
Let’s all go back to Tumblr - raleighm
https://theoutline.com/post/5811/why-tumblr-is-better-than-twitter-and-we-should-bring-it-back
======
tomjen3
A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on
our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and
as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

~~~
geofft
Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like
the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style
content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems
people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be
interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site
generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow.

I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the
critical mass thanks to Mastodon.

~~~
habi
If you're running a WordPress blog, then the
[OStatus]([https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-
wordpress/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/)) plugin
connects your site to the fediverse. I don't know if there's such a thing for
your static generator, though...

~~~
vertex-four
OStatus is currently implemented by Mastodon but essentially none of the rest
of the post-Activitypub fediverse - we’ve more-or-less standardised on
Activitypub as a protocol which solves many of OStatus’s problems.

------
phyzome
Main takeaways, in my view:

\- Longer form allows for less heated conversation

\- Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post
encourages fighting

That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we _shouldn 't_ allow
trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh?

My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where
comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something
the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth,
main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
I run a few blogs for a couple of pretty big Authors (not GRRM big, but still
top 5 in Amazon for their categories).

For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just
have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send
me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method,
and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the
person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One
of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too.

A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be
approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in
a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them
to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a
previously approved comment."

~~~
saurik
I find it really interesting (and even exciting) that Instagram stories (which
have rapidly taken over Instagram) work like this: you respond by sending a
private message to the poster, not by leaving a public comment.

------
b5
This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's
definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else.
I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017.

The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber
effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in
their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for
bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on
Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you
if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.

This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy,
and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the
air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also
tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)

I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish
girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but
#goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing
subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into
the foundation of it.

I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by
"gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They
flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things
like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and
my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said,
reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.

In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know,
there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful
reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr
did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or
by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.

This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally
drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the
platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a
similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.

~~~
pjc50
> I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that
> by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot.

Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to
be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main
organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.

~~~
tinbucket
What basis do you have for concluding it was an anti-trans false-flag
operation in this poster's case? Nothing in their post would lead me to
naturally reach that conclusion. Downplaying or instantly dismissing this kind
of anecdata as the result of a "false flag" is naive at best and dangerous at
worst.

Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a _lot_ of stuff on Tumblr that
leads me to think there's a very active, very angry, very threatening trans
lobby on the platform. I've seen repeated threats of violence and worse from
trans-identified individuals directed at feminists who want maintain female-
only safe-spaces. These posts are rarely taken down and the community will
often rally against the "TERFs" being threatened ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical
Feminists").

I know one woman who'd posted about keeping changing rooms for females
separated on a sex basis. Her employer and college were contacted repeatedly
by a pair of people who said she was spreading hate-speech online. Their goal
seems to have been to have her fired. These same people had been making
threats of violence against her, culminating in a rape threat. At this point
the police became involved and I'm not sure how it's since been resolved.

Obviously this is a tiny minority of people but it's a tiny minority that
often aren't actively censured or disowned by the larger community, and whose
extreme views are reinforced by a sympathetic echo-chamber of like-minded
people. Some may be "false-flags", but I don't think they're in the majority
by any means.

------
bopbop
This walled garden isn't working! Quick, let's get back to the last one!

Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been
solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial
entity isn't pushing it.

This is quite interesting though:

"Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal
lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free."
</b>

So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog
weirdness people like to read?

~~~
codingdave
> It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity
> isn't pushing it.

The existence of Wordpress would argue otherwise.

~~~
bopbop
Isn't wordpress more the technology? Or do you mean otherwise?

Who would you see as pushing it? Or do you mean it's monetizable?

It's definitely an excellent piece of software.

~~~
slezyr
[https://wordpress.com/pricing/](https://wordpress.com/pricing/)

wordpress.com (not .org) is a platform for blogs.

~~~
bopbop
That's what I was missing. Cheers.

------
lrg
Some of the longer posts about social justice that I would read on Tumblr when
I was regularly using the app offered some insight into the minds and feelings
of marginalized groups that were able to voice their opinions vehemently due
to the anonymity that Tumblr provided. It was a safe space and an echo
chamber, in that widely unaccepted opinions were harshly criticized as bigotry
and removed from the discourse. I think it gave a lot of people the
opportunity to vent to a group of generally caring, considerate, sometimes
single-minded, and occasionally misguided teenagers and young adults when
these people felt that they had no other outlet. It might not have produced
the most inspired arguments or conversations, but at the very least Tumblr
provided a cohesive community.

