Pillowfort is Closing

Pillowfort will close on the 4th of December. It was an alternative to Tumblr that launched in 2017, with community features inspired by LiveJournal. There was plans to make Pillowfort a non-profit, but not enough people applied. 

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I’m terribly sorry to bring this news to you. This is, genuinely, the hardest decision I have ever made in my life, and I have put off doing it for as long as I could. While we did have many people reach out about the non-profit initiative, for which I am grateful, 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, and with nobody able to take Pillowfort off my hands, 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.

In retrospect, I think the site never really recovered from the security incident in 2021. We had great momentum going up to that point, but after we had to take the site down for several weeks, the buzz and word of mouth never came back no matter how much we tried. While the money Pillowfort brought in over the years since then was enough to keep Pillowfort running with a skeleton crew, a skeleton crew was never going to be a sustainable way to run a platform of this complexity. At our biggest, we only had one community manager, one content moderator, and 3 web developers comprising our team, all of whom were part-time. This left me having to wear a lot of hats to fill in the gaps, and frankly I have been burned out from the responsibility of it all for years now. Perhaps if I’d been more honest with myself about my limitations and asked for help earlier things may have turned out differently, but I can only deal with the situation as it is now.

I still believe that a place like Pillowfort deserves to exist, and that belief has kept me going through many of the difficult times I’ve had running this site over the last decade. I also couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing those of you who do love this place, and it still pains me so much to do it. Tragically, the need for a place like Pillowfort has only grown more dire in the nearly ten years since we launched, but it’s also become more difficult to sustain a place like Pillowfort since it started. It’s broken my heart to see the internet I used to love become toxic, corporatized, and unrecognizable. I hope someone else will come along and create a better platform for us all, because we badly need it, and I’m sorry I couldn’t make Pillowfort last. But I hope you will remember Pillowfort fondly for what it was while it lasted.

Sincerely,
Julia

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I personally liked the features it had, but I never used it because of the security issues during the public launch.