pillowfolks

As of October 19th, 2026, Pillowfort has announced that the site is shutting down and will close on December 4th. If you are new to this DW community, welcome, and if you're returning, welcome back. Note I am temporarily limiting new posts to this community in order to stem the tide for the time being. On this post we can keep track of news, suggestions, and projects related to the site shutdown and our migrations to other sites.

For those new to Dreamwidth:

Downloading an export with Tassel:

Projects and initiatives:

Other blogging sites and web hosts:

Please feel free to suggest more in the comments below. I plan to keep this post updated, and you can use the track comments feature if you'd like to be notified of comments.

monster_hugger

This is an attempt to link to as many communities that are relevant to Dreamwidth users who were previously active on Pillowfort. I've roughly categorized the communities based on whether they are specifically about pillowfort, were created in the wake of the announcement of pillowforts closure, or were created independently from pillowfort but are equivalent/share overlap to communities active on pillowfort.

Related to pillowfort

( Read more... )

Created from or inspired by pillowfort communites

( Read more... )

Dreamwidth Equivalents

( Read more... )

If you have any additions let me know, either here or on the pillowfort version of this post!

prettyarbitrary

Hello, folks! I decided to go hunt down some good communities for various interests, and I...may have gotten slightly carried away.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but all these comms have been active in at least the last six months--and mostly the last few weeks.

DW can be like Pillowfort in the way sometimes you'll find comms where there's one person keeping the lights on, or the most recent post is from about 6 months ago--and both of these are signals that the interest is there and people would love more activity!

Also like PF, if you find a comm you love but that is clearly dead, you can apply to take it over.

General Creatives
( See the list )

Crafting & Fiber Arts
( See the list )

Visual Arts
( See the list )

Writing
( See the list )

Fandom & Fandoms
( See the list )

Fanworks
( See the list )

OCs & Original Fiction
( See the list )

Creative & Fandom Events
( See the list )

Books
( See the list )

Games
( See the list )

Icons
( See the list )

Nature
( See the list )

Coding & Internet
( See the list )

RP
( See the list )

Assorted Interests & Hobbies
( See the list )

yourlibrarian

I have been chatting with

ravensilversea about having a small_joys community here at DW, since apparently it has an absentee mod on Pillowfort.

This is not something I feel the need to start/mod myself as I already have various communities here, but I don't imagine it would be very labor intensive if someone wanted to take it on. It seems to me this coming month would be an ideal time to have such a community available.

I have poked around DW and there is a longstanding, currently modded community called

awesomeers which overlaps what I'd consider small_joys to be. So I was curious to know if current small_joys users think that it would suit, or if you want to start up a separate community here.

yourlibrarian

I've already seen two cases of this popping up on my feed. If you are opening an account at Dreamwidth, be aware that you can change your username but it will cost US $15 to do. And since most people right now are just trying out the site, they're probably not ready to start paying for features yet.

So think about a name you wouldn't mind being stuck with for a while.

Although speaking of paid features, to follow up on my post about creating likes on your posts,

florianschild has created a browser extension which will automatically insert your kudos poll code into an entry. Download it at the link.

(Also crossposted about the username issue at dreamwidth on Pillowfort)

bookscorpion

Here are a couple of sites you can use to host your images to display them on Dreamwidth via hotlinking (aka the image is uploaded to that site but appears on whatever site you embedded it on)

(disclaimer: I have not used most of these personally but I have seen them around, or used them for single images I wanted to share real quick)

PostImages

no account needed, free account available for more organisational options and space., and a paid account starting at 15$/month Will give you embed code ready made in a bunch of variations from html to markdown to bbcode.

Flickr

Flickr has been around for ages. There's a free account with limited space, or various tiers of paid accounts. I have no idea what those costs because Flickr won't show it to me. Will also give you embed codes in bbcode and html, with options on how the embed should look.

