“can mutuals dm you?” my mutuals can fire me from a cannon through a brick wall, looney tunes style. as long as we’re all having fun
if tumblr shuts down you can find me on tumblr. ill still be here. they cant make me leave
Moon shaped anomaly in the sky tonight
is it the moon?
I’m not answering questions right now. I’m scared.
I mean I know a certain level of projection on fictional characters and situations is inevitable and even healthy, but sometimes you got to step back into the real world to remind yourself that Character X is not your shitty parent/abusive ex/asshole boss/bully from high school, and that people who like Character X are not personally victimizing you.
op is getting death threats now probably
Anonymous asked:
In all seriousness Jv, how much is Tumblrcom worth now? IIs it too big for us users to band together to buy it? Or would the running of the website be too difficult.
No web experience here, just a Tumblrina wishing we could pull rescue here.
jv answered:
I’ve talked about this in the past… the problem is not how much would it take for Automattic to sell the site, the problem is the operating costs. Even if you get it for free, you need several millions per month just to pay the infrastructure of the site. Running tumblr for month, without even paying salaries, costs more than what AO3 makes in donations in an entire year. It’s not “let’s get the money together and buy it!” it’s “let’s get the money together… every single month, forever”, which I don’t think can’t really work.
This is nothing against the anon, but posts like this make me so sad. Like people really have no idea
1. how much it costs to store their gif sets and serve web traffic and push notification and w/e
2. how much Zuck and others have been making from brutally harvesting and exploiting your private information
3. that maintaining a social network like this is a full time job for MANY highly skilled people, and that running datacenters is expensive, and using cloud services is more expensive
4. Like seriously, how is your mind not blown every day that you can still view some gifs uploaded in 2007. That's 10 megabytes that's been viewed (downloaded) a million times. Perhaps some were viewed 100 million times. That's 1'000 terabytes (1PB) of traffic just for one popular gif. It had to be on several hard drives, safely, all that time. You've been lied to if you think that costs nothing.
And again, not saying this about anon and not judging anyone but like. Statistically, over 99.9% of you don't want to pay for Tumblr Premium. How many of you would suddenly want to pay for Open Source Tumblr. How would you talk to the New Staff. How would you react if you disagree on any UI changes they make. If people send death threats to staff over a free social network, how much more entitled do you think people will be if they actually have to pay for it. What if you see some CSAM or revenge porn or something. Who will review it. Who will delete it. Who will be in charge of banning those users. Who will read bug reports. Who will validate complaints about inappropriate DMs. There literally is enough work for hundreds of people every month even with a financial sinkhole as Tumblr is right now. How do you think it would get managed as a community project. Who will keep track of 200 volunteers. Who will replace them when they burn out. Who will make sure there aren't power hungry cliques abusing their power. Who will make sure it's not hijacked by political parties or corporations to push their propaganda and oppress or data mine a minority and sell the data to ICE. Who will make sure a creepy mod isn't just reading all your DMs. Who will carry the legal responsibility if Nintendo sues the site for copyright infringement. Who will do audits. Who will represent it in court. Who will respond to DMCA takedowns. Who will wake up at 3am to mitigate a DDoS. Who will take legal responsibility when the database gets hacked and email addresses get leaked. Who will make sure the database admin isn't actually working for NSA and that's why he can afford to volunteer for free.
Running an ethical, large-scale, rich-content (with images over a few kilobytes large) social network is just incredibly complex. And by complex I mean impossible.
>Join a union
>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on
>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members
>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that's going on
Yeah, there's a surprising amount of people who just...don't interact with the union they are in at all. At all. And then complain when shit gets voted in they didn't want.
Maybe get involved. Show up to shit. Just a thought.
This is also true of the Democratic Party btw. People are always complaining about what "The Democrats" should do, or aren't doing etc etc.
but like literally in my early 20s I started going to my local party's meetings regularly and with-in a few months they were like "hey you want to be on the committee to re-write our by-laws?" yes, yes I do thank you. "hey you want to get elected to be one of our representatives to the meetings of the state party?" why yes thank you so I got to go and debate the budget of a swing state Democratic Party.
