M.Montoya

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.

A few weeks ago, a small but higher-than-normal number of accounts were mistakenly suspended. The suspensions were quickly reversed, but our response wasn't good enough, and we want to say more.

We're sorry it took us this long to address this. Trust and safety issues are difficult to discuss publicly, and we can’t share details about specific individuals or how our systems work without exposing Tumblr to bad actors. But caution led us to say too little, too late.

We’ve heard from members of the trans community on Tumblr that they were disproportionately impacted, and that deserves a direct response. According to 3rd party researchers, Tumblr’s userbase has the highest proportion of LGBTQIA+ folks on social media, so it makes sense that when something goes wrong, those communities might feel that disproportionate impact.

One thing we want to emphasize is that we do not moderate people's identities. We moderate behavior. We know that identity shows up across a Tumblr profile in many ways, from followed topics to the flags people put in their bios, and more. However, these signals play no role in how our moderation systems make decisions. We monitor those systems for evidence of bias and take corrective action when we find it.

We understand that the communications sent to affected users, and our broader silence to the community, didn't meet the standard people expect from us. That feedback is fair, and we apologize. We've updated the messaging sent to people impacted by these incidents. We are also overhauling our process with a goal of responding to mistaken suspension appeals within 24 hours, and have instituted an ongoing internal review of how suspensions and appeals are handled.

Going forward, we're committed to finding a better balance: being more transparent with our community about issues that matter, even when we can't share everything.

Tumblr belongs to everyone. We take that seriously, and we intend to earn back your trust. We are not afraid to have tough discussions with you or make updates based on your feedback, though on occasion, it might take some time.

To the people whose accounts were affected, and to the members of our trans community who felt targeted: we are truly sorry.