Tumblr Trying To Squeeze Into ActivityPub

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At the news that Tumblr will be “joining” ActivityPub after its migration to Wordpress completes, I have some thoughts. Maybe eight or nine years ago, I would’ve thought, “Oh cool! Now it’ll be easier to see some of my favorite creators and artists on the federated timeline!” And then things would have been pretty neat, simply adding cool stuff to an already growing platform. But, that’s not how I feel about it anymore.

Earlier, at the end of last year, Tumblr terminated my account without notice, without an e-mail, and without responding to my multiple e-mails, for months, over what I can only presume to be a cartoon gif of Super Mario Brothers character Luigi, holding a cartoon gun, shooting cartoon billionaires. Maybe they thought it was in bad taste. I thought it was in amazing and awesome taste, and you can’t change my mind. Never-the-less, it is extremely unprofessional to just delete someone’s account on your platform without at least specifying exactly why in an e-mail, and if there are any steps to eventually recover your account.

That was years of content, and even things I paid for, gone. Without a single word. The domain I owned through Wordpress, zapped out of existence!

But, these are only just personal grievances. There is … so much more.

In 2018, Tumblr wiped out NSFW content, which was said to be mostly about eliminating CSAM from their platform. Which, you know, makes sense. But, painting with such a broad brush had adverse side-effects, like pushing LGBTQ+ users even further to the margins, or off of the platform entirely.

“But Nova, all they have to do is stop posting porn!”

It wasn’t just about porn. It was about sex positivity, sharing yourself, and your journey, in all of its facets, uncensored. A grown adult should be allowed to express themselves, as they see fit, on a platform, where there are safeguards already in-place to designate someone’s account 18+.

And I’m sure most people who were on Twitter in 2018 and 2019, back in the supposed golden days, remember Tumblr fandoms absolutely invading their timelines with the kind of niche, meaningless discourse you would only ever see on Tumblr. This was met with mixed feelings.

Then, in 2019, Automattic, the team behind Wordpress.com, acquired Tumblr from Yahoo for 3 million dollars USD. Which, is kind of hilarious, considering that Yahoo purchased Tumblr in 2013 for 1 billion USD. But that’s beside the point. Automattic acquiring Tumblr was also a thing of mixed feelings, and ultimately, I don’t think people cared all that much, at the time, that Tumblr was now connected to Wordpress. I mean, most people were still correctly under the assumption that Tumblr was a heavily censored platform.

That’s not the end of the story, though. In 2024, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, began his tirade against unaffiliated Wordpress companies, and open source WP tech. Or, maybe you remember when Matt himself was fighting with a trans woman over moderation policy on Tumblr (because, people still use Tumblr, after-all), and then banned her for a mostly harmless post that read that she hopes the CEO “dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.” This, was, of course, in response to Tumblr/Automattic’s refusal to properly moderate transphobic content.

The latter is, in my opinion, the failure of big-tech-talking-head’s ability to “read the room,” or detect when something is a shitpost, and not serious in the slightest. And definitely not a threat of violence. But, that’s a problem with most CEOs and billionaires. They’re so disconnected from reality and other people, that everything goes over their heads. Like exploding hammers.

And now, since you have the full story, you know why Tumblr shouldn’t be part of ActivityPub. Unless Matt is forced to step-down, and unless Tumblr drastically changes their moderation policy, they should be treated exactly the same way Meta is being treated on the fediverse–By instance blocking them completely.