Pillowfort!

[alias_sqbr]

I joined the latest beta round of the social media site Pillowfort. So I made sqbr and joined some communities. It's nice enough, very quiet.

Structure-wise it's a sort of mix of dreamwidth/lj and tumblr: posts have a comment section, but can also be reblogged if marked rebloggable. Communities also have chat posts in a sidebar organised by "most recently commented on". Making posts is very tumblr-ish, including in-built image hosting (that crashed when I tried to use it :/)

Also: it seems like you have to write your posts in rich text D:

The "friendslock" feature is weird, unless I'm misunderstanding it: the only option is to show posts only to people who follow you, rather than only people you follow. That seems open to abuse.

You can turn on reblogs, comments, and "nsfw" on a post by post basis which is nice.

Most of the communities I joined haven't had any posts in months, or have one dedicated poster doggedly talking about their OCs to the void.

There's an in-built tag blacklist function. To test it out I added a tag on the top post of my feed and the post vanished entirely, which I don't like. I much prefer xKit's "a post has been blocked for containing X tag" approach, that way I can decide if I want to check it out based on my mood, who posted it, the other tags, etc.

It's a little slow, but it did just get an influx of new users and is still in beta.

Based on the most popular communities, the people there skew fannish, creative, and queer, which is no bad thing.

They got their initial costs paid for by an indiegogo compaign but I can't see any way for them to make money long term, unless they're planning on adding paid accounts/ads later.

Overall I see them going the same way as imzy and soup: a nice idea that won't take off. But we'll see.

Comments

[sanguinity]

I got my invite this round, too! You did a much more thorough job of exploring than I did (thank you for the write-up of your discoveries!), but my general impressions/questions were similar: so, sooooo quiet (a quiet it can grow from, or one that fails to capture people's attention?) and where is the money to keep the lights on going to come from?

[aris_tgd]

I also have an invite this round--I haven't registered yet but it seems likely I'll be aris_tgd over there as well.

[alias_sqbr]

See you over there :)

[alias_sqbr]

I'm glad it was helpful! I asked about the money in the "ask the staff" post, but no reply as yet.

[sanguinity]

grrlpup heard from somewhere that we're the last free round of beta invites; that hereafter the invite rounds will be associated with funding somehow? If that's true (and I might have it garbled), it explains where money will come from, but it leaves me wondering where users will come from.

Of course, the odds are high that I've got it garbled... :-/

[alias_sqbr]

I have heard multiple theories, it seems like garbled is the only sort of information we have :/