TΉΣ DΛПGΣЯ ΛCΣ

As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.

Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that. 

Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult. 

If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there. 

If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably. 

We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more. 

most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this

is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes.  are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.

Some good news, I’ve been talking to two developers now and got them working together, we just had a meeting with the guys behind an existing large (millions of users) site similar to Tumblr, with a vibrant and open-minded community, and more importantly, it has open-minded owners who believe in free speech. They think we can get something done here to rescue the whole community.

I’m not allowed to reveal the site name yet. I can tell you it’s mainstream, open to everyone, open-minded and welcoming. (It’s not WordPress or any site owned by Facebook or Twitter. It’s not Pillowfort, that’s in closed beta. It’s not Ello, that’s mainly for artists. It’s not kinkspace or fetlife, those are too specialist. It’s not jux, that seems to be closed. It’s not Soup, that seems still in development and too small.)

One of the reasons for delaying the announcement for next few days is they don’t want a “land grab” where people take the names of current popular Tumblr users over there (cyber squatting). So they are looking at ways for existing Tumblr users to keep the same names on the new site.

More info over the days to come.

The plan is, broadly:

1. By December 9th, announcement of the new site and how to secure your username there

2. By December 10th, an online tool for bloggers to copy their existing content to the new site automatically, with the same tags and captions.

3. Bloggers will need to copy their content across between December 10th and December 17th if they want to use the automatic tool.

4. My understanding is that after December 17th there will be no public access to any “flagged” posts on Tumblr, but the original poster will still be able to see the flagged post (for a short time at least). Therefore, the original poster may still be able to manually download a post to their own PC or phone, after December 17th, and manually upload it to the other site. But if you have lots of posts that will take a long time, it will be better to use the automatic tool before December 17th.

Please understand that these dates are approximate and may change for technical or other reasons.

There may be a few rough edges or not so perfect looking site design on the transfer tool. Everyone is doing their best. The main goal here is to help as many people as possible preserve access to their content, in the short space of time Tumblr has allowed us, and preserve as much as possible of the Tumblr community spirit somewhere new.

The new site will cater for photo, GIF, text and html posts. It will not offer video and audio posts, due to cost reasons - maybe in future, but for now you will need to preserve video and audio content yourself in some other place.

If your Tumblr blog has a mixture of original content and reblogs, or all reblogs, all of that can be copied over to the new site. Reblogs will become “your” original content if nobody else posted them yet, otherwise they will be shown as reblogs. The devs are looking at ways to preserve attribution of reblogs back to the original Tumblr poster, if that person also moves to the new site.

Important: your Likes cannot be copied from Tumblr to the new site. You will have to go find the same posts again on the new site, and like them afresh.

(Similarly, existing reblog comments, asks, messages and other user interaction on Tumblr cannot be copied to the new site - that’s just too much to do, in the short time available.)

If you want to preserve any of your existing Liked posts on Tumblr, you will need to either: (1) download the post to your own PC, or: (2A) reblog it now to your own Tumblr blog, and then (2B) use the automatic tool, before December 17th, to move your whole Tumblr blog across to the new site.

If you have Liked a lot of posts here on Tumblr, the gridllr.com webapp should be able to help you do steps 1 and 2A quickly, I mean download or reblog.

(Someone complained to me today about the appearance of Gridllr on a phone. It’s best to use Gridllr on a PC, Mac or Tablet with a large screen.)

If you have liked a post here on Tumblr and the original poster decides to delete it, or even to delete their entire blog, some time before December 17th, then that post will be permanently lost. So if you want to be sure to preserve any of your Liked posts, you should best download or reblog as soon as possible. If it’s reblogged to your own blog it is safe from deletion, at least for next few days.

Yes indeed no nudity but you can find all the discriminatory and hate speech you want!

But wait, the icing on the cake…

…really? Do i need even say anything.

So as we are all Aware by now Tumblr wants to shut down adult content on this homepage. But new revelations suggest that neither the finding of child exploitation content or the removal from the AppStore were the cause of this action.