Edit: Flickr's $11/month or $82/year

imgbb

Similar to PostImages, will give you html and bbcode for your images. No account needed, no free account available but a paid account in various tiers. starting at 14$/month
Edit: apparently there are free accounts (I didn't want to go to all the steps of signing up so I missed that)

SquidgeImages

free fannish image hosting by Squidge - for fans by fans which is really nice. 18+, no commercial use of the images. Images don't need to be fannish to be there.

FileGarden

more a cloud than image hosting but as far as I know (but could not confirm because I haven't signed up), hotlinking is allowed. Also no idea what any of this costs because there's no easy way to find out.

edit: it's free for the first 2GB (with 40MB maximum per file) after which you have to pay, with the lowest tier being US$2.50/month which increases the capacity to 100GB storage.

dishonorable mention: Imgur made hotlinking against their TOS. The irony is killing me LOL

even more dishonorable mention: ImageShack who used to be free, pivoted to paid account and replaced embedded images from free accounts with advertising. And Photobucket who deleted those images when they went paid account which I guess is better than ads but still.

intrepid_inkweaver

Since there's no 'like' feature available on Dreamwidth, how do people feel about people just commenting with a 🩷? That wouldn't be annoying or anything would it? I like to let people know I read their post.

Also, while I'm here, I apparently tried making a Dungeons and Dragons Community here the last time I tried to make myself at home on this site, but didn't get any members. So, like, here it is if you want to join:

dungeons_and_dragons

(I hope that works.)

I might change the name to TTRPGs, though. Or something more inclusive like that.

Current Mood: cheerful

bakartridge

Bit late to doing this but drew something based off the recent Resident Evil movie. The true point of the movie was to show that you NEVER take an overtime shift.

osteophage

Elf has suggested that information be gathered for the Fanlore wiki entry about Pillowfort, particularly with regards to site culture and fan communities.

For instance: does anyone know how the "WWW" tradition got started on the Bookworms community? That might be a good one to add.

osteophage

Quoting from Tassel Fort Downloader Update 2026-10-21:

The downloader should be fixed now. Make sure to follow the instructions on the download site. If you still run into problems, do let me know.
The downloaded file name shouldn't include special characters. Letters, numbers, spaces, dashes and underscore are fine.
Automatic updates of Tassel can take up to 24 h to reach you. To manually update, go to the Tampermonkey (or similar) dashboard and click the "Last updated" timestamp. The latest Tassel version is 1.10.4.

springstarz

It's called

pillowfolk_gamers and is meant to be a place for former Pillowfort users to connect over games, post about their favorite titles and what they're playing, and maybe even find people to play games with. I had actually considered making a similar community back on Pillowfort with a function of helping people find others to game with... then the announcement happened and that flew out the window. Either way, I guess you could say this is almost an attempt to start up a Pillowfort-based gaming clan where the thing connecting us is that we're all former Pillowfort users. Imagine that XD

prettyarbitrary

It's me again! With how-tos on more cool DW features. (I think they're cool.)

Comment Tracking:

My personal favorite--I consider it the secret sauce of Dreamwidth (and LJ before it)--post tracking! You can use this to get notified when your favorite bloggers make new posts. But you can also CRUCIALLY use it to get notified when people leave new comments on a post you like.

So if you got dug in on a cool conversation in the comments, you can turn that on and get notifications whenever somebody leaves another reply. This lets you stay in the conversation without keeping the post open in a browser window or something. You can add a blog or post to your tracking at any time using the little bell/track this icon at the bottom of each post. You can manage your post tracking in Account Settings > Notification tab. (Also the place to go to adjust your notification settings generally.)

