Tumblr to Move to Wordpress

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

Everyone’s heard of Tumblr. Most know it for its 2010s fandoms, and sometimes extreme politics. Others know Tumblr for “that place that banned porn, which caused a huge influx of those same fandom loving people to suddenly invade Twitter.” And then Twitter got bought out by a megalomaniac, and then a trans woman made a joke about exploding hammers to the CEO of Tumblr (This isn’t to say that death threats should be taken lightly, or are never serious, but after reading this I find it hard to even see this as as death threat. Wishing someone were dead, albeit bad, and not something I would personally do, doesn’t a death threat make.), and then trans people started getting banned on Tumblr, ad infinitum.

Suddenly, we’re at a crossroads, where that same CEO says, “Ay, we’re movin’ it to Wordpress.com”, because they’ve tried so many things to revitalize the platform. Except for … just simply reversing the changes made all those years ago that caused people to leave. It wasn’t just “banning porn”, though. They were really attempting to target CSAM, but in the cluster of gunfire, they took out completely innocent blogs, or people who were expressing their adult rights to, well, enjoy some naked stuff of a totally legal nature.

As of writing this, there is still porn on Tumblr.

It’s not to say that porn was the only reason Tumblr was ever good, or popular, though. But once they started targeting their own users, they never stopped. On the corporate internet, LGBTQ+ people are targeted regularly. On Twitter, on Threads, on Fartbook, on Tumblr, and so on. It can be hard to find a place to really call a digital home. Which is why a lot of people have fled to the ActivityPub federated Tumblr clone, Wafrn. And, while it still may be in its infancy, or working through development, it is a far better bet for those of the LGBTQ+ persuasion who are tired of being harassed, targeted, and banned literally everywhere a corporation touches.

People deserve to be able to express themselves freely, online, without being made out to be pariahs for their mere existence. Obviously, when I say “express themselves freely” I don’t mean that, people should be able to say slurs and abhorrent things without question or consequences. It you feel the need for a social network where you are allowed to do those things, you don’t need social media, you need therapy.

Is a move to Wordpress.com going to change anything for Tumblr? I don’t know, maybe? If they finally turn on fediverse integration, it could help. But, knowing the CEO is a thin-skinned whiner, I just don’t feel confident about that.