savvyblunders:

recentlyfolded:

Okay, I’m seeing a lot of “Pillowfort is hard” posts. And posts that it’s not like tumblr. Fair calls. But let me see if I can describe a bit of the culture as it’s already built up there.

People have their own blogs and some of them gather a lot of conversation in the comments. @thursdayj, for example, hosts regular gatherings on their blog with lists of the day’s discussion topics. I’ve found folks to follow in those comment threads and other folks I just like talking to in the master thread. This is pretty LJ-ish, only easier to format and manage for those who weren’t deep into LJ and writing html.

The convention seems to be growing that one posts content to their own blog and then reblogs to various communities. This makes for some dash repetition when you follow them both, especially since using readmore breaks isn’t general etiquette yet. But because the user owns the post no matter where it’s reblogged, any post can be read from any place and still have the same content. You can reblog a post to your blog and it’ll show up to all of your followers…but it’s still that same original post and comment thread. That’s right: no more of those tumblr scattershot reblog trees where there’s a good comment here and then off on another fork, something else worth comment. Or where you can’t add a comment because some other commenter/reblogger has you blocked for…something and the whole post is off limits. There are people who post so reliably to some coms I follow that I don’t follow them individually. It’s a different dash management strategy to tumblr’s and once you make sense of it, one with more versatility and control.

Community Ads have a master list, so you can check them out by topic…and if it’s not what you want, fine, start your own. That’s a good place for finding chunks of new material for your dash.  Want to discuss? Just join in the comment thread from your dash. Or the com. It doesn’t matter because it’s the same. I’m slowly working my way through the ever-growing coms list, adding in the topics I’ve gotten interested in here on tumblr. Sure it takes time and that hurts after giving up that dash you’ve been curating for years on tumblr, but it’s not going to be easier anyplace else. I have accounts on both pfio and dreamwidth, and I find the former much much easier to add content and people to.

People sometimes get in a lather because the thread owner, the OP, controls the post and its comments. They can delete any comment or the whole thing: it’s up to them. And they can restrict whether or not their post can be reblogged at all. The whole structure is focused on ownership and civility, and so far it’s been working pretty well, at least in the corners I frequent. Reposting-without-credit is much less convenient there. I’m sure abuse will come with growing numbers, but the OP tool of banning a user from ever seeing anything you post means that repeat offenders are going to have less and less to work with.

Images. Yeah, there are file size limits. Image privilege expansion packs are supposed to be one of the extras we will be able to purchase. I like that: I just post small stuff so it’s reasonably thrifty for me not to pay for hosting everyone else’s big gif files.

I think that wherever we all go, there will be work to be done. First, work to back up what was on tumblr. Then, work to curate a new dash in a new place while learning how said new place works. And it’s only going to be interesting if enough people who interest you also end up there. For me, not interested in transferring all of my tumblr content to a new home (I consider it all ephemeral except for a bit of writing I backed up before I ever posted it anywhere), it’s a matter of picking up and establishing myself over there. I hope a lot of other folks I follow here will do the same. It’s bare-bones and under development, but it has a lot of the tumblr functionality we want with less of the tumblr abuse we don’t. That’s why I’m over there.

Good to know…I’ve resisted joining pillowfort because I’m quite comfy at Tumblr. But it looks like the way things are trending.

@savvyblunders