just to be clear, I’m staying here as long as this site functions. I have 0 intentions of deleting this blog, I will go down with this ship if only to see exactly how bad it gets
Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.
The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons.
The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW.
They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.
the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression.
late night cashiers at 24-hour convenience stores are the holders of our greatest secrets and most intimate selves
not my mom, not my partner, not God himself has seen me no-make up in line to buy a choco-pop and panty liners while on the brink of a heart felt meltdown
no one has given me the empty stare of complete indifference that fills my anxious nerves with relief
there is nothing like the sweet freedom of complete nihilism experienced at a 7/11 at 2am, God lives in church, the randomness of the unfeeling universe lives at aisle 9 of CVS
what a fabulous and also philosophically horrifying tumblr post, thank you so much
There were two professors like this in my department and I was one of like 20 people who was taught by both of them so there was a very small gang of us who knew that Professor Brick Wall and Professor Overshare were married with two kids.
Okay, I’m seeing a lot of “Pillowfort is hard” posts. And posts that it’s not like tumblr. Fair calls. But let me see if I can describe a bit of the culture as it’s already built up there.
People have their own blogs and some of them gather a lot of conversation in the comments. @thursdayj, for example, hosts regular gatherings on their blog with lists of the day’s discussion topics. I’ve found folks to follow in those comment threads and other folks I just like talking to in the master thread. This is pretty LJ-ish, only easier to format and manage for those who weren’t deep into LJ and writing html.
The convention seems to be growing that one posts content to their own blog and then reblogs to various communities. This makes for some dash repetition when you follow them both, especially since using readmore breaks isn’t general etiquette yet. But because the user owns the post no matter where it’s reblogged, any post can be read from any place and still have the same content. You can reblog a post to your blog and it’ll show up to all of your followers…but it’s still that same original post and comment thread. That’s right: no more of those tumblr scattershot reblog trees where there’s a good comment here and then off on another fork, something else worth comment. Or where you can’t add a comment because some other commenter/reblogger has you blocked for…something and the whole post is off limits. There are people who post so reliably to some coms I follow that I don’t follow them individually. It’s a different dash management strategy to tumblr’s and once you make sense of it, one with more versatility and control.
Community Ads have a master list, so you can check them out by topic…and if it’s not what you want, fine, start your own. That’s a good place for finding chunks of new material for your dash. Want to discuss? Just join in the comment thread from your dash. Or the com. It doesn’t matter because it’s the same. I’m slowly working my way through the ever-growing coms list, adding in the topics I’ve gotten interested in here on tumblr. Sure it takes time and that hurts after giving up that dash you’ve been curating for years on tumblr, but it’s not going to be easier anyplace else. I have accounts on both pfio and dreamwidth, and I find the former much much easier to add content and people to.
People sometimes get in a lather because the thread owner, the OP, controls the post and its comments. They can delete any comment or the whole thing: it’s up to them. And they can restrict whether or not their post can be reblogged at all. The whole structure is focused on ownership and civility, and so far it’s been working pretty well, at least in the corners I frequent. Reposting-without-credit is much less convenient there. I’m sure abuse will come with growing numbers, but the OP tool of banning a user from ever seeing anything you post means that repeat offenders are going to have less and less to work with.
Images. Yeah, there are file size limits. Image privilege expansion packs are supposed to be one of the extras we will be able to purchase. I like that: I just post small stuff so it’s reasonably thrifty for me not to pay for hosting everyone else’s big gif files.
I think that wherever we all go, there will be work to be done. First, work to back up what was on tumblr. Then, work to curate a new dash in a new place while learning how said new place works. And it’s only going to be interesting if enough people who interest you also end up there. For me, not interested in transferring all of my tumblr content to a new home (I consider it all ephemeral except for a bit of writing I backed up before I ever posted it anywhere), it’s a matter of picking up and establishing myself over there. I hope a lot of other folks I follow here will do the same. It’s bare-bones and under development, but it has a lot of the tumblr functionality we want with less of the tumblr abuse we don’t. That’s why I’m over there.
Good to know…I’ve resisted joining pillowfort because I’m quite comfy at Tumblr. But it looks like the way things are trending.
Same. I’m verrrrry loyal to platforms I’m comfortable in. But. Pillowfort is sounding promising.
I’m on pillowfort but haven’t really done much with it other than set up a blog and follow some people I know. But once their site is up and running I’ll be back over there.
deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.
EquusGirl's Tumblr 