Untitled

Once again, it was Hack Day at Tumblr, our favorite excuse to pause the roadmap for a moment and build something weird, useful, or ideally both. Here is a sneak peek of what the team built.

Unified Inbox

@ex, @kostastsi4 and @alexjf worked on making Asks and Submissions easier to find in the apps, moving your Inbox (currently buried in blog settings) to a tab in the Activity screen, where all your other incoming communication lives.

Gifs in replies

In @elt’s opinion, replies could use some spicing up. So he spent Hack Day adding GIF support to replies. Neat! 

Fun fact: reply threads themselves actually started as a Hack Day project over two years ago. The circle of hack life continues. 

Scaling the Reblog Graph Explorer

@blowery improved the implementation of reblog graph to handle massive viral posts gracefully. Instead of struggling with very large reblog chains, this hack rethinks how the graph is laid out so it can handle posts with massive numbers of reblogs more smoothly, making it easier to explore how posts spread across Tumblr.

In-Blog Search Filters

Web had the most complete set of in-blog search filters. Android and iOS? Not so much. @lesianlen worked on bringing parity across all three platforms: Android got Top/Recent sorting, an original posts filter, and Ask and Chat post type filters. iOS went from zero filters to a brand-new bottom sheet with the full filter set. Now everyone gets to search their blog properly, regardless of platform. 

Separating in-blog search from "Exclude from Tumblr Search and Recommendations"

Did you know that selecting the “Exclude from Tumblr search and recommendations” setting would also disable your in-blog search? Well, thanks to @lesianlen, now it doesn’t. This one’s already live.

Communities: Granular Moderator Permissions and Promotion Flow 

Promoting a member to admin in a Community is a big deal (and currently irreversible). 

@straku ironed out the promotion flow, adding a simple step to alert, confirm, and prevent promotions that could be to moderation.

Another request is having more control over what moderators can do. A way to give moderators more power, without them overtaking the community admin.

@jubs built a permissions system that lets admins choose what their moderators can do, without compromising their own ownership. In addition to existing moderator permissions, such as removing posts, and comments, you'd be able to allow mods to edit the community appearance (title, description, etc), the community settings (auto-moderation, tags, etc), and even manage other moderators.

Memories in Profile Page & Archive Page

Inspired by Google Photos’ “Memories” feature, Sowmia proposed building a “Memories” experience for the blog to surface nostalgic posts from its history.

The idea was to create a dedicated Memories feature and link it to archive pages, enabling users to rediscover past content in a more engaging way. As part of the hackday, she implemented the archive page portion of this idea, laying the foundation for integrating the full Memories experience in the future.

Post launcher with shortcuts to Drafts and Queue

@ex tried a new version of the post launcher at the top of the dashboard on web: switch blogs before opening the editor, or jump straight to your Drafts or Queue (takes 3-4 clicks to get there now). The buttons also show how many posts you have in your Drafts and Queue.

Reblogs with Videos

After all, why not? Why shouldn’t we have videos in reblogs? @andriibuilds dared to ask. And build it.

Like Sorting

People with thousands of Tumblr likes have been asking for the ability to sort and organize them for years. To start, @andriibuilds prototyped sorting options for the Likes page.

RemindMe

Inspired by Reddit's RemindMe bot, @data-science-from-the-trenches built a native reminder system: reply to any post or thread with "RemindMe! 2 days" and you'll get an activity notification linking back to it when that time has passed.

The Mysterious Cat Asks

As a preparation for April Fools, @jubs introduced asks sent by the Mysterious Cat, when you eat an "ask" food in the Snek game. Each question was represented by an item, with its own rarity.

And that’s a wrap on Tumblr Hack Day, March 2026 Edition. Huge shout-out to everyone who spent this time building cool things, sharing demos, and reminding us how much fun it is to make Tumblr weirder, better, and more delightful. 

Keep an eye on @changes to see if any of these hacks make it out to you.

This place matters, and our goal is to keep Tumblr thriving for a long time. That means Tumblr has to keep evolving. There are things we know could be better. You probably have a list too. Some of it will be easy to fix. Some won't. That's exactly why we want to work with you.

The Tumblr User Panel will be a group of people on Tumblr who'll work with us over time to give feedback on how this place works today and where it's going. We know we have to earn your trust, and we want to change how we build features and include you more in the process. We’re looking forward to shaping this together.

If you're interested in joining: https://tumblr.survey.fm/tumblr-user-panel-interest-survey 

Here's what you probably want to know:

Why a panel instead of just listening to everyone?

We won’t stop reading tags, comments, reblogs, and support tickets, but a panel helps us paint a more complete picture before we build, and go deeper than a reblog thread allows.

Who are you looking for?

A mix of experience levels, devices, countries, posting habits. People who've been here a decade and people who showed up last month. 

Will everyone who fills out the survey get in?

No. We're keeping it small enough to have real conversations. If you're not selected, it's because we're balancing across a lot of dimensions, not because your response wasn't good enough. We may expand or rotate members over time.

Will critical feedback affect my account?

No! We want your feedback and criticism, and that will never result in any action against your account. 

Can I leave?

Whenever you want. No penalties.