Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum so I hope this topic is okay to share here.
Pillowfort is a small social media website with a mix of Tumblr and Livejournal elements. It has been a US-based private LLC for about ten years, running on donations and premium accounts, totalling under $8000 of monthly income.
Pillowfort’s owner Julia is looking to hand off the website to the community through a new non-profit, and is asking for volunteers as well as advice from people who are experienced running these kinds of orgs. If anyone has any insights to share with Julia, they would be very appreciated!
I wonder if she’s considered talking with the Free Software Foundation. They do good work even if Richard Stallman has problematic opinions and attitudes.
Good thinking. Worth noting: PF is not open source and might not end up open sourcing their code due to other priorities. So a lot of FSF’s advice might not be applicable in that case?
If I were to join the board I would vote to delay FOSSing Pillowfort until more urgent bugs and issues are settled.
In that case, Julia might want to talk to the people behind Dreamwidth. They had built their platform by reverse-engineering LiveJournal, if memory serves.
I joined Pillowfort back in 2018, and it’s been a rewarding experience for me. I talked some about the site culture there recently in a post about comment culture.
Pillowfort has also been a good place to connect with folks who are curious about getting into personal websites, since the userbase is heavily made up of folks who’ve gotten fed up with the likes of Tumblr and Twitter. I myself started my personal website as a result of a post I saw there, and since then I’ve been helping newbie coders on Pillowfort with troubleshooting their CSS and HTML.
I don’t know if anyone here is in a position to help Pillowfort with becoming a non-profit, but I do recommend spreading the word if you can.
Being that Dreamwidth is for profit (they’re an LLC), I’m not really sure that’s the best place to ask for help from when it comes to becoming a non-profit. I know The Organization for Transformative Works ( https://www.transformativeworks.org ) is a non-profit in a similar enough field?
I am wishing Pillowfort the best because I’ve wondered ever since it started to become clear that corpo social media was unsustainable (and downright hostile to a lot of the communities I hang out in) if a non-profit model would work. They’ve basically been kept afloat for the past couple years by donation drives, so the big change here is more restructuring and legal status than changing funding source, right?
Correct. In theory this move would allow them to get volunteer labor at the staff level. There’s a bunch of de facto volunteer labor already in the form of community moderators (think Reddit, Discord) and bug reporting but that’s it.
However a legal restructuring might come with new legal and accounting costs. They’ll have to tread carefully.
Thanks for pointing that out about Dreamwidth, I had them confused with the OTW.
I could be misremembering(or maybe I never had the story straight), but I thought that LiveJournal was open source at some point, and then became closed when they started adding more proprietary things to it sometime after Dreamwidth forked it. I recall there were other forks, like one that was called deadjournal.
… checking …
Oh dear, deadjournal still exits, my old one was still in the browser bookmarks I’ve transferred and ignored for the last 20 years. My browser autofilled the URL and now I’m looking at my own deadjournal from 2003. Oh. Oh, no.