Julia Baritz is having quite a week. The Austin-based developer is the founder and lead architect of Pillowfort.io, a community-oriented social media platform that's quietly amassed around 20,000 users in its first two and a half years. But since Monday, Baritz has been inundated with more than 8,000 requests from people clamoring to join her site. Traffic to Pillowfort’s homepage has been 10 times higher than average, she says.

Baritz has porn to thank for this. On Monday, Tumblr announced a ban on all “adult content”, and creators have been frantically searching for a new place to migrate their NSFW art and porn blogs ever since. Pillowfort emerged as a potential safe harbor via word of mouth on social media; the site allows NSFW content to be posted with few restrictions, as long as it doesn't break any laws.

“It’s funny that adult and sexual content has become the linchpin and turning point of our popularity in a way, but I’m not surprised,” adds Baritz.

Sexual content has always been a part of fandom communities online, from LiveJournal to Tumblr. These communities have a history of abandoning platforms that don’t support the free expression of adult material. It was LiveJournal’s crackdown on NSFW material back in 2007 that broke many users' trust in the site and initiated the mass migration to Tumblr, along with the creation of fandom sites like An Archive of Our Own. Now Tumblr’s facing its own porn-related exodus, because NSFW content appears to be at odds with its business goals.

For Baritz, the experience has been head-spinning. Pillowfort is still in beta, and this situation has become a huge test for the site.

If anyone understands what Baritz has been going through, it’s Denise Paolucci. As the co-founder of Dreamwidth, a web 1.0-style blogging platform that shares Pillowfort's user-first philosophy, she has seen a similar spike on her site this week. Dreamwidth is more established—it has existed since 2008 and has 53,595 active users (and 3,453,932 total accounts)—but traffic to the site also has surged by a factor of 10, she says. Many Tumblr users are tweeting about their plans to migrate to both Dreamwidth and Pillowfort.

Both sites adhere to an anti-advertising, anti-VC funding, anti-corporate model that is focused on user privacy, control, and freedom. That's what makes them such appealing options to many disaffected Tumblr bloggers, but the challenges they face underscore why the dream of an independent web is so hard to achieve, even when there's demand.

Microblogging Like It's 2009

Dreamwidth began as a side project after Paolucci and her cofounder Mark Smith felt that LiveJournal, their former employer, had lost its way. Paolucci worked there as a community manager, and Smith as a developer. They built Dreamwidth on LiveJournal’s open source code, which was already 10 years old at the time. A decade later, they still run the site. “The other day I realized I’ve been working on this code base for about 20 years, and I had to go lie down for a minute,” she says.

The benefit of code that old is that it's incredibly stable, has been fully patched and security-audited, and it’s efficient. This week it has handled 10 times its normal traffic smoothly. “We have designed Dreamwidth to be very expandable,” according to Paolucci. “We did have a big increase in traffic when Tumblr made its announcement and no one noticed, because we set up the site so it can scale in an instant.”

But what it gains in stability, it lacks in new features. Dreamwidth can barely handle images, as some Tumblr exiles have noted on Twitter, and currently has no option to upload video. GIFs should work, Paolucci says, but users get only 500 megabytes of image hosting on their accounts, at least for right now. “Unlimited image hosting is one of those features that people have gotten used to that are VC-subsidized on most websites. We can’t afford to offer that same kind of unlimited, endless image hosting.”