------
intertextuality
Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure,
it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes
things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following
content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr
is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso.

This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics
and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are
upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and
discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested.

You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text
content instead of link submissions, but _especially_ in /r/AskHistorians and
similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its
possible to have longer discussion there.

Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still
a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates.
Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable.
However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content
aggregates where anyone can post.

So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the
popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on
an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo
chamber easily too.

For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn,
even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad,
although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they
finally kill off the old design.

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg)

[1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with
Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.

~~~
Grue3
It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in
your screenshot.

~~~
blueflow
Wrong, that change only happened in the dashboard, not on the actual blogs.

~~~
Grue3
It depends on the theme of a blog. The themes are customizable, so blogs which
set their theme were not changed when the new default theme (without
indentation) was rolled out.

------
teddyh
> _But a great many serious things cannot be articulated in 140 or 280
> characters, and so_ [on Twitter] _you get the most easily reducible — and
> therefore least accurate — version of the feeling or idea. Either that, or
> you get lengthy Twitter threads, which are ponderous and boring._

This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of the media requiring
“concision”¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since
non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be
expressed concisely.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_\(media_studies\))

------
bena
Yes, let's go to tumblr because text-wrapping is awesome.

Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get
indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any
text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page.

Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than
it is worth.

~~~
Quanttek
Didn't they change that quite a while back?

~~~
bena
Possibly it's been changed since then. I've some friends on tumblr but after a
while I've just given up on going to any tumblr link because reading it became
annoying.

------
therealmarv
Have you seen the last mobile app? You are forced to see 3-4 ads without
seeing the post in question. Actually tumblr is dying because of this.

------
douglaswlance
Tumblr is guaranteed one-upmanship. The reblogging feature causes escalation.

We need to look at the brain, and figure out how neurons work together in
networks to produce truth. Then use that model for our social networks.

~~~
majewsky
What makes you think that neurons produce truth? Neurons mostly produce
actionable thoughts.

~~~
hydrox24
> Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.

I suppose you think this is true.

~~~
majewsky
Well, no. I thought about editing this after the fact, but couldn't come up
with a succinct summary of what neurons do on a high level. So I let this
first impulse stand.

~~~
pjc50
I think you missed a joke, but I'm not sure.

------
randomsearch
Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane
interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what
it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises:

1\. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon,
Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever)

2\. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with
colleagues or interest communities.

3\. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and
everyone's opinion is given the same weight.

(1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a
flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to
prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these
kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN.

It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know
nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad
idea.

The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is
that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells
advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base.

I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising
we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that
is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible
problems that causes.

tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at
all.

~~~
phyzome
It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?

~~~
wastedhours
(1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.

------
woolvalley
Any public social platform that wants to be the new thing needs to add a
discoverability component for new users. I signed up for mastodon.social a
while back, and had no idea who to follow. So I stopped using it.

I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you
join to solve this problem.

~~~
pferde
You can usually search for hashtags that interest you, and take it from there,
engaging people talking about them.

------
whywhywhywhy
Really miss the early image-blog days of Tumblr, the reblog functionality
causing work to be attributed and sort of collective consciousness made it a
fascinating internet art site to browse and contribute to.

Pretty much all been replaced by Instagram now which although has most of the
same functionality the fact it's a locked in system with only the most basic
form of linking and attribution makes it a completely different place for
artists. People stealing work and claiming it's their own is a lot more common
on IG, on Tumblr the ease of re-blogging and focus on curating allows users to
flourish as either curators or creators without any bad blood between the two.

(Purely talking about the art side of Tumblr here, I wasn't involved in the
other areas)

------
jrs95
> Maybe you’re familiar with the many reasons why people hate Twitter. It’s a
> time sink, it enables the spread of fake news and bigotry,

Yup. Tumblr totally doesn’t do any of that. I guess we are supposed to pretend
it doesn’t because it’s a platform for the right kind of lies and hate?

