I just paid the donation to join Pillowfort cause I thought that was the site people were saying to move to...was that a mistake? Is it gonna be this new unnamed one instead? I wanna support new sites but like I don't need or want multiple blogs on different platforms and now I'm kinda overwhelmed and stressed.
It wasn’t a mistake, anon, there are still more than 20k people on PF. But you have to understand that fandom migration is not a unified and organized move; it’s messy, points at different directions and at different times, tries several websites before picking up the one that offers more, and only in the future we’ll be able to look back and say “oh yeah, the big trend moved more or less in that direction, and others followed after a bit.”
So if you don’t want to be on multiple blogs and platforms no one forces you to do so, but if you want that place where you are to also be the one that 100% will become Fandom’s next main hub, you’ll have to sit tight and wait, because right now we’re all in the dark. It’s okay, we’ll find somewhere in the end, or make something up from scratch if need be, just keep your eyes open and make the best of what you have in your hands at all times. Fandom is for love and fun even now, let’s not forget it .
This.
I know of at least two different theoretical new sites in the brainstorming/futzing around phase of development.
Lots of people are leaving for twitter-style places or realtime chat. (Mastodon, Discord, Twitter itself.)
Some of us are camping on oldschool Dreamwidth.
I too feel overwhelmed and stressed, but if people made you think PF was the for sure Next Home of Fandom, they were… overly optimistic in many different ways.
PF was a popular option people mentioned because it has the most tumblr-y features, but it always had drawbacks. Even before this latest issue, it was deeply unstable and unready to handle our level of traffic. The content policy hadn’t, previously, been clarified, which lots of us pointed to as a huge red flag. Even when the site was up and had less traffic, I found that it loaded extremely slowly for me.
When the LJ era started drawing to a close, it took years for it to be obvious that Tumblr had won over all of the other options. (And even then, not everyone came to Tumblr.)
Was namesquatting on PF worth $5? To me it would be. But if the real issue is the investment of your time, take a break from fandom blogging, read some fic on AO3, do some holiday things. Give it a few months. We’re just not going to know where “Fandom” is moving for a while.
And when we do know, that place may not be a conventional blogging platform.
^^^^