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.
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.
This is a really nasty way of doing this, but if you do have a Mastodon account, you can use feed2toot[0].
An "upgraded" version of it would be to parse another RSS/Atom feed for your blog. Make an excerpt of the content that's 496 - <link_length> and then construct the toot to be "<excerpt>... <link>".
Of course, native integration would be far better, but it would go way out of the scope of static site generators.
I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.
If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus](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...
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.
I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.
"The fediverse" seems to be the name people are using to refer to the maxclique of federated Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible (Pleroma, etc.) instances. Mastodon uses ActivityPub as its server-to-server protocol, although it adds some features or at least conventions that I think are not in core ActivityPub (content warnings, emoji, usernames of the form @geofft@xoxo.zone instead of https://xoxo.zone/@geofft, etc.). But I think that it's possible for any Mastodon user to subscribe to something that's just publishing blog posts via ActivityPub and not actually acting like a Mastodon server, and posts will show up in their timeline.
(Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
I am writing an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will let you federate with Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. If you're interested, I'll be posting updates at @jdormit@mastodon.technology.
I agree that individual blogs that emit an RSS feed to follow are a great thing. However, most bloggers don’t really have the skills to host their own blog on a dedicated server. So, even if they did avoid Tumblr, they would be relying on another such hosting service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com.
You can use a static site generator and drag-and-drop the build directory into Netlify (or deploy with Git). Hosting is free, including using a custom domain and SSL.
It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle.
Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
>It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle.
That's already above the 'interested enough to do it' threshold of 99% of the population
Plenty of people on social media/blogosphere who have no idea how to do even that. Just because "it isn't that hard" doesn't mean the barrier to entry isn't incredibly high.
Thats how I always used to host my blog. Free ad-free php, cPanel, Fantastico. But it was always a nightmare, hacker exploits a bug in WordPress, upgrade WP, then the free host changes policy & now one or other feature is broken.
Its easy to install, but its not easy to keep up & maintain the VPS WP installation for an average user like me.
Last year I came across GitLab pages & jekyll; & now its easy to maintain. Yes, not easy to start.
I meant a webhost or VPS isn't free. And yes, that was directed more towards the general populace using services which are currently free, such as Tumblr and other blog platforms.
CPanel can do nightly backups. If something goes wrong, roll back a day or 3 and try again.
I've been using this method since WP was first added to Fantastico, way back in the day. A form of lazy versioning I guess.
We're not talking about companies who need high availability. Your personal blog can handle a day down while you restore from backup (it's just a few clicks from the CPanel, the wait for the email saying it's ready).
Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.
Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
I operate on the principle that the Web was invented for publishing information to the world, so I don't publish anything (blog posts, comments, etc.) that I don't want available to the world. Hence I'm fine for bots to scrape it, copy it, aggregate it, whatever (as long as it's not plagiarised, but that's a different discussion ;) ).
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
> Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
That's always the problem. Minds that aren't aware of this become more predictable.
Until they are aware of this.
I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do.
If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.
I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform.
This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me.
How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).
You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).
You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
What I'm envisioning is a desktop or phone app where you author posts and comments and read other people's posts and comments. The information is stored locally, but published out via a dumb server, with end-to-end encryption. Essentially, the server becomes an async dumb pipe (can just use WebDAV for this) or optionally a synchronous dumb pipe (if you add in a streaming protocol for notifications, such as websockets).
The software could also push up a static website made of any public posts, I suppose. :-)
I feel quite strongly that most users would benefit from their own device being the system of record for their posts, with the server functioning as coordination point and secondarily as an emergency backup.
(I'll be posting in more detail about this if you follow my blog's feed.)
Ah, when you said "private" I thought you meant something that wouldn't be shared with anyone (e.g. a personal diary).
You're right that some other solution would be better for "private but shared" content (although it would likely be tricky w.r.t. both security and psychological/social aspects like getting people to follow good practices to prevent leaks).
Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
self hosted wordpress does all this out of the box I think. I have one site where I have public posts and pages and some pages are "password protected" - so they are viewable by a select few associates, and a few pages are either saved as draft or pulished privately in the admin backedn / dashboard - which makes it easy to retrieve and edit and such.
There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such.
only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option.
there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing.
Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available.
You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
I'm on board with that, but we haven't solved the problem of notifying the world of our content. Places like reddit discourage posting your own material. HN is fine for niche but places like medium cross-promote between authors so things are more likely to be discovered.
- 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.)
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."
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.
I think Reddit and sites alike cause a problem with activism.
I see topics for great initiatives on sites like Reddit however everything about its engagement is just wrong.
Comments are poor - people know how to game it, posts have a limited life span affecting comment quality, when a post disappears from the front page engagement drops to what seems 0%. Re-posts are looked at negatively, reddit community gets bored of seeing the same topic even if there is an interesting change or update.
There is something fundamentally wrong about it. Forums allow for longer discussion and are a good way of promoting long term activism when needed, there are threads forums lasting years, are a joy to read and follow.
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.