I had to move for work not that much after that but like people I know from that have been delegates to the DNC, have elected officials come to their homes for events. Literally there's a middle aged lady I know who when Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, Hillary started with a small tour on a van, she called it her Scooby Van, and her first stop in New Hampshire, with its "first in the nation" primary was to a bakery in my home town and the person she sat with at what was her first or second official campaign stop of her run for President is a lady I know who isn't some super secret Democratic overlord or anything but a local lady who volunteers a lot.
Just the other day I got invited to meet my Senator (again) tomorrow I'm going to meet my state's governor (again) because I volunteer, if I wanted I could likely get to be a delegate to the DNC
so many organizations are open doors that people just refuse to push and then are big mad it didn't read their minds and do what you think.
I live in a town of 960 people, and four years ago I ran for an open seat on the Library Board; within three months I was chairing the board because the lady who was the chair had been doing it for 14 years and she wanted a break. Someone also threw my name in the ring to be on the school board; another candidate won the seat that time.
In my first three years on the library board, we
- a) lost a librarian to a car accident,
- b) hired an interim librarian,
- c) hired a permanent librarian,
- c) wrote an anti-censorship policy,
- d) balanced the library budget three years running,
- d) started a Friends of the Library group,
- e) organized our social media campaign,
- f) joined the statewide electronic catalog, and
- g) quadrupled our library membership.
So when I ran for library board for my second term, I got voted in with 100% of the votes cast... and I also won an open seat on the school board as a write-in candidate with 19 votes; and I lost an election to the Select Board (our 'mayoral' system is a 3-person board) by just 38 votes out of 450 cast.
So now I'm solving library problems on the one hand, and solving school board problems on the other hand. It's an education in educational policy and finance — federal and state aid programs, local policy on athletics and sports and core education vs arts funding, union negotiations, and more. If I ever decide to run for select board again, I'm going to be much better informed and prepared to understand the issues.
Meanwhile...
Just yesterday, I drove through a town of 65,000 people. There was a group of people on a street corner holding up "pro labor" signs and "free Palestine" signs and "anti-war" signs, and "Jill Stein for President" (mind you, this is March 2025 -- there isn't a presidential election until 2028!) and "The Green Party wants your vote!" signs. There were maybe ten of these folks?
So when I got home, I went to their city's "Boards and Commissions" website. They have 19 vacant seats on various committees and boards and commissions, including two (the Wetlands Commission [wouldn't that be a Green Party issue??], and the Diversity Commission) that don't have enough members right now to hold meetings under state quorum rules. And there are 85 people on other commissions and boards that are up for re-election this year, and more than half of them don't want to keep running for these seats; they'd welcome a challenger.
In other words, the local community is STARVING for people to fill local government responsibilities.
Why are these people out here holding up signs for a woman to run for president in three years, when there are 104 seats in their own community government that are up election this year? Demonstrate to someone, somebody, anybody that you want to help solve community-level problems, and that you know what you're doing... and there's no holding you back.
I really believe there's some sort of "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon happening with Gen Z discoursers where they're too afraid to question the logic of some of the discourse being thrown at them for fear of appearing to be unwoke so they just blindly parrot it not to be excluded by their peers
not just a Gen Z thing, like that’s a valid criticism of tumblr few years back, and I’m not ashamed to admit it sucked me in too. people can say whatever shit they want as long as they use the right vocabulary and an agressive tone that just implies that disagreement is out of the question. it sinks in because you will get similar messages about legitimate issues and sometimes from the same people.
Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time
To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.
I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.
And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷
for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.
In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.
Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.
If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).
To use it:
- download and install python 2.7
- download tumblr-utils
- create an application on tumblr to get an api key
- extract the tumblr-utils zip and open the tumblr_backup.py file in notepad
- search for "API" and paste in your OAuth consumer key
- then go back to the folder where you extracted tumblr-utils and choose open folder in terminal / command prompt, or type cmd.exe in the address bar while inside the folder
now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:
Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.
On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.
This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know
but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts
if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!
tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down