Create Custom Access Circles & Custom Reading Pages:

Another super useful trick, if you're somebody who likes privacy and the ability to lock your posts to certain users, is the ability to create custom access circles. On DW, you always have the ability to set posts to public, private or 'access locked' (this means people you have followed/friended). But you can also create custom access lists! So perhaps you have one for 'besties I trust with information about my mental health.' Or one for 'beta readers for my rough drafts' or 'people who opted into my obsessive posting about kpop.' You create and manage these Custom Access Groups or Custom Circles in your Account Settings > Manage Circles. Create and name one, and then add the people you want in it. Or remove people who you've blog-divorced.

As a bonus, a Circle also includes a custom reading page. So along with using them for custom blog post access, you can also use them to create specialty reading pages--maybe 'people who write weird fic,' or 'my fiber arts friends.' AND you can set those reading pages to be public or private, so that if you don't want people to know you have a weird fic reading page, you can hide it.

Subscribing to RSS feeds or, Did you know you can follow Tumblr blogs from your DW reading page?

Another super cool one: You can add RSS feeds to your Dreamwidth reading page. So you can follow people who post on Tumblr or Twitter or Bluesky. You can follow people's personal off-site blogs. You can follow news feeds from various sites--maybe you're into AP's Finance section or you want to be able to track new fics posted to your favorite AO3 fandoms. Here's the how-to of creating and following RSS/Atom feeds on your Dreamwidth. (Edit: now with 100% more actual link!)

Post to Dreamwidth via email

In your Account Settings > Mobile, you can set up the ability to send emails to Dreamwidth to make posts or reply to comments. Nice if you don't feel like logging in. If you're like me and you lurk in your email a lot, you can have DW notifications set to send you emails as post or comment notifications and then reply to them straight from email.

Crossposted to

newcomers,

pillowfolks

themolw

I see a lot of people are moving to DW and miss features from PF and/or don't know the cool stuff you can do here. As someone who has been crossposting my art and short text posts to DW, I want to share some neat tricks to mold your journal to your liking.

Dates:
You can set the date of your journal entry to whenever you would like, which makes DW great for archiving your posts from other sites. Click "Edit Date" to do so. Some more infos about how this works can be found here.

Tags:
Tags on DW are for your personal organisation on your own journal which makes hashtagging redundant. Tag diving isn't really a thing here (although there is a short window of time where your post will show up in Latest Things).
But you can use nested tags here! You can group topics, e.g. all your fandom posts under the parent tag "fandom" by using the formatting "fandom: superwholock" and "fandom: Sailor Moon".

Cuts:
You can customize the text of your cuts, and e.g. use them as summary or content warning.

Content Warnings:
If you set your post to "Viewer Discretion Advised" or "Age 18+", you can give a reason as to why you do so in the "Reason for Age Restriction" box and warn people of its content. (This should also be possible for your entire journal if you lock it.)

Image Posting:
Most of the DW guides focus on hosting images, I'd like to talk about embedding them nicely. I really enjoy midnightchills's tumblr like photoset code. armaina also pointed out that you can edit the CSS of your layout to prevent the built-in image embed from spilling outside of your layout.

Layouts:
There are a lot of coders making pretty alternatives to the default layouts, such as myrtillenne, 10billionghosts, baisemain, tessisamess. There are also communities collecting layouts like dreamwidthlayouts, dreamcodes. Make sure to check if the layout is mobile friendly if that is important to you. You can do so by clicking the coder's live preview.

Fancy codes:
You can add a lot of fun things to your journal profile, entries and sometimes even comments that you can find on dreamcodes.

tl;dr Dreamwidth is different from Pillowfort which sometimes makes it harder to use, but if you really want to, there are a lot of options to turn this into a cozy home^^

kayscale

Hello! I've noticed that, in a lot of places (and especially in the journals of people who recently migrated from Pillowfort to here!), IP address logging is enabled, which means that the IP addresses of people who leave comments on posts are automatically recorded when they comment. I noticed that this feature is on by default, so I went into my account settings and turned it off (and this post is meant to be a kind of PSA to people who aren't aware that this feature is turned on and want to turn it off). But I thought I'd ask: how do people feel about this feature, especially those who have been on the site for longer? Is it good to have it turned on, or better to have it turned off?

