I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).
Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:
If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for.
They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
Posts in chronological order like they should be!
A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.
So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.
If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.
If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can.
This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!
REASONS TO JOIN PILLOWFORT!
KEEP IT BOOKMARKED SISTERS, AND WAIT FOR IT TO COME BACK ON AIR
Okay… is this some dumb new feature, @staff? I commented on someone’s post. Not reblogged, just commented and now I’m getting a notification for Every. Single. Person. who has commented after me. I don’t want or need this.
It’s called “conversational notifications” and you can turn it off under your notification settings.
yet another obnoxious change that tumblr introduced with no warning, apparently.
oh my god thank you.
In case anyone is bothered about notes from a recent post.
I love how the search function on this site is absolute garbage. I can look up a post word for word and I will NEVER find it
Pro tip:
Wanna find a post?
Write out what you remember into a Google search.
After you write that out, end with site:tumblr.com
Google will search for your text on just tumblr
In my experience, it’s way more effective than searching through Tumblr
(you can use site:SITENAME.com to search any site btws)
This usually works but for some reason a lot of posts get indexed on google from a person’s URL based on the posts that were recently reblogged on page 1, meaning that this is only a tiny bit more reliable.
I HAVE a solution to this, you have to write down site:tumblr.com/post “ “
and then write a direct quote (could be a fraction of a sentence) into the quotations, I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s so useful, it works like 99% of the time
(the more popular a post is the more likely you’ll find it)
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described – first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing – but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it – specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also – this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
bullshit central 