It’s widely accepted among those who have posted online that perhaps one of the worst singular events to happen to the internet was the Tumblr porn ban, carried out by it’s third owner Verizon (who had inherited the site from Yahoo, a part of a failed ad network strategy). Verizon had made many terrible decisions when purchasing Yahoo and AOL for their add networks, including purging many legacy but well-liked services that were essentially information archives (in particular under the Yahoo banner such as Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Groups), and selling off Flickr to new owners who gimped the site unless you paid up for Pro™. But perhaps the most short-sighted decision Verizon made was to handle Apple finding CSAM (or Cheese Pizza as it’s nicknamed) on Tumblr by banning porn completely.
This one decision would have ramifications and in a way, would be one of the biggest community killing choices made by any internet company (if not the largest). This would send Tumblr’s userbase scrambling to different websites, be it Twitter or even parts of 4chan. This would lead to community members flooding other social media sites and imposing their cultural norms and behaviors there, and altering the fabric of internet communities to a point of no return. What do I mean by this? Well, every single behavior from Tumblr (from “fixing” art by editing it to make it more “diverse”, to harassing artists drawing something the wrong way or something that some users don’t approve of is now everywhere on Twitter. It’s just even worse now because unlike Tumblr, Twitter has far stricter moderation. Tumblr was the kind of website where on top of reading about casual drug use openly or users openly committing crimes like shoplifting, there’d be some characters. No other website could turn out girls like Lindsay Souvannarath, who after being busted in a failed mall shooting plot was discovered to be a “Neo Nazi Columbine fangirl” among other things. Yes, that’s a mouthful to take in but when I say that Tumblr at one time allowed anything and everything, I mean that.
Verizon didn’t handle CSAM in the way that most sites would by cracking down on it and only that, and maybe other unsavory content, or by using the app being off the store as pressure to get people to move to freer mobile platforms, but by literally banning everything with an infamously half-assed filter. I’m sure some boomer in a suit only realized “oh shit we own a website for porn, shut it down” and that’s what happened. Tumblr would lose tons of value and would be bought at a steep discount by Automattic, the owners of WordPress (the project and .com, where this blog is hosted). WordPress has followed in the footsteps of Verizon by also refusing to unban porn, with the CEO sounding a lot like Joshua Connor Moon in an essay he wrote. While the post mainly targets mid egirls or >egirls who are dime a dozen online, it fails to address drawn art (which was a huge deal on Tumblr). Even allowing drawn art would be better for the internet than posting IRL images, especially in the wake of the PornHub revenge porn and CSAM scandals.
His refusal to do the one thing to fix Tumblr has paid off, and now Tumblr is downscaling with employees being moved elsewhere after continuing to burn through money. Everyone in the comment section pretty much has the same opinion, mocking the fact that Tumblr won’t do the one thing to get people back on.
There’s no popular prepackaged solution
Yet despite Tumblr going down the tubes, one interesting thing is that there has been no new Tumblr clone as of late that has gained traction, and especially not a decentralized one. There’s pillowfort.social, but that website has had issues with being insecure and paywalled so nobody cares about it. There’s cohost which is actually free and does a great job mimicking Tumblr, but it has very strict moderation/rules, and the community is the monoculture everyone stereotyped Tumblr as being. But most importantly, despite how anti-corporate the creators claim to be the creators won’t license their code under something like the AGPL. If the owners ever decide they want to leave the internet or carry out an unpopular ban wave, you’re back to square one. In fact, the cohost ToS as an example prohibits archival and promoting bunker sites if the admins ever backstab their users (which Twitter has been caught doing multiple times with BSky and Fedi users).
It’s also interesting how after DeviantArt has gone down the tubes after the Wix buyout with an infamous new UI designed to mimic ArtStation and also cracking down on the content people used to visit the site for; there’s also no new federated or open source art gallery solution yet. Meanwhile, Redditors (which are probably the worst community online bar none) are able to develop their own federated Reddit clone called Lemmy, and after the API fiasco this led many to run their own instances of it. Yet as of now, there’s no real fediverse Tumblr clone, just people posting on Mastodon wishing it was Tumblr.
While I was going to end this on a negative note, I did find out that there is in fact at least one person trying to write a federated Tumblr clone, and also was told that “SocialHome exists but it looks awful“. There’s also Misskey/Firefish implementing inline replies as well, but it’s not a Tumblr clone but rather a Twitter clone. Neither SocialHome or Swanye (the new project) are popular at all, and Swanye is in pre-alpha state or something like that.
I guess my point with this post is, if you just whine online all day long nothing will happen. If you make your own federated software stack, the idea won’t die. Just ask the Redditors. Whining about how your favorite website is offline when it’s clear it won’t come back won’t make it come back any faster.
@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com we need no t*mblr descendant, the original one was a mistake and it costed the world sanity, maybe if the accursed site finally goes offline the curse will be broken
