something can be concievably argued as a threat to preserving the innocence/sexual ignorance of a puritanical, white Christian kid, then it has much higher potential to be flagged as n sfw. (of course, this means LGBTQ+ content (romantic or otherwise) and non-white content is more likely to be tagged as in violation of the TOS.)
tl;dr: even if every single person moderating tumblr was acting with the best intentions, trying to be 100% fair and reporting/acting without bias, the drift will be towards creating a sexually chaste, LGBTQ+-unfriendly, white-centric, and cis-bodied/perisex only space as everything else gets reported more often as a problem and purged off the site.
that’s why censorship enforces baked-in privilege in brief, folx.
Sorry to bother you, but, this post has been incorrectly flagged as explicit content by tumblr. I’m reblogging it here in hopes that you (the OP) will see this note and file an appeal.
I would file an appeal myself, but apparently ONLY the OP can.
Wow, look at that!
No images to be misinterpreted by a bot
Nothing sexually explicit at all – not even mentions of sexually explicit content.
One mention of n sfw (even censored as here)
But I did mention lgbtq+ content 🤔
And talk about how Tumblr’s new policy will absolutely be enforced in racist and queerphobic ways
Wild
So much for “allowing written erotica & similar”.
Ya’ll back up and save any writings you want cause the whole written words won’t be targeted thing is bullshit
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