butchsocialist:

queeranarchism:

socalledunitedstates:

@lumisateenkaari replied to your post: I heard the website called Pillowfort. Heard its…

socalledunitedstates:

No, it’s not decentralized. It has the “communities” feature, but that’s much closer to reddit’s subreddits than Mastodon’s instances

Now’s a good time to mention that you can never trust centralized social media. Pillowfort is currently ad-free, run by an attentive and cool set of devs, and has a lot of cool features, which is great. There’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way though. They might decide to sell, they might decide to include ads to get a little more money, they might just decide to fire the whole staff and go in a completely different direction. Remember, we thought tumblr was different too

Pillowfort’s source code is closed-source, meaning we have nothing but their word to go on that it’s not harvesting and selling your data, and that there’s no vulnerability for hackers to harvest that data instead. And since it’s all hosted on one server, if there’s an attack, or a disastrous bug in an update, or just an update that sucks balls, the entire pillowfort community will have to suffer through it

Plus, pillowfort doesn’t use ActivityPub, the standard that allows the entire fediverse (from Mastodon to WriteFreely to PixelFed to PeerTube to FunkWhale) to interact, share, follow, and get notified from any federated site. Federation is a really cool concept that is still in its infancy, but is actively getting cooler

If you really want a tumblr-like experience, and refuse to adapt even a little bit to a similar but slightly lesser network, there are some federated tumblr clones currently being worked on. Until then, don’t expect finding a new master to solve your problem, and don’t give your money to pillowfort please

Difference between AO3 and pillowfort, is that AO3 is open source
software developed and hosted by a non-profit organization. Pillowfort
is closed source software by for-profit company.

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Edit:

Oooooooo this is very important stuff to consider.

From Pillowfort’s TOS:

“When you register, Pillowfort may collect information such as your name, e-mail address, birth date,
gender, mailing address, occupation, industry and personal interests. You can edit your account
information at any time. Once you register with Pillowfort and sign in to our Services, you are no
longer anonymous to us. 

Furthermore, the registering party hereby acknowledges, understands and agrees to: 

1) furnish factual, correct, current and complete information with regards to yourself as may
be requested by the data registration process, and 

2) maintain and promptly update your registration and profile information in an effort to
maintain accuracy and completeness at all times. 

If anyone knowingly provides any information of a false, untrue, inaccurate or incomplete nature,
Pillowfort Blogging LLC will have sufficient grounds and rights to suspend or terminate the member
in violation of this aspect of the Agreement, and as such refuse any and all current or future use of
Pillowfort Blogging LLC Services, or any portion thereof”

Am I correct in understanding this measure as similar to Facebook’s requirement that you provide your real name, date of birth, and so forth? If so, couldn’t this be harmful to trans folks or other people who want to be anonymous for whatever reason, safety or otherwise?