Tumblr Alternatives
So Tumblr is, as always, an on-fire garbage can (insert John Mulaney Gif), but since their response to being told by the Apple Store “hey get rid of your terly rampant amounts of child pornography or we can’t host your content” is to delete a bunch of blogs, and then ban adult content, our response (the response of most of their users) is “well, I’m outta here.” Especially considering porn was one of the main things tumblr was known for, the other being it known as a crazy SJW website. So now to find a place that captures what we were all actually here for, or at least has the basic capabilities to handle what we would like to do with it.
A lot of people who have twitter are going there, but frankly, twitter is not tumblr, or really much anything like it (in my humble opinion), and besides, I don’t have one, so if I’m going to go through the trouble of making an account, I want it to be as close of an experience as possible.
So meanwhile, I looked up a few lists of “websites like tumblr” and I’m going through them until I find a suitable alternative.
A few of the things/features/issues that are important to me to consider include:
copyright for artists and writers: aka unlike DA, where as soon as you post an image, it belongs to them now, legally speaking, and they can do whatever they want with it.
dashboard, tagging, and ability to look up other posts for similar interests. Y’know, basic social media things
NSFW: what’s their policy?
And some of the websites I’m going to check out:
Medium
Wix
Weebly
Jimdo
So now, for the ones I’ve checked out so far:
Soup
Nsfw is allowed, and I heard it was basically exactly like tumblr in a lot of aspects, so this was actually the first site I checked out, but I didn’t even bother making an account because while one place described it as “unpolished”, their site looks so weird on my computer I can’t stand to look at it. Theoretically, you can directly import your posts from other social media onto here, I heard, but you can only have one blog at a time. So those are just some fact about that
Blogger
This is the first site I tried. Its really good, except for one major thing – it’s really not designed for reblogging. You can technically find other blogs by common tags they use, but you have to use a direct link, there’s no button for it, and its only blogs, not posts themselves. NSFW is allowed, and by searching the tag I did immediately find porn, but not very good stuff, and not a lot of it. You can run several blogs easily, and post easily, but again, not being able to easily and intuitively search for others by shared interests kind of nullifies any purpose this might’ve had for me. Let me know if I’m wrong and any of you have a site there.
Wordpress (.com)
Nsfw is allowed, but no porn. I initially wasn’t even going to consider this one since I wanted a site that had both capabilities, like tumblr did, but I decided to check it out. It seems like even though on writing, they say no pornography, there are various thriving porn blogs on it. You can also search by multiple tags at once! You can also choose if certain posts can be reblogged, for those of you who occassionally make personal posts you don’t want to be shared and spread for anyone to see. There doesn’t seem to be the best auto-formatting, so sometimes things will appear a bit weird on your blog, but otherwise it seems to be a very viable alternative to tumblr. The active content right now leans towards longer article-type things, probably because you have to click a post to view it in its entirety (unless its super short, I guess), as well as because I had to look this site up to find out it existed, AKA its popular enough to show up in a top-10 list, but not well enough known that ya’ll already had blogs there.
So yeah, this post is going to be updated as time goes on, but for now, I’m really leaning towards Wordpress if you want a sort of all-in-one casual social media platform close to tumblr’s design, vs your specialized websites like FA or AO3 or whatnot. If any of ya’ll have any knowledge on these or anything to add, please comment and let me know! We’re all out of this in this together! :) :) :)