------
androidgirl
I don't think that there is a solution as easy as moving to $SOCIAL_NETWORK or
$ACTIVITY_PUB_SITE.

I feel currently that the issue with social media is it's hyper stimulating.
Speaking from a recovering social media addict point of view, the modern web
latches onto human tendencies too well. We can be outraged, surrounded by
people like us, 24/7\. That's immensely fulfilling to most people, including
me.

I don't use social media anymore because it's awful for me. And I don't think
the echo chamber issue can be solved, at all. It's not a technology issue,
it's an issue with how humans respond to these networks and the Internet in
general.

~~~
Spivak
I think this view ignores differences in systems that do actively shape the
way we communicate and how communities grow. I don't think that social media
fits your description, just that sites like Twitter do.

Examples of less-toxic social media:

\- Messaging: SMS, Email, GroupMe, Messenger, Skype, Snapchat

\- Micro Communities: Discord

\- Small purpose-driven communities, small subreddits, Discord

\- Collaborative: DeviantArt, GitHub

\- Long form discussion: Blog circles, Blogger, Tumblr sometimes

\- Non-discussion: Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, StumbleUpon

~~~
androidgirl
Admittedly this is a more relaxed definition of social media than I have
accepted, but I see your point!

I still use Discord and Github, and the social interaction there doesn't cause
the same feeling that Facebook or Twitter do.

However, I might argue a select few of these sites or technologies can still
be polarizing or unhealthy, particularly Instagram and Pinterest.

------
wyoh
I use to like Tumblr but a significant part of the content creators I was
following (photographers) moved to either Instagram or Patron. It's not the
same as it used to be and the platform is quickly losing ground.

------
newswriter99
-self-harm glorification

-bad porn

-signal boosting for political rants

-faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors

-cyber bullying

Let's not?

~~~
phyzome
Those are all content issues, not format/platform issues. Don't like those?
Don't make your social circle out of the people who do them.

~~~
philwelch
The medium is the message. Twitter is designed like a platform for harassment,
so a lot of the content on Twitter is harassing. Tumblr is designed like a
platform for radicalization, so a lot of the content on Tumblr is radicalized.

It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the
people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same
echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of
crap in the first place.

~~~
phyzome
But Twitter makes it so that's all up in your face. I haven't used Tumblr
hardly at all, but it seems like it's _optional_ to participate in that, since
things are a little more partitioned.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I
haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here
have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?

~~~
b5
I used Tumblr for years. From probably 2008 until 2017.

It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr.
The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you
fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.

This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy,
and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the
air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also
tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)

I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish
girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but
#goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing
subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into
the foundation of it.

I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by
"gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They
flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things
like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and
my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said,
reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.

In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know,
there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful
reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr
did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or
by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.

This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally
drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the
platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a
similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.

~~~
phyzome
Ouch, sorry to hear about that.

Do you think it actually promotes radicalization, though, or is that just the
culture that developed there? E.g. Mastodon's interaction design is very
similar to Twitter's, but the people are waaaay nicer, because that's just the
prevailing culture. Compare to other parts of the Fediverse, such as GNU
Social, which is much more Twitter-like in tone.

Either way, I think it's a good lesson in how public-by-default social media
is kind of a terrible idea in retrospect. You wanted to share a non-sensitive
post, but maybe just to people who are in any way socially accountable to you,
not the entire world.

~~~
philwelch
Even if a platform tends to encourage meanness, stupidity, and radicalization,
the specific direction that takes can depend more on founder effects. I don't
know of any interaction design that made Tumblr in particular so radically
left-wing.

It's also easier for a nice community to become mean than for a mean community
to become nice, so maybe give Mastodon some time and exposure and see what
happens.

~~~
phyzome
Definitely. Mastodon is very much still in the honeymoon period.

------
AndrewKemendo
I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I
understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems
like it's tractable.

Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it
possible.

~~~
dangoor
My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most
user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page,
"install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that,
they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to
click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent).

I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com,
likely).

I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's
not self hosting.

I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info
etc... on one page and a CC and that's it.

A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account,
pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email
the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login.

So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default
Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2
account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had
you set everything up individually.

