#i’m not really fond of tumblrs replies/thread function

[fizzytoo]

i keep thinking “i wish tumblr had this…” but it’s just me hoping tumblr would just plagiarize twitter a little bit

[marinersubmariner]

The twitter mess has got me thinking about livejournal and fandom platforms in general, so here’s a lot of words that mostly amount to me being old and sad!!

The past couple years I’ve really struggled with the pull to start using twitter because so much fandom activity moved over there, while at the same time being held back by knowing that it would not be a satisfying experience for me. I lurk there a little, and it’s alright in small doses, but it just doesn’t work for the types of fandom posts that I can contribute or that I want to see. And it has increasingly frustrated me how much people post fanart exclusively over there when its formatting is awful for fanart (no archives! no organized tagging system! completely unbrowseable by subject matter or time period! everything disappears in .02 seconds if it even crosses your view at all! WOW SO GREAT. I get that it lets you post porn but that isn’t a big draw for me :/ yeah, I know, what am I even doing on the internet)

My preferred form of fandom is images and graphics and art and long-form commentary and twitter just isn’t made for those things. You can kind of jury-rig it for them I guess (weirdly cropped 2-to-4-image photosets, hmm. great. threaded tweets??? you know there was a time when you could put all your related thoughts into a single post!) but it’s obviously designed for brief little texts and I’m too self-conscious about writing things for that to ever work for me. The way I see it is you can absolutely tweet on tumblr but you cannot make a tumblr post on twitter, and that’s the fundamental disconnect that has prevented me from leaving. I’m not compelled to go to a platform with fewer and worse features. (well, that plus the fact that I no longer have any friends to follow in the way that I followed the crowd from livejournal to tumblr. why bother!!! NOBODY’S LISTENING! —Cassian Andor about posting on social media)

I totally understand people mourning what could be the loss of years of fandom activity on that site, but at the same time its immediacy has always made it appear more fleeting to me anyway. Obviously you can scrounge up old posts if you really dig around, but without archives or functional tags it has never seemed to be a platform that encourages a long lifespan for anything posted there. Which is of course the trade-off for it being so current and of-the-moment, but I also think it’s detrimental to the fandom ecosystem as a whole, and on a personal level I’m too much of a hoarder for that kind of disposability to work for me. I like to keep things in my little treasure trove and continually pore over it with fondness. :(

I also just have too much anxiety, uh, in general, but especially with instantaneous forms of communication, so I get extremely avoidant about anything fast-paced. Chats always made me nervous, I don’t like texting, it all makes me a little too frazzled to do for fun. I was okay with message boards and lj comments because there wasn’t as much expectation of a quick response (and of course there was way more separation of Internet Time when you didn’t have a smartphone on you 24/7. boundaries!!!! never heard of them). A lot of this is purely mental hangups because I’m perfectly capable of communication, but it’s stressful and exhausting and the internet is filled with increasing pressure to never say the wrong thing (which is already a pressure in my head!!) so to add forced brevity and urgency on top of that... it makes me so uncomfortable and it’s such an enormous barrier when the foundation for literally everything is communication. Words are hard!!! I’m not terrible at it but there’s always an excessive amount of deliberation involved and it’s such a difficult thing to grapple with all the time. Constantly, forever. The mortifying ordeal of SELECTING WORDS to make yourself known!!!!!!!

I guess also nothing has ever been as conducive to discussion and replies as lj. Tumblr replies are so limited and reblogging to add your own commentary is a totally different thing. Private messages are there, but there’s no decent mechanism for open back-and-forth conversation. So even while part of me is glad that people might come back here, more activity on my preferred platform doesn’t change the fact that I still feel dissatisfied with the way all of this operates in general. Tumblr is better than twitter, but even tumblr isn’t that great.

To be honest I’ve become so fuckin weird about this stuff that I now essentially use google docs like a private secret livejournal. I type out my thoughts constantly as though I were writing an actual post to share and then I never share it. Which is probably. insane. But in the era of social media all fandom stuff either seems like way too public a forum full of jerks or it’s seen by nobody anyway so why bother. There don’t seem to be comfortable niche spaces anymore, or if there are I never found them, and besides that I’m too shy and too tired to seek them out and work up the energy to interact. So I just talk to myself like a lunatic. It’s super healthy I’m sure!!!!

I also just really miss how I felt on the internet and in fandom spaces when I was younger, making pointless little websites and graphics and posting photographs just because I wanted to. And obviously I still make things because I WANT to, but the act of actually posting to the internet now and the way that others engage with it seems so much more transactional than it used to. I got into making graphics when it was only like a handful of people on a message board sharing things with each other, and it’s wild how much more fulfilling and encouraging it was to have just a few familiar people make comments than it is to get likes and reblogs. A little number ticker on a post is like... that’s it? That’s all there is? It’s so hollow and mechanical.

Sort of the best way I can think of to describe how it feels to me is that it used to be more like being the proprietor of a quaint storefront where you peddled your wares and people could come and go and chat as they please, and now it’s more like tossing one of your wares onto a highway where it gets driven over at 80mph. And certainly that perception is skewed by rose-colored nostalgia about ~the way things used to be~, I’m much older now so I’m sure my temperament has changed a lot too, I slowed down while everything else sped up, time makes fools of us all, etc. But I’ve seen enough people express similar things about the modern internet that I do think maybe it’s not just me.

