Tumblr .. .

[Kolo]

Automattic's CEO actually answered a bunch of Tumblr-related asks on his blog recently in light of this stuff. I thought some of the answers were interesting, especially the breakdown of Tumblr's subscriptions:
"Out of the 11.5M monthly active users of Tumblr, only about 27k have subscribed, or about 0.2%. If that were 10 or 20% we could run the site forever."

I've seen some people say "Tumblr should go open source!" which is frankly... very silly. Open source isn't a magical fix-all button and it won't help the core of this issue, which is that Tumblr is expensive to run and operate, like any supermassive website :(

I don't think moving to a skeleton crew is the end of the world but it can very much be a writing on the wall type of situation, especially because as shevek said I imagine less and less people are willing to stake millions on turning around Tumblr after seeing so many people fail to right the ship. I know not all the changes were liked but to see the lowkey subscription services flop after a lot of people always rally around the idea of them bodes really poorly for anyone looking to pick it up.

A former employee said this in another post:
"27k people subscribed to ad-free means around a million per year. This is after over a year of growth. That's less than one month of purely infrastructure costs, not even having staff wages into account. The badges and rest of the sales are doing significantly less than that."

That's a lot of money for any company to be hemorrhaging every month. Who wants to take on a debt like this for a ship that's proven unprofitable? :(

I don't have much of a horse in this race as I stopped using Tumblr years ago. Like in 2015 or 2016 I think? But it still sucks.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I agree with @creaturefeature - back up your blogs! I HIGHLY recommend this method. Unlike the official method of exporting your blog, this method doesn't take long once it's all set up (tumblr's official method is VERYYYY slow) and also saves image descriptions!

If you're not already versed in python, it takes a while to set up for the first time, but thankfully this doc is VERY thorough in explaining what exactly to do, so even a python-illiterate doofus like myself could manage it.

THANK YOU!! I previously used another method which only saved media so you couldn't view posts as they were, but this does exactly that. Some setup was needed but it's perfect!

[BUTCHBONEZ]

Tumblr definitely has faults but I prefer it ++ cohost over any other mainstream newer platforms.

[Wildcat]

Watching Tumblr die kind of hurts. I've been on it since 2015. I have a complicated relationship with the website. I'm not sure what will be my main social media after it shuts down, but it will likely be Cohost + MelonLand.

[soapfriendo]

tumblr has pretty much become my main hub for just messing around and chatting with folks, and i've met quite a few ppl i'm close to now on the site. my main two gripes are that.......

1. it's only usable if u have a buncha browser extensions installed, and i don't mean that lightly. the site has a buncha annoying ads and pointless features so you have to make sure u have an adblocker handy, and once u have that a "disable your adblocker" popup will appear that uses the most annoying, rage fueling "how are ya doing, fellow kids" corpo speak i've ever seen so u will have to block that element, i also used the adblocker to block a buncha other elements i deem pointless. u will also have to install that one userstyle that returns the layout of the site to normal since at some point last year they changed it to a claustrophobic hellscape that resembles twitter's layout, and then u will have to install xkit rewritten to get rid of any other stupid features the site has

2. the staff, and oh man do i have some things to say about the staff. they've kinda gained a reputation for not doing anything about the bigots and the people who actually cause harm to others, and instead going for random trans women and anything related to them, which the people who were there during the debacle from a month or two ago already know about. it seems like the staff are more concerned about content blocking anything they dislike and terminating the accounts of anyone they dislike, which kinda applies to me since my account got terminated for a stupid reason last year

my general opinion on the site is that i've managed to form a pretty good circle of folks that i like, but the management of the site is godawful