(no subject)

[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?

Comments

[flaksesomlys]

Seems like it did have an effect on some users, so it really is just our circles that haven't moved. Not that that affects your point, which I agree with. Network effects: they're strong!

[brin_bellway]

I think there's more to it than a binary of "nothing happens" and "exodus". While I have not stopped using Tumblr altogether, the change pervades the way I use the site. My use is far more tentative, far more at-arm's-length.

I don't post OPs there anymore, though as a gesture towards those who still primarily use Tumblr I do post links to each Dreamwidth post I make. I mirror everything on my Tumblr to a Wordpress site. I haven't left Tumblr, but it's not *home* anymore, it's just a way to find interesting posts and to let people know about stuff. Nothing is primarily hosted there; everything has off-site URLs even if I have to manually paste a chunk of reblog into a Wordpress post drafter to get them†. The eventual deletion of my Tumblr is no longer a possibility to have a few emergency measures in place for, but an inevitability to be fully factored in.

I'm still tying up a *few* loose ends--for example, neither the initial Wordpress import nor the local tumblr-utils copy says who sent a posted ask, so I have to find those and edit them in--but within a few months I should reach a state where, should Tumblr fully implode, I can smoothly switch gears and lose nothing. In this post-purge world, I can settle for nothing less.

---

†Wordpress removed the ability to do incremental Tumblr imports because they were overwhelmed by the demand, and anyway one of my previous incremental imports botched and left me with a couple thousand duplicate posts to clean up, so I don't think I'd want to use it again even if it were still there.