I don’t know, unless you’ve been following me since livejournal this probably all sounds like nonsense coming from a silent lurker who barely even posts. I’ve always been much more reticent on tumblr because it feels so exposed—the potential for things to spiral way outside of your orbit is both scary and annoying. But I guess I just don’t really know how to participate in fandom anymore in the way it exists now. I don’t have a community and it feels impossible to break back in amongst The Youths. I don’t have the energy to contribute as much as I want to, and then when I do expend the energy it seems like a waste of time because it’s stuff that either goes entirely unseen or it gets silently viewed and disposed of in an infinitesimal fraction of the time it took to put together. So there are these two warring impulses of: this is making you unhappy and you should stop vs. it doesn’t matter if you’re entirely alone when you’re still having fun by yourself with your special interest that you enjoy. And I don’t know how to reconcile the two.

[dramallamadingdang]

Pillowfort Features.

I’ve seen some questions in various posts about the differences between Pillowfort and Tumblr, so I thought I’d make a post of what I’ve observed. Bear in mind that I’m a new Pillowfort user, so any more experienced users should feel free to chime in if I’ve gotten something wrong or if you have something to add. Basically, the platform is attempting to be a fusion of the good things of both Tumblr and more traditional journaling formats (i.e., LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, etc.), with an emphasis on fostering community that Tumblr just doesn’t have. I’ll break it down between what I see as good and not-so-good about Pillowfort. You may have a different opinion about whether something is a good or not-so-good thing, of course. :) And do bear in mind that the platform is still in beta, so features will likely be tweaked/added, especially now that it's in a more open release.

Good stuff:

Direct, drag-and-drop image uploading.  Just like Tumblr, without have to create links to images in order to have images in posts, and no dealing with flaky 3rd-party image hosts that might decide to blur all your images next week.

Reblogging, liking, and commenting on posts, as with Tumblr.

Threaded commenting. Meaning, you can reply to someone’s replies on posts without having to “mention” them. The comments on posts appear in proper threads, with nested indents, and the person you reply to gets a notification about the comment on their dash sidebar, so they’ll know you’ve said something and can just click a link to go to what you’ve said and reply to it if they want. This is virtually the same functioning as on LJ, et. al.

Journaling-style communities. Meaning, you have your own individual blog, but you can use it as a jumping-off point to create or join any number of communities you like. So, your own blog can be just about Sims, but you can join communities of something else that you’re a fan of, and you can make posts directly to those communities. So, if you want to post about many different things but keep your own journal about one specific topic, you can easily do that via communities, without having to create separate sideblogs and/or logging in and out of different accounts to do different things. You can have one account (and one dash) for everything.

No corporate ownership, entirely user-supported. This means no advertising at the moment, though that could change if the platform takes off. It also means that it behooves users to donate if they use the platform (and if they can, of course) because this would decrease the likelihood of having to make some features not-free in the future. (Everything is free, so far as I can see, at the moment, unless you join without an invite code, in which case it’ll cost you $5 or the equivalent in your local currency, of course.)

I'm not sure, but I don't think there's an anonymous ask system? There is a private messaging system, but I'm not sure if you can use it anonymously and/or without having a Pillowfort account. Of course, this may be a not-so-good thing as well, particularly for people who are extremely socially anxious, but if I'm right it also means no anonymous lecturing/haranguing from other users when you post something they don't like.

NSFW is OK. Which could also be seen as not-so-good, of course. However, people who post the stuff are supposed to flag any NSFW posts as such, and you can opt in or out of seeing such posts if you are over 18. (You can’t opt-in if you’re under 18...unless you lie about your age when you sign up, of course.) Since it is (currently) a small platform with a small amount of users, I don't think bots are a concern.

Blacklisting You can create lists of words/phrases to blacklist, so that you won’t see posts containing -- in either the tags or the text of posts -- the words/phrases you block on your dash. For example, if you don’t want to see posts about Sims 4, you can block that phrase and, assuming that people have tagged properly, you will see no Sims 4 posts. This gives you more control over what you do and don’t see on your dash. On Tumblr, you can do this with 3rd-party extensions like X-Kit, of course, but it’s a native feature of Pillowfort’s platform.

More formatting options for text and cuts on posts and comments. Among other things, you can change font sizes, and you can have multiple cuts on one post, so you have more options for setting up your posts. Tumblr lacks this, and it annoys me, but maybe it doesn't annoy other people. :)

Not-So-Good Stuff:

No queueing posts or the ability to save posts as drafts. Honestly? This is the only thing that’s bugging me about the platform. If this is added, I’ll be a completely happy camper.

No themes. So, if you’re into having a fancy format for your personal blog, you can’t do that...yet. Pretty sure that’s in the hopper, from what I’ve read, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ll have to pay a premium for it.

Possible server slow-downs and whatnot now that there will be more users as the platform is moving towards being out of beta.

No chatting. For me, this is actually a very, very good thing, as I’m really not very fond of chatting. I’m guessing more people would see this as a not-so-good thing, but maybe I’m wrong about that.