youarenotthewalrus

And sure enough, it's been over a month since Tumblr became NSFNSFW and almost a month since I last posted here. The exodus has, at least in my circles, largely failed to occur. On the one hand, I am glad. Tumblr is easy, it is convenient, it is familiar, and no other website I use is really a good substitute for it. On the other hand? It is disappointing. A major social media site makes a decision millions of its users vehemently disapprove of, there is a great uproar, and then... seemingly nothing happens. Everyone stays on it, the policy remains in place. Fucking networking effects. I tire of having so many Internet spaces tied to giant faceless corporations who can fuck with us at their whim. How many thousands of artists and sex workers got thrown under the bus because some dipshit at Verizon thought the site would be more appealing to advertisers if they got rid of the porn?

Perhaps we should have more federated social media in the mode of Mastodon, so that if the main Tumblr instance banned porn everyone could just move to other Tumblr instances that still had porn while still being able to follow the same people and use the same platform. God only knows how we get to that point, though. Trust-busting?

See, the problem with Dreamwidth as a Tumblr replacement is that the dynamics of a LiveJournaloid platform are very different from those of a Tumbloid platform. I can't just sit back and let the feed wash over me, occasionally plucking out a particularly compelling or amusing bit of text or media and passing it on, I've got to, like, actually compose original thoughts and set them forth. People have mentioned how it feels like going back in time, somewhat, to a more Web 1.0/1.5 era, and this is I think a big part of it for me personally: rather than a cyberpunk swimming the infostream, data being blasted directly into my eyes and ears, I've actually got to read things and then write things in response. It's not enough to just hit a like button or add a couple of tags to a reblog, I've got to write whole sentences. Paragraphs, even.

This shouldn't feel alien. I've posted in forums before, old-fashioned ones that don't let you like posts or make threadmarks even. But fora are ubiquitous. They're a little retro, but they've never really gone out of style. But journal sites have. So while I can go to a forum and it won't (usually) feel like I'm stepping back in time to 2005, here, it does.

Not that that's a bad thing, per se. Sometimes retro is nice! But it's certainly different.