What a shock that is. It's odd how someone you don't know can be a part of your life for so long, that you're profoundly touched when you hear about their death.

Patrick Stewart was the first bald actor to appear on screen. Before him, actors were required to either have hair or wear a wig. This changed in 1987 when he held a room full of Hollywood executives hostage and shaved their heads, chanting "One of us! One of us!". RIP Sir Stewart, you'll be missed.

RIP Dolores Huerta
RIP Patrick Stewart

I have not used it, but wafrn is supposed to be a federated tumblr alternative.

Is the Pillowfort community discussing a collective move to the Fediverse, to someplace in the Fediverse that is not Mastodon, to someplace in the Fediverse that has largely got the same features as Tumblr?

My personal experience, and I’ve got a lot of personal experience in this, is that free, open-source, decentralised alternatives are vastly less well-known than those think who know them inside-out.

Most of the time, when people are forced to escape a centralised silo, they tend to move to another centralised silo instead. For it’s the centralised silos that are well-known because it’s them that tend to have advertisement budgets, it’s them that know best how to manipulate Google by SEO means, and it’s them that mass media and/or tech media prefer to talk and write about because they’re easier to understand.

The majority of Mastodon users don’t know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. For them, the Fediverse is Mastodon. If they had any reason to move away from Mastodon, they’d be stuck between joining Bluesky, going back to X or staying on Mastodon because they don’t have the foggiest idea of what else the Fediverse itself has to offer that might suit them better.

Outside of the Fediverse, knowledge about the Fediverse is dominated by

• not even having heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon, but not of the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon and thinking Mastodon is the Fediverse

Another example: Flashback to the early 2010s. People wanted to leave Facebook for greener pastures that didn’t snoop on them as egregiously. At first they went nowhere because “there was nowhere to go”. Then, when Google+ was launched, they went to Google+. Sure, it was a Google product that definitely would snoop on them. But hey, at least it wasn’t Facebook, and Google would probably snoop less than Facebook! Besides, “there was nowhere else to go”.

All regardless of diaspora* existing. All regardless of diaspora* shaking up mass media in summer 2010 when the four devs announced a free, non-commercial “Facebook killer” and asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding to develop it, and they got over $200,000. (This is also why the only people who know that Google+ was an all-out diaspora* rip-off are current or former diaspora* users.) All regardless of Friendica existing.

Considering all this, chances that the Pillowfort community has heard of Wafrn are next to nil.

@jalefkowit As George Carlin quipped in his legendary "Airport Security" routine...

"What exactly is an “unknown person?” Surely everyone is known to someone!

Intel reports Q3 revenue up 21% YoY to $16.5B, vs. $16.5B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue and adjusted EPS below estimates; INTC drops 16%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/29/intel-intc-q3-earnings-report-2026-.html
http://www.techmeme.com/261029/p49#a261029p49

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117524743265465427

Could we have a worker-owned coop instead please.

@cwebber How about Wikipedia? En.wikipedia *is* deluged in AI slop but has become increasingly strict against LLM usage, apart from very limited exceptions. There's a noticeboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AINB and LLM warnings are pasted in articles that are suspected of being LLM-contaminated.

Watching Star Trek: Next Generation as a kid gave me a lifelong love for science fiction.

You will be missed Patrick Stewart.

That’s fair. However I was making the comparison with the general population, and yeah, knowing that websites exist outside the big 3/4 ones they use is already a feat for them.

The odds are still very low for a Pillowfort user to know of us, but have to be a huge multiple of the odds for a typical Tumblr user.

@RickiTarr noooooooo. Now I am so very sad. What a loss for the world.

@ProPublica

Aluminum, steel and gas recycle really well into new products. Plastic doesn’t.

From the article “The symbol gave plastic the sheen of recyclability, even though most items cannot be reprocessed due to economic or technical barriers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 8.7% of U.S. plastic waste was recycled in 2018; the rest ended up in landfills or was incinerated. In 2019, the Department of Energy estimated the national plastic recycling rate at 5%. ”

I feel like people who are already using an ‘alternate’ site are more likely to have heard of other ones.

Yeah, the last thing I remember about pillowfort is their security issues, and I hang out on Tumblr (a space it was designed as an alternative for). People weren't recommending it anymore after that, like they used to.

I tried it out before then, but it didn't hit for me. I've tried a million alternate ljs and tumblrs, so that says nothing about its quality. If you go on social media and no one wants to talk with you about what you want to talk about, it seems like a waste of time and effort.

It's a shame when independent projects like this close down, but if not enough people stepped up to help when help was needed, burnout was inevitable, and burnout can only be ignored for so long. Better to close it down like this than in a more dramatic way.

The type of people who went on pillowfort might actually be interested in fediverse alternatives. They'll reconnect on dreamwidth, probably, and post where they can be found. If Wafrn has what pillowfort users want and, more importantly, if their friends from there want to try it out with them, it could be a healthy boost of furries, lady fandom nerds, and lgbt+ people to the fediverse.

RIP Dolores Huerta
RIP Patrick Stewart

#RIp Sir #Patrick #Stewart. You were an incredible actor and an inspiration to me and many others. Godspeed as you go boldly into the beyond.

I'm reminded of Pircard's answer to Data, when asked "what is death?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5NDxdp4-E&t=8s

#startrek #picard #rippatrickstewart

@Leviatar Satan está ocupado intentando escaparse del infierno desde que llegó la Thatcher.