The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on
cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you
could.

~~~
dangoor
Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of
the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db,
copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it
differs from a VM is that I don't have root.

Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM.

Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can
easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self
hosting axis.

And lots of people _do_ pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't
pay even $1/month.

------
stevenicr
Tumblr was one of my favorite places on the web for a time. A real anti-fbook,
but then they were taken over by yahoo.

It didn't change a lot at first, but the wall street ad and censor machine
started to creep in and it became obvious what once was a haven for sharing
things you would never do on fbook, well it got a new moderation staff and
more changes.

I stayed with it even after the change to hide the porn by default and such.
Then one day one of my tumblrs got banned.

I understood, it very much looked like many of the rampant spammer's tumblr
sites, I had thought thay by using a custom modded theme and other things a
tumblr employee would see it was not a cut of mill spam blog but highly custom
and completely unique.

I was wrong, the moderator that made the site disappear did not see it. When I
emailed the next level staff asking why and suggesting that it was unique and
not spam, they replied it was flagged as spam and is gone.

I wrote back one time begging for access to download a copy of my tumblr, it
was all original content, all the text, all the photos. They did not care to
even reply.

I tried to write the CEO, I reached out for an explanation on twitter even.
Nothing.

I know, not a customer, the product, and your rights to speech are not rights
when publishing on a sharecropper lords platform, but I expected more of
tumblr. I was mistaken.

I later read about how some of these companies were employing a lot of people
from places outside the USA and did some research on the majority of religions
and morals of those areas and scratched my head wondering how the main people
of tumblr could even consider such a move given the wide range of widely
shared content likely being disturbing to so many in some of those places.

Then I realized, it was not just about the cheap labor, it was about have an
excuse for why so much was mopped up without a second thought. IT wasn't the
tumblr crew doing it right - this was the plan from yahoo and the future
advertiser's and wall street and all that.

I'm so mad I did not backup my tumblrs when I had the chance, so mad that I
gave them so much. Promoted it as a place to have fun without the stress of
fbook, linked in and such.

Never again.

At least with other portals you know there is a chance at loss ( I routinely
save my comments before submitting to any wordpress based site, assuming that
akismet will likely flag my comment and make it disappear into the ether box
not seen by blog admins.. and of course blog admins make them hidden as well.

Can't believe I'm about to say this, but I have more faith in G plus providing
customer service and fair rules than tumblr. Boy that did not taste right
coming out of my virtual mouth.

That's how pitiful tumblr is now, unless it goes back to being self owned /
private or whatever, it is dead to me, And there is not backup for them to get
of my past trust and love.

~~~
exikyut
You've probably tried these, but just in case...

\- Internet Archive

\- Googling the URL to see if anything's still in Google's cache

I wonder if you'd be up to sharing what the tumblr URL was, perhaps privately.

~~~
stevenicr
Thanks for the ideas there ex. not sure how to share privately, but I think
the url was: sexchaterotic dot tumblr - I had three of them, one is still
active, so it could be a different url. My open set of notes and emails only
go back so far.

Since the ban of the other one I've been too paranoid to post anything there
for the fear of it being destroyed with no way to do anything about it.

I did manage to export a tumblr site into a wordpress at one point, and now
control whether the content stays or gets removed and have backups. Wish I
could of exported that other one, it was pretty custom.

~~~
exikyut
Interesting.

I tried to find the blog you mentioned, and sadly it has indeed pretty much
fallen off the end of the internet. Neither the Web Archive nor Google's cache
has it, sadly.

But I did find proof it once existed:
[https://www.sexchatsexchat.com/peeps/sexystuff/tag/sexy-
quot...](https://www.sexchatsexchat.com/peeps/sexystuff/tag/sexy-quote/)

I also found an archived registration record from 2014 for
[http://cn.sitexy.com/whois/sexchaterotic.com](http://cn.sitexy.com/whois/sexchaterotic.com)
but I'm unsure if this was relevant.

I've sadly seen quite a few tumblrs be destroyed, in the form of users who I
suddenly realize have a "2" or "-new" after their name. The content they're
posting is sufficiently interesting to their followers that they get their
network back reasonably quickly (one person finds the new account, follows
them, then that spreads the posts back into the rest of the network), but they
lose the link between the notes/reblogs and their ID.