Current Mood: curious

bookscorpion

If you have your own webspace or are planning to get it, then I highly recommend Piwigo for photo management. It's free for you to host on your own, or you can pay for a cloud account managed by Piwigo. The code is open source, the cloud hosted in the EU.

I managed to set up Piwigo with almost zero knowledge of how to do anything with my own website just by following the instructions on their website. It worked perfectly with Filezilla.
There's an app for iOS and Android that's comfortable to use, and at least some photo management programs will have the option to upload to Piwigo (DigiKam for example has it, another FOSS program for Linux. Mac and Windows, also high recommended).

The admin web interface is nice and clean, and on the outward facing site you get a thumbnail gallery with the option to see each photo in various sizes and do some quick edits on it like renaming ect. There is also the option to set up user accounts but I have never done that. You can get a ton of plugins and various themes, apart from the customisation options Piwigo offers right out of the box.

I've been using Piwigo for more than a decade and never had any problems. The only thing I wish is that it would give me the permalinks for the images ready to copy paste but I will live with right clicking.

Screenshots under the cut
( Read more... )

katzedecimal

And yep, bummed about it. But, needs must. Any of my PiFo peeps can friend me here, and new folks too. Hello! There isn't much to see on my DW since years ago but we'll see what happens, I guess.

Current Mood: sad

yourlibrarian

There is a workaround which I have posted about at

newcomers. You will need a paid account to do it, but it's just a cut and paste once you have set up your code snippet.

If you have questions, please post them at

newcomers instead of here, so we can keep all explanations or issues in one place.

arimamary

If you're migrating your posts to Dreamwidth, you might find the need to convert Rich Text into Markdown or HTML, depending on your preferred text format (which you can also change). Below I'm sharing some online converters I use often to post on Pillowfort and Dreamwidth.

iimpavid

Congratulations to the handful of you who responded to my question! That is more than enough incentive for me to tackle a trasfer task I was planning on doing anyway. I have begun a community,

pillowfortu_haul which will house Blanketboxes of the past!

I am copying over Blanketboxes I have made and those from deactivated users first.

If YOU would like to copy over Blanketboxes you own, I encourage you to do so after reading the sticky post in Pillowfort U-Haul. PLEASE READ THE STICKY POST found here.

penbrydd

New words time! When you subscribe to someone, you'll also have the option to 'grant access' to your journal. An awful lot of you are pushing that button on every follow, so let's take a look at what that means.

At the bottom of the new post screen, you'll notice the visibility setting for the post. Now, on PF, you could show a post to everyone (public), people who are logged in, your followers, or your mutuals. Here, that setting's a little different. You can show a post to everyone (public), to your access list (people you clicked 'grant access' for), or to a custom list (specific subsets of your access list that you can set up manually).

So, 'grant access' gives people access to your ... less public posts, your 'friends locked' posts, as we used to say on LJ. Like

arimamary pointed out in the comments on a crosspost, "it's an area between followers and mutuals for post visibility. You may subscribe to each other but access-only posts are like a list of names for a private party you're hosting (on your journal). Very exclusive." Make sure that's what you're trying to do when you click that button!

You can always go to 'Manage Circle' in the Organize menu at the top, if you want to change that setting for anyone who's following you, or set up custom access lists for particular types of posts you don't want to show everyone. To undo it, if you didn't mean to do that, just go to the Manage Circle page and untick the box for the people you didn't want on that list. There's also a tickbox for subscribe, if you want to start or stop following someone who follows you!

Another note, if you're not showing up on your own 'Reading' feed, and you would like to, you should go to your own blog and click the follow button, to subscribe to yourself.