Very much this. Tumblr has features which seem designed to actively encourage harassment. The quote-tweet feature which that post about Mastodon the other day complained about? As this points out, Tumblr's had its own version of that since the very start, and unlike on Twitter deleting your post does nothing about the quoted copy. It also allows anonymous asks by default, which are widely abused to harass and threaten. It also has an utterly toxic culture built around all this which the press seem to downplay for political reasons, just like they downplayed the Russian influence op which reached pretty much all of Tumblr whilst writing endless articles about Facebook and Twitter.
Indeed. I wondered whether the author was talking about a different Tumblr to the one I was familiar with. Even from the early days it seems to have been a community for militant transsexuals, furries, SJWs, and people with niche sexual fetishes.
> 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.
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.
I was on tumblr until around 2016 and i can confirm the observations - harassment for totally misrepresented things, just to demonstrate virtue. From the few persons i met IRL it doesn't seem like an false flag.
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?
> So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?
Sort of, if you've got the rare personality that can turn a blog into a form of entertainment. Along with the unrelenting dedication to do it in a rote fashion week after week for years. Once the audience latches on, you're not allowed to take a long hiatus or change what you do. Dooce (dooce.com) comes to mind, her blog had very primitive beginnings prior to growing into a serious monetized traffic destination for a time. I like to call them Howard Stern personalities, people that are gifted entertainers. You may not like their brand of content or personality (I don't care for people like Stern and Glenn Beck for example), but they've got the magic sauce for some audience base.
I spent a lot of time in the early blogosphere, circa 1998-2004 or so. Something that was amazing to observe, was how many very talented personalities were unable to break through to that ultimate next level of popularity. They seemingly had everything it required (whether wit, charm, skilled story telling, et al.) and still couldn't get there. The world has a lot of brilliant people that never break through for any number of countless reasons.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Collectively neurons moderate their individual binary responses and together respond with more nuance to outside stimuli. Maybe that's the parallel she/he is trying to present?
> neurons work together in networks to produce truth
Category error, surely? Whether or not something is true, it's truthiness or falsiness must exist outside of the brain percieving it, yes? In which case it's a process of recognition or labelling, not creation.
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.
There's also (4) - a discussion medium with an increasing number of partisan bad actors both at state and corporate level, whose interest is to gum up communication, switch the overton window or foster division by trolling.
In my opinion, an increasing problem with twitter and other discussion media is astroturfing and bot re-signalling, so I feel this needs an additional category different from (3), in that (3) is people who are incompetent. (4) would be people who are agenda-driven and/or malicious.
Or, to put it differently, (3) is about problems caused by people who can hide their incompetence. (4) would be about problems caused by people who can hide their identity.
I'm extremely pessimistic about this section of users, because in my opinion, an identity-based internet would just as radically screw up the internet in a different direction. I do feel, however, that that's the way governments are heading if things carry on the way they are.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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've been waiting for the GDPR to destroy them for this, it's easily the biggest abuses I can think of. Your dogs case might not be that big of a deal but many people have put up some very explicit material of themselves and I doubt they are aware that anything reblogged is still on the site.
When browsing the more explicit info it looks like 90% of the content comes from now deleted accounts, so they're in a position where compliance would destroy a major chunk of their traffic.
Not a huge loss for the world though, the UI is the worst I've come across. It takes some spectacularly bad design to make a blogging platform that doesn't work well with tabs.
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.
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.
I think the "notes" and the "reblog" function contribute to the problem. It drives engagement ^w^w makes trolling way too easy and creates a need for attention that leads to attention whoring/virtue signalling/radicalisation. I think they are pretty much platform problems.
There was a great article I've never been able to find again about how the UI of Twitter naturally guides users into de facto bullying, and most of the advice given by experienced Twitter users (e.g. check existing replies to a tweet before adding your own) is working around UI choices made by the system itself.
I wonder how many of those bully-inducing UI features are also present in software like Mastodon or Diaspora, and are therefore disasters-in-waiting, to be triggered once critical mass of users is reached.
You can add one more thing: inane bullshit. In my field of academia, I know several people who maintain a Wordpress or similar blog for serious matters, but a parallel Tumblr blog for silly memes etc. So, there seems to be a feeling among some that Tumblr is not a credible venue.
I don't trust Yahoo to moderate things well either. They seem to be a little too reactionary. For example they first cracked down on NSFW blogs for no particular reason and then mostly rolled back changes after protests. https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-q... How do you think they're going to handle organized campaigns to remove users, or not to remove users? My guess is it will be a mess.
I can't actually recall any form of organized moderation that has been successful for WIDE audiences.
It seems to work 'OK' if there's a smaller community with a group of core dedicated users (which the moderation staff has a large overlap with); however even then it works only if there is a clear and unambiguous mission statement and laser focused guidelines of 'on topic' contributions.
I'm not familiar with Craigslist, and have only very limited observations of Reddit; but I think these sites are generally the closest to a sustainable model.
In my experience they let 'local' moderation do it's thing, sub-communities individually have their own flavor and groups; with active and positive ones seeing the most success. Moderate ones tend to languish until they trail off. The really bad ones get globally flagged and killed.
I think a logical next step might be 'supersets' where different user areas subscribe to a kind of moderation guild.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