And that's the thing. From the standpoint of "normal" social networking,
having new people discover you, etc, you generally do want to keep your
identity so people can track that _you 're you_.

I guess for _real_ fringe interests (although I can't really say what you're
posting is that much of a fringe interest, at the end of the day, really...),
Tumblr doesn't seem the best place to go - which _is_ pretty hypocritical,
I'll give it that, yeah.

I can't find it now (agh) but I remember reading an interesting Yahoo report
that said something to the effect of shutting down Tumblr. All I can find now
about it is earnings reports, but this PDF was a bit more explicit about it
than that. Tumblr will, eventually, one day be gone; and the world is going to
be a very very strange place when that happens. :/

There's no point stressing out about that point now though; nobody knows how
it will pan out - maybe some crazy-insane (in a very good way) bunch of people
will band together to make their own new thing, or maybe everyone will
converge on some existing site. I doubt _everyone_ will disperse, although
that will sadly happen. IMO, any individual effort will be fruitless unless it
fits in with the group dynamics that play out at the time, and I see no point
in taking the chance that the frantic freakout efforts I make will hit that
dynamic, so I'm just watching.

This being said, I definitely classify the question of archiving as something
that is a very good idea to do right now, IMO. Sadly it seems so unnecessarily
nontrivial to do so; I'm not aware of any software to download tumblr accounts
that isn't a completely broken half-an-hours-effort-at-4AM job. This is sadly
probably why there are few/no backups of more rare accounts. :(

It's possible the Web Archive might have something, but the few parts of their
archives that _are_ public are effectively impossible to search (you basically
have to download GBs if not TBs of data, open it, go "nope", delete it all,
and download the next set).

Hm, this turned into a bit of a rambling rant.

I'm really glad you were able to export the content into wordpress (was it the
one I found above? lol). Is the WP installation hosted by you? That, along
with picking a smaller hosting provider, and verifying ahead of time that
they're fine with the content you want to post, should hopefully minimize
heartache. (This is actually a general protip: go with a smaller provider
who's one or two people, let them know what sorts of DMCA/takedown/angry
emails they might get at your behest and how you plan to deal with them, and
even crazy content (eg, obscure political views, flamewars on steroids, sex
chat-related sites, etc etc) will stand a chance at staying up for a little
while.)

Actually that makes me think of something.

The thing with hosting your own website is that, unless you operate, say, Sci-
Hub, which has the kinds of enemies that can pressure domain registrars into
deregistering you, you'll be fine, because, in the scenario where your hosting
provider boots you (or gets yanked in the middle of the night themselves -
this can sometimes happen with tiny outfits), you just switch providers,
apologize for the downtime :), and move on. (Obviously you have a local site
backup. Right?) DNS registration is a bit hazier thanks to reregistration bots
that constantly sniff for expiring domains and snatch them. Some of the
automated systems that do this will even pay $$$ to grab the domain early in
the termination pipeline (expiring domains go to auction before they are fully
un-registered) if they detect the site was popular.

It may be worth asking around Web hosting communities for a good registrar
that doesn't boot fringe interest groups (there are fewer smaller registrars,
so the hosting thing I mentioned about going with a smaller outfit can't apply
here). I mean to do this but haven't yet.

So... an interesting ideal could be, you could register your blog with tumblr
_on a custom domain_, do whatever customization you wanted, post whatever you
wanted, and then, when tumblr yanks your site,

a) you still have the domain, so you just pivot that over to your own
hosting...

b) ...which has all your content on it, either because you were posting it to
both, or because you imported your continuous backup of the tumblr account :D

TL;DR, tumblr isn't for "real" fringe stuff, banhammers are both silly and
horrible but unavoidable, using your own hosting will zero your chances of
getting disappeared.

------
volkisch
Only if tumblr promises to close down account/blogs promoting
pedophilia/zoofilia/similar degenerate stuff. The moderation after the Yahoo
buyout got quite stale, they don't even block nazi, or anti-zionist stuff
which is a red flag in liberal media.

~~~
lagadu
And who decides what is "degenerate stuff"? You?

No, thank you.

