Dreamwidth staff are aware of the situation. Take it easy on them, guys.
“We welcome everybody, and with some exceptions like spam, our only content restrictions are what’s illegal under US law. We’re not advertiser supported and our income is entirely from user payments, so our concern is 100% for you, not what content makes advertisers nervous.” – update
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth
As many of you know, in my day job I’m a journalist, and one of my colleagues is covering the tumblr changes and wants to talk to anyone who has been affected, creatively or financially, by the new policy, so that we can get your story out there. If that’s you, PM me or email her at kaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com.
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #signal boost
i would ask that people leaving tumblr try to move somewhere with an rss feed so i can in theory find some kind of rss reader and follow everyone that way
also:
it seems like this policy shouldn’t actually affect my blogs
but i will still do backups anyway
most alternate sites, even the distributed ones, seem like they kind of suck compared to tumblr in terms of features. they don’t have stuff like
reblog chains
easily browsable archives
view a user’s tagged posts in [reverse] chrono order
fun customizable user pages
i can see why this one’s not supported, it’s probably a headache
maybe i should look at dreamwidth? i know it doesn’t make comments first-class the way tumblr does but it seems like a better fit for me than, like, a facebook-clone or a twitter-clone
It looks like you agree with me very well on what the best features of Tumblr are (except I don’t care very much about customizable user pages; I have literally never changed my blog background, this was what they gave me by default back in 2011).
I hope we can find something suitable for us, and I’ll make sure to let you, especially, know if I find it.
When I first started thinking about this after the first signs of a purge a few weeks ago, I wondered if maybe one could do some sort of Mastodon/DW hybrid, similar to the Tumblr/DW proposal [link; hmm, WordPress makes the early parts of long reblog-chains pretty unreadable, I’m going to have to do something about that; for now, here’s a Tumblr-hosted alternative link] a while back. Pleroma [link] might make the need for DW hosting of non-short posts unnecessary, but the idea could still come in handy.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth #Fediverse
I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +4k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search.
Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog*
*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted. Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat.
I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing:
1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)
**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted.
So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes.
P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything.
There is also TumbleThree, a standalone program, if you prefer a GUI over command-line. Also seems to have more options, such as downloading your liked posts.
According to Tumblr themselves, starting December 17th, NSFW material will no longer be allowed on their site at all (saw that coming since Yahoo bought them out, I’m positive they’ve just been waiting for an excuse). This includes any NSFW photos, videos, graphics, gifs, etc. They say it won’t include erotica text but honestly the former is just a step toward the latter, check our receipts for the ff.net purge and livejournal strikethrough. And since it’s an algorithm not a human coming after NSFW content, they’re using a “take down first, reconsider on appeal” method- just like LJ did, and content that IS SFW can be flagged and taken down without a human checking it first. I’ve had photos of my birds taken down because of this, so don’t assume you’re safe from this absolute nonsense because you don’t post NSFW content.
I’ve used the above method personally and can affirm it worked fine for me. I would absolutely recommend you do it, too, and sooner rather than later.
Storm’s coming folks. Time to get to safety. Grab the contact info of whoever you want to stay in contact with now. If you’re a content creator of NSFW material, get setup someplace else even if it’s only temporary, and tell your followers where to find you.
Stay safe, friends. I hope to see you on the other side.
I have recommended the OP’s method for some time, and now more than ever.
If you’re comfortable letting WordPress have access to your account, I recommend doing both (at least, once the exporter starts working again [link]). Personally, I try never to have anything exist only in the cloud *or* only locally, and [bbolli’s tumblr-utils] + WordPress is a fairly simple way to cover both of those.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #(look you know what I *meant* about hoping to use that tag again someday) #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Wordpress
Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.
Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).
Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.
So what is changing?
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
Why are we doing this?
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.
Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.
So what’s next?
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.
Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.
Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.
Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.
This is so fucking sexist I can hardly believe it. And yeah looking at the new guidelines….I guess I can’t swear anymore either??
All of this as though the only way to crack down on child porn and porn bots is by additionally restricting images of women, fanart, adult sexuality, reproductive health, fanvids, gifs, etc. Is so disingenuous.
Make no mistake this is the impact of tech monopolies and Apple’s puritanical rules of the app store.
“Don’t upload any content, including images, videos, GIFs, or illustrations, that depicts sex acts” leaves the door WIDE open for cracking down on written erotica whenever they decide, too.
Also gotta love “it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.” More people. Different people. Not the people who have built a community on this website for the best part of a decade.
So, uh, apparently when I started talking [first link, second link] about looking for Tumblr alternatives “just in case”, I was literally thirteen hours ahead of the curve.
As I’ve said before [link], I cannot live on a platform with obscenity laws. It may start with images of genitals, but that is never how it ends, and paraphiles get cracked down on sooner rather than later.
—
I have marked my entire WordPress archive public, most notably this part [link]. (The older intra-blog links in this post are to WordPress, but–perhaps from a surge in interest–the Tumblr-to-Wordpress exporter seems to be having some issues, so I don’t yet have WordPress copies of posts from after ~10 PM yesterday.) I’ll be cleaning up the formatting in chronological order as I find the time: in the meanwhile, please forgive the dust.
—
While I expect I will stop posting here soon (less sure about reading; at the very least, there will be a transitional period where I keep an eye on my dashboard for announcements of where people are moving to), this will *not* be my last post. Stay tuned for updates on the next steps.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #(I hope I shall be able to use that tag again someday) #oh look an update #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Wordpress
An interesting idea! Very good fit for the “101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers” tag (use 41: read-write social media).
I see two main issues:
There doesn’t seem to be per-post blacklisting or even muting, which combines badly with the system where you automatically see everything friends-of-friends post. Someone who likes my fandom posts does not necessarily want to read my kink posts, and someone who likes my entire blog does not necessarily want to read a bunch of Amenta RP. There’s a block system, but this seems rather extreme: finding a friend-of-a-friend uninteresting does not mean you want them to be unable to read your posts.
On the bright side, it looks like backing up your blog is as simple as backing up (Linux) Thunderbird: just zip the local folder and stick the zip file wherever you want, and to restore it just get a blank installation of the interface program and stick the unzipped backup folder where the interface expects its data to be. (I have restored Thunderbird from this style of backup twice, and both times it has Just Worked™.)
I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you!
Tags:
#somnilogical #part of me is hoping that if Tumblr actually shuts down it will cause a surge of interest in Tumblr clones and #lead someone to make a Fediverse platform I actually like #but it is good to have some plans on standby #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #replies #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Scuttlebutt
About that post a couple hours ago that read “This is a test of the emergency systems. It will be deleted shortly.”:
I was checking whether deleting a post from Tumblr and then re-syncing my backups erases the backed-up post. Preliminary testing suggests that, for both local and WordPress copies, it does not.
While there are certainly flaws to that approach, I think it beats the alternatives. Especially given the…recent events on Tumblr.
—
Relatedly, I’ve done a bit of looking around into alternative platforms, in case the worst occurs. I’ve particularly focused on platforms inter-operable with Mastodon (Mastodon is, after all, a Fediverse platform), hoping to be able to interact with Mastodon dwellers without being subject to the ridiculously small character limit.
It seems like all of the platforms listed as compatible want to be either Twitter or Facebook, with nothing that quite sates my love of reblog chains [link]. Pleroma [link] seems like it might do, I suppose, although it’s still awfully Twitter-y.
Tags:
#oh look an original post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #Wordpress #Fediverse
everyone’s posting their links to the other social media they’re active on in case their tumblr gets deleted in the latest and greatest ill-conceived ineffectual attempt to algorithmically combat pornbot spam
so in case my tumblr gets deleted for some reason, here is all the other social media i use:
none. really hope my blog doesn’t get deleted
I don’t *currently* have any other sites, but in the event of a Tumblr shutdown–either of me personally or of everyone–you can probably figure out where I’ve moved to by googling my username.
Unlike a lot of blogs that claim to take Tumblr imports, WordPress includes reblogs and images. My WordPress is currently private, mostly because the formatting is fucked up in ways that would be simple but tedious to fix (tags insist on displaying on alphabetical order, which scrambles the commentary; intra-blog links link to the Tumblr copy and not the WordPress copy): if the original Tumblr copy vanishes I will go through the whole thing, clean it up (moving commentary tags into the main post body), and mark it public. If anyone else reading this wants to be more reliably able to link people to their old posts, I recommend a WordPress backup.
—
While I back up my Tumblr to my laptop daily, and to my phone weekly, I’d only done a WordPress backup once ages ago. Thanks for the reminder to add it to my routine backup schedule: I’d hate to be unable to link people to old posts, or to have to figure out how to host the local copy in a reasonably linkable way.
—
(Sorry for getting my seriousness in your joke(?) post, but it inspired me.)
Tags:
#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #reply via reblog #(every time I suggest backups as a solution to something Dad scoffs and says that nobody actually does those) #(he keeps doing this even though I always respond with ”…*I* do them”) #(if my laptop abruptly fails again it’ll suck having to buy new hardware but that’s all it’ll be: new *hardware*)
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 