Follow Your Passion

oh yeah its SO dead.

Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.

First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.

What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!

StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.

On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.

So, what’s included in the box?

The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.

A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.

Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.

Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.

An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.

Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.

What’s still to come

Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!

More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.

🌟 New

In the iOS app, we’re experimenting with replacing the Account nav bar item with the newly-redesigned TumblrMart. We’re working on more experiments changing the overall navigation experience in the Tumblr apps, so stay tuned.

You can now gift Important Rainbow Checkmarks to others on Tumblr. (Note that you can disable showing these Important Checkmarks in your blog settings, including the ones you’re gifted or have purchased for yourself via TumblrMart.)

🛠 Fixed

Fixed a bug on web that could allow people to edit Neue Post Format posts in the legacy editor, which frequently led to broken post content (such as broken polls).

🚧 Ongoing

We’re aware of an issue in the latest version of the iOS app that is causing the share-to-Tumblr option in other apps to not carry over the item you wanted to share. We’re working to get a fix out as quickly as we can.

🌱 Upcoming

Nothing to report here today.

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Answer: Hello, @significantfoliage!

A simple but potent answer for you: which is to report whatever you think is violating our community guidelines/policies—if it’s a post, report the post. If the whole blog is, then the whole blog. We can take it from there. Don’t overthink it. Just hit that report button, and we will take it from there.

This is an important question, so thank you for asking. Your feedback is appreciated, folks.

Best,

🌟 New

We’ve rolled out poll creation to more people, and we’re planning on getting poll creation out to everyone by next week!

We’ve brought back the “For You” tab in Explore on web.

We’ve rolled out the new recommendation label “Liked by {blog name}” to replace “In your orbit”. This does not change how these recommendations are sourced; if you choose not to share your likes, they will not be recommended to others.

In version 28.0 and beyond of the mobile apps, we’ve added a message about what to do next if you have an empty “Your tags” tab.

Reporting a blog as spam and/or a bot will now remove it from your Activity feed the next time you view your Activity.

🛠 Fixed

We’re fixing more bugs with polls, including improving how they display for logged out users, and updating every poll on the page on web when there are multiple instances of the same poll present on the page.

Fixed an issue with the post form on web which prevented CTRL+Z (⌘+Z on Apple devices) from undoing the first action made in the editor.

Fixed a bug on iOS that was showing an empty set of quotation marks in push notifications about anonymous asks, instead of showing the actual ask text.

Fixed some issues that were causing items in TumblrMart to always display in English despite your device’s language settings.

🚧 Ongoing

We’re aware that Twitter has announced it’ll be shutting off free API access, which may impact Tumblr’s ability to auto-post from Tumblr to Twitter for users who have that set up. We’ll provide an update on this blog in the future about what ends up happening with this functionality.

🌱 Upcoming

The redesign of TumblrMart that we premiered on web will be coming to the mobile apps soon!

✅ 🌈

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

just wanna ask if there's a way to maybe minimize or group all the report notifications?

Answer: Hello there, @bleuskais!

We hear you loud and clear on this one—so for now we’ve updated the activity list to only show a maximum of three of these thank you notes per page of your activity items. Hopefully, that will help reduce the noise—and thank you so much for reporting so much spam! Keep on at it folks, and keep the questions coming.

Best,

🌟 New

We are continuing to roll the polls feature out to more folks! We’ve been going slowly with this one out of an abundance of caution and fixing bugs before we gave more people access to it. If you don’t have polls yet, you will soon!

The “new” indicator next to the TumblrMart icon on web has been replaced with little sparkles. Also, it’ll go away once you’ve accessed TumblrMart.

Some folks will start seeing a “Today” tab on the Explore page, which will feature stuff that’s happening on Tumblr in real time.

On web, the buttons that appear on an image you’ve added to a post now have labels to make the post editor more screenreader-friendly.

🛠 Fixed

Fixed an issue on mobile web where the “Summon crab” button could appear over other buttons. It now disappears after 5 seconds.

Version 28.0 of both the iOS and Android apps contains a fix that improves the colors used in polls in certain color palettes.

🚧 Ongoing

This is your biweekly reminder to keep reporting any spam you see. We’ve seen a few folks asking about what we’re doing on our end, and while we’re not going to get too detailed about it here, we will say that we’re using something similar to Akismet (another Automattic product!) to squash these bots.

🌱 Upcoming

Nothing to share today.

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Answer: Hello, @wovenstarlight.

Now that’s a great idea! Fingers crossed it happens. We’ve noticed this on the Android app, and it’s super annoying.

We’re not sure what team could pick it up anytime soon though, but we hope that this one gains traction. Keep eyes here or @changes for any news.

Thanks for your question, and keep the feedback coming!

Best

We’re starting to roll out a polls feature for the post editor across all platforms. Yes, that’s all platforms. That’s iOS, Android, and web. You should all have access to this in the next few days. And what’s more, it’s super easy to use.

Simply select the newly added orange poll icon (on web, it appears when you start a new content block in the post editor, on mobile it’s in your toolbar).

Write your question.

Add at least 2, at most 10 response options for people to choose from. There's a character limit on these, it's about as long as the Puss in Boots option offered above.

Set the poll duration to one day or one week. 

You can add some commentary to your poll or let it speak for itself. 

And, just as with any post, you can toggle who sees the poll by using your community labels. Or you can go wild and blaze it if it meets the content guidelines for blazing. 

Come across a poll in the wild? Have your say! Click on your chosen response. Congratulations, you’ve just voiced an opinion.

Ok so I just had to make a lil post because I am truly intrigued by this. I have loved Tumblr for a long time. A LONG time. This account is new but BAYBEE the amount of abandoned fanboi accounts I lost the passwords to over the years.