Web of the World: Serious Rumours of Tumblr Shutting Down

[silverberry]

I'll talk about Big Internet News here!

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/hosting-site-imgur-will-remove-explicit-and-anonymous-content-next-month/

Starting on 15 May 20233, Imgur will be removing anonymously uploaded images, as well as NSFW ones.
This is going to lead to a lot of link rot and lost of information and art.

If you used Imgur to host images without registering for an account, please make sure you have back-up copies of important images, and be prepared to fix links that redirect to Imgur!

Many manuals and how-to guides are also uploaded anonymously - if you know of one, or use one hosted on Imgur, now's the time to save a copy.

As NSFW works will also be affected (even those with non-criminal content), if you've been using Imgur to upload saucy stuff like comic translations, redraws, fanarts, or original works because most sites won't allow them, please download them and find a different image hosting site ASAP. Unfortunately, I don't know of any free, trustworthy sites that allow NSFW content - please feel free to share alternatives you know of!

[galled]

Whoa-boy!

[Gingerale]

oh no!

Thanks for letting us know, Silverberry!

[silverberry]

I hope this reaches someone who needs it! Link rot is so sad and frustrating to deal with

[silverberry]

https://www.blog.google/products/regist ... rads-tech/

Google now allows people to register .zip and .mov as site domains. That is, in addition to website.com, website.org, people can now create website.zip and website.mov

The other domains are pretty cool, but these two in particular are going to be unsafe.

Since these domains share endings with filenames, please practice extreme caution when receiving or sending messages with those file extensions written in plain text. The browser or email may automatically turn them into clickable links, and any malicious actors can register those domains to lead to phishing sites or malware. And extend this caution when searching for .zip and .mov files on your own PC as well - Windows search functions have a tendency to search the internet as well, and not just the PC.

[galled]

Some people not putting on their thinking caps...

[silverberry]

While Automattic, the owner of Tumblr and Wordpress, hasn't made any public statements yet, a screenshot of a concerning message has been leaked and spread around a reputable Wordpress-related public Discord server. According to the message, the people working on Tumblr are to be reassigned to different projects, while Tumblr itself will be left with a skeleton crew to keep the site running.

[+] SPOILER

People who have experienced the shut down of a big site note that shifting to running the bare minimum is one of the first steps of it closing down. Often, the skeleton crew will not be able to keep up with the maintenance and moderation the userbase requires. Bots and malicious users eventually overrun the site, and the users will move on to a more usable platform.

Instructions on how to back-up one's own Tumblr blogs are being spread around.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yBW ... vQgjI/edit

Tumblr is a micro-blogging website and, while not as popular as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now x), contributes greatly to internet culture and fandom culture. There are several accounts on FB, Instagram, and Twitter dedicated to just reposting screenshots of Tumblr posts and interactions. Writers, artists, fans, and hobbyists have formed tight communities on the site to network, form friendships, and continue generating interest and content for media that have ended ages ago. Tumblr is also one of the first places discontented Reddit and Twitter users migrated to when they could no longer abide by the changes in the other sites' features and policies.

Pillowfort, another micro-blogging site created in response to Tumblr's NSFW content ban years ago, and one of the most recommended Tumblr alternatives, has also recently come out with financial difficulties.

https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/3921481

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I'm devastated. Tumblr's been my internet home base for years. My account holds conversations from fandom friends who was last seen more than 5 years ago, echoes of interactions from long-deactivated accounts. Exporting a decade's worth of stuff from my blog is going to be a nightmare, but the posts from dead/now unused blogs will likely just disappear if the site goes down.

I have no idea where else to go. I have various accounts on other sites, but none of them fulfill the niche Tumblr does. Twitter/X is too limiting - I need the high character counts, dammit. Dreamwidth seems to be text-focused. Wordpress isn't really used for highly casual and informal posts and memes, as far as I'm aware. Reddit is a forum, not a blogging platform. And Facebook now requires people to input their legal names (sometimes even asking for ID proofs) and tends to be really bad at showing posts in chronological order.

Guess I'll just stuff my insides full of dirt and bury myself underground in the hopes that the mycorrhyzal network that wraps around the earth accepts me into its folds.

[Ashton]

so much going on. is tumblr still up? i havent used it in so long

[silverberry]

so much going on. is tumblr still up? i havent used it in so long

It's still up! Automattic tried several monetization schemes - ad-free subscriptions, cosmetic badges, giving users the ability to turn posts into mini-adverts, selling actual physical merch - and they also made pages and videos appear more Twitter- and Tiktok-like.

Whether or not Tumblr goes down or plateaus depends on if the moderation team stays as is. There seems to be an ongoing war between staff and bot armies - every now and then I get a string of blank follows, spam bot messages, and find weird things flooding the tags, but they stop for a while after a week or a month before starting up again. If moderation suffers, the spambots are gonna be insufferable @_@

[Ashton]

rip. i only posted band image spam on tumblr xD