Yep, ages ago, and we’ve all been wondering what happened to it. With Threads promising to federate soon, it’s reminded us that we’re not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta, and that we were hopeful not long ago of many not-entirely-evil-companies joining the fediverse. Medium and Mozilla have set some things up, as has flipboard, and tumblr were supposed to be a big addition … that just hasn’t eventuated.
I used to be interested in Tumblr joining the Fediverse, as someone who strongly prefers Tumblr’s long-form microblogging to Twitter’s format. Unfortunately, Tumblr has shown itself to be just like any money-hungry corporation at a smaller scale.
Tumblr is trying to push Tiktok-style short video Tumblr Live, which is filled with trackers, and they have plans to change their UX to be more like Twitter because Twitter is more profitable. Tumblr has the advantage of having a very low percentage of technical users, who accept these changes and don’t find workarounds because they don’t know what’s going on.
With the direction Tumblr is going in, I’d defederate it if it ever starts federating. I want a Fediverse software that mirrors Tumblr’s long-form microblogging, not Tumblr itself and definitely not its horrible community.
Well mastodon is the only platform dedicated to the character limit. Most alternatives have much longer limits (like thousands). Eg calckey and akkoma and mastodon forks.
I think that if a platform wants to support long-form content, it needs to make design choices around long-form. It can’t be a short-form content UX with an arbitrary limit removed so that long posts can be created, if they’re going to be displayed and interacted with in the same way as 280 character tweets.
Some design choices that made Tumblr better for long-form posts and discussion: Being able to tag a post without writing the tag inside the main post body, so posts can be categorized without messing up the content. Text formatting support. Media can be inserted into any part of the text instead of forcing them to appear at the bottom of the post. Q&A. Post archives. Custom blog theming. One account can have multiple blogs to organize content. Replies show the context of what they’re replying to when shared. Support for commenting on posts. They combined these effectively with short-form design like the centralized feed of posts and interaction buttons.
Another reason I prefer Tumblr over Twitter is because Tumblr’s format makes discussion most visible, while Twitter makes soapboxing most visible. Tumblr’s design has flaws, but it’s the best example of platform design that balances long-form, short-form and discussion in my opinion.
It supports both, which is why I like Tumblr’s format the most. You can make short status updates like Twitter or long, informative articles on the same blog and it doesn’t look out of place.
Thanks for the reply.
we’re not anti-corporation as much as we are anti-Meta
Agreed. I’d like to see Tumblr join the fediverse, though recently it seems to be focusing on Tumblr Live rather than such a big change as federating. Interesting with Medium as well.
Maybe this says something about my awareness of the world: I didn’t know Threads wasn’t the first.
I wonder if that might also be partially because Tumblr has no control over other instances being ok with (appropriately marked) nsfw content. And of course, since about 2019, Tumblr has been very anti-nsfw…
But also yeah, losing $30 million annually isn’t great. Maybe Tumblr should go all-in on federation though? Like, to the point of encouraging users to leave/offload from Tumblr servers and do federation? Wouldn’t be easy, but if they want a longer then solution…
