Today, Tumblr’s owner, Verizon Media, announced that Automattic plans to acquire Tumblr. Automattic is the technology company behind products such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Simplenote—products that help connect creators, businesses, and publishers to communities around the world.
We couldn’t be more excited to be joining a team that has a similar mission. Many of you know WordPress.com, Automattic’s flagship product. WordPress.com and Tumblr were both early pioneers among blogging platforms.
Automattic shares our vision to build passionate communities around shared interests and to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, especially when they come from under-heard voices and marginalized communities.
We look forward to continuing to create products that empower your self-expression and sense of community and that build a better, more inclusive internet.
They’re dumping it for–in the grand scheme of things–almost nothing
No, Automattic *isn’t* ending the NSFW ban
‘As for what this means for WordPress, executives from both Tumblr and Automattic will “look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.” We wouldn’t expect any immediate changes, though.‘
I think my main reaction to this is to trust WordPress a bit less. The main appeal of the place for me is that it *isn’t* Tumblr, a separate platform with separate interests.
I’m going to continue my project to create a more stable copy of my Tumblr on WordPress. I’ll probably even continue my plan to start giving them money this winter (what better way to give people an incentive not to screw you over?).
But I’ve been wavering, lately, on whether to *also* look into self-hosting. Not as a Plan A, you understand: I’d *rather* not go through the effort of running the whole infrastructure myself. