But seriously, on the whole? I’m gonna miss this place when it finally enters it’s final FINAL FINAL death throes, because for all of its faults, all of its shitty design, Tumblr was undoubtedly great platform in one respect at least: the micro-blogging format here was ideal for lurkers.
Reblogging coupled with the unique style of tag-comments the fandom developed here suddenly made visible the big chains of lurkers who normally don’t interact with the work or its creator directly, but they pass it along in their own little circles, putting up your content up in their own spaces, adding all these heartwarming tags like “it’s great!!”, “omg i love u” or “i’d read that”s.
I create sometimes, when the mood strikes, but I was always mostly a lurker, actually! Especially back on LJ.
I’m old enough for my ancient, defunct LJ account with less than 10 entries to be still floating out there somewhere, and old enough that migrating to DW is less painful due to nostalgia factor. Yet, it is a nostalgia factor brought on mostly by the fact that for years, LJ was primary place to lurk on!
After clicking through all the “yep I’m old enough to view those entries :) :) :)” buttons on the way, of course.
((The image below: old-school “Lurker Day” LJ/DW banner, one of many you can still find out there – this one’s from https://soc-puppet.dreamwidth.org/))
This so hard. It’s the reason Tumblr became my home rather than any other social network.
Because Lurker is my creature-type. I started on Tumblr exclusively reblogging things and adding those little comments about what I liked about them. And I always felt like those comments were inadequate to express how much I got out of the thing, but I figured saying a small amount badly was better than nothing.
And then I gradually gained more confidence in the idea that I could say original things and they’d also be good. At least good to me. Maybe other people too, if they happened upon it, but that wasn’t necessary. It just had to be good to me.
And then, well, I became sinesalvatorem. Like, me. /I/ became this fucking blog. It stopped being a url I registered so Tumblr would let me have a dashboard to lurk a bunch of cool people. I became the blog because I was able to really believe that I could let my Self out here.
Which only happened because I had a place where I could reblog other people’s stuff with mediocre commentary, and that was OK. So it was also OK if my mediocre statements stood on their own. And maybe, eventually, stopped being mediocre – but only to the extent that I stopped caring if they were.
Because what mattered was (-matters -is) they’re /me/
Tags:
#same!!! #if I am capable of pulling off Dreamwidth blogging now it is only because Tumblr gave me the space to grow #and yes I have an LJ with one entry #(it’s an entry directing people to my Tumblr) #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Livejournal #Dreamwidth #yes this
Brinens and Things 