pillowfort.social, one of the alternatives to Tumblr that arose out of The Great Sexodus of 2018, announced on October 19th through email and their staff blog on the site that Pillowfort will be shutting down on December 4th, 2026, due to difficulties with standing up a non-profit initiative to fund the site’s ongoing maintenance and development. From the email:
I’m terribly sorry to bring this news to you. While we did have many people reach out about the non-profit initiative, it became apparent that we crucially wouldn’t be able to find someone to take over as the head of Pillowfort and lead the organization. Since things cannot continue the way they have been, the only option left is to close it.
The essentials are:
- Pillowfort’s last day will be December 4th, 2026.
- All subscriptions have been cancelled. You will still be able to access the features you paid for until Pillowfort’s final day.
- We will be honoring refund requests for any and all purchases or donations made in the last 75 days (i.e. since August 5th). Just contact Staff with information about the payment(s) you want refunded.
- We will be releasing a blog export feature soon to allow you to save a text file of all your blog posts. In the meantime, you can also download an archive of your blog using the unofficial Tassel browser extension.
Read more on Pillowfort.
Founder Julia Baritz posted on Pillowfort that she had been personally filling the gaps in staff to keep the workload evenly spread among the few other existing Pillowfort employees, who she lists at most being one community manager, one content moderator, and three web developers. The site aimed to be sort of a combination of all the good parts of social networking services of the past, sort of becoming an amalgamation of LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and a couple of other “group” networking sites.
Yet another indie web service popular with queers and furries gets burned by the fact that we’re too weird to market, and that they can’t be bothered to learn how to (properly) pander to us.