A slightly unrelated note, that heart button at the bottom of a post isn't a like button, it's the memories button, which basically adds the post to a bookmarks list, so you can come back to it later. Works about like bookmarking a fic on AO3.

city_noise

Hi everyone, cross-posting these Wafrn recommendations here since obviously PF is no longer a reliable place to store information. I hope that's ok, tell me if I need to adapt anything since I don't get DW yet.

Wafrn is a social media designed to look and feel like tumblr. It works on top of ActivityPub with all the quirks that implies. However the mod team is super great and attentive to concerns. You can post as many images and videos as you want, unlike Dreamwidth. You may create long posts like Pillowfort, unlike many Mastodon instances.

Wafrn is decentralized, there's many instances to pick from. Each instance has its own mods and privacy policy. These are my recommendations, you can find more on join.wafrn.net. You can find the privacy policy in the bottom left corner of each instance. Wafrn does not yet have community features, however you can view and browse Bluesky lists.

Wafrn connects to bluesky. If you want to avoid Bluesky, you should try a Sharkey instance instead. You will be able to talk to Wafrn without dealing with Bluesky.

Recommended instances

problemeowtic.net

18+

Hate speech includes community infighting: transandrophobia, transmisogyny, aphobia

No real life genitals, fictional minors in sexual situations. Explicitly allows ageplay and artistic depiction of abuse

Nothing illegal in the US

Admin is very cute and nice (verified)

meowing.men

18+

Ukraine based, no tankies or pro-russian attacks on ukranians

No MAPs and zoophiles

homestuck.fr

18+

Nothing illegal in Germany or France

No CP, necrophilia or bestiality, real and otherwise

Finally: the app.wafrn.net instance. It's the biggest one, it's the one I'm in, it's closed. If you say you come from PF and mention me you'll probably get in. It's less stable since it gets the latest software updates (but it also means more features)

18+

No hate speech, including in-group (i hate trans men / i hate trans women)

No endorsing JK Rowling or any of her products

Off-platform behavior is a factor in moderation

Profile

Pillowfolks

About Us

Are you pining for Pillowfort? Looking for people you know, or people you'd like to know? We are here to help!

Page Summary

osteophage - Pillowfort Shutdown Masterpost
monster_hugger - Pillowfort Communities on Dreamwidth
prettyarbitrary - Big honking list of communities
yourlibrarian - small joys community
yourlibrarian - Choose Your Name Carefully + Browser Extension for Likes
bookscorpion - Image Hosting
intrepid_inkweaver - Liking Posts and a DnD Community
bakartridge - Welcome to Raccoon City
osteophage - Pillowfort on Fanlore Wiki
osteophage - Tassel Fort Downloader Update
springstarz - I have created a community
prettyarbitrary - DW features: Comment tracking, Custom circles, RSS feeds and replying from email
themolw - How To Pillowpost on Dreamwidth
kayscale - Discussion/PSA: IP Address Logging
bookscorpion - Image hosting: Piwigo
katzedecimal - Welp, here I am, back once more
yourlibrarian - Missing Your Likes Button?
arimamary - Online Converters for your Migration Neeeds
iimpavid - Packing Up BlanketBoxes!
penbrydd - A quick heads up about following/subscribing...
city_noise - Wafrn recommended instances

October 2026

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Sticky: Pillowfort Shutdown Masterpost

Pillowfort Communities on Dreamwidth

Big honking list of communities

small joys community

Choose Your Name Carefully + Browser Extension for Likes

Image Hosting

Liking Posts and a DnD Community

Welcome to Raccoon City

Pillowfort on Fanlore Wiki

Tassel Fort Downloader Update

I have created a community

DW features: Comment tracking, Custom circles, RSS feeds and replying from email

How To Pillowpost on Dreamwidth

Discussion/PSA: IP Address Logging

Image hosting: Piwigo

Welp, here I am, back once more

Missing Your Likes Button?

Online Converters for your Migration Neeeds

Packing Up BlanketBoxes!

A quick heads up about following/subscribing...

Wafrn recommended instances

Recommended instances

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