It is about money, namely the money Verizon hopes to get out of tumblrs “progressive” user base.

“Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf (former Yahoo VP Simon Khalaf) chose Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge, "Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to [make] a ton of money.” … Khalaf did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to him wanted it noted that Black Lives Matter was only one “community” that Khalaf referenced: he also discussed Game of Thrones and Manchester United fans.“

Also interesting to note here:

"But a former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was "in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.“

If you’re looking for reasons to leave, I’d like to add these ten to your thinking. 

You might not be personally interested in NSFW content in your fandom - but on December 17th Tumblr’s algorithm is going to take down a lot of SFW content in error. Many of those creators have moved on and aren’t around to requests that their posts be re-assessed. Older fandoms are about to lose a huge amount of material.

Do you want to stay on a website using slash-and-burn tactics against long-established user communities? Tumblr believe they can tell most of their userbase they aren’t welcome here, then expect a family-friendly utopia to rise from the ashes. They’re going to get a nasty shock.

The site is about to hemorrhage active users. You might not post NSFW content, you might not like NSFW content - but many of your followers do. They’ll follow where it goes.

There are clear signs that Tumblr has incredibly hazy standards of what will constitute adult content. You only need to read their big announcement to know this. (’Female representing nipples’? Nudity in art is fine, but not in fan art?)

You can bet your bottom dollar that no matter how ‘adult content’ will be judged, those standards will be applied far more harshly to LGBT content. Romantic kisses happen between heterosexual pairings; gay pairings commit sex acts.

And even if the loss of adult and LGBT content is fine by you, that’s load-bearing content. Without all that monthly activity, Tumblr is going to see a shocking fall in its traffic. How long before Verizon decide it’s not worth keeping Tumblr operational at all?

If you want to spend your time and effort in building a fandom, it makes more sense to direct it into helping establish a new community with long term prospects. Why waste your time trying to keep a dying giant alive?

Learning a new site might seem like an annoyance, but so are the bugs which have plagued Tumblr for months. Those glitches are going to get worse as the site collapses.

Nazis are still perfectly welcome here. When all the fandom blogs are gone, blogs spouting hate speech are going to be much more obvious. Tumblr was known as a haven for adult content; it’s about to become known as a haven for racist content.

If Tumblr bans adult content and then collapses shortly afterwards from a mass exodus of users, other social media sites will think twice before doing this in future.

TLDR: as Tumblr experiences a nose-dive in activity, other sites will see a sudden blooming - and you can be a part of that. You can contribute to something good and growing. Some of those communities, especially in smaller fandoms, could really use your help in laying down solid foundations. 

I think something is fishy here. And I think Tumblr needs to put the rumors to rest

Yeah, no.

Tumblr blocked the tag “chronic pain” in this mess for no reason

They’re flagging commonly used tags by queer people, sex educators, and artists who make their fucking LIVING on tumblr

They’re gonna take down genuine sex workers because they didn’t curb the problem with spamming porn bots YEARS ago when tumblr users REPORTED OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND *OVER* that it was a problem

Tumblr IGNORED the bots, IGNORED the problems, and honestly treated it like NOTHING until their app was taken off a store due to it.

They’re fucking over a shit-ton of REAL PEOPLE who rely on tumblr for community and/or income because they ignored users’ complaints about shitty porn bots for YEARS until it had financial consequences

I can no longer even talk about chronic pain without the post being blocked from searches

I have drawn one or two nude pieces on my art tumblr which is 99% safe for work but now I’m worried the blog will be taken down entirely because Tumblr won’t bother differentiating between spam and REAL PEOPLE just trying to live their goddamn lives

And god forbid I want to talk about bisexuality or sex or kink in just… MY LIFE. As a normal-ass human being who just wants to TALK ABOUT HUMAN THINGS

No, their solution to nuke a problem they’ve ignored for years is to take us all down at once

So maybe don’t laugh about “oh no not my pornz” because 1. plenty of that ~porn~ is made by actual humans making their living and 2. WAY MORE than “just porn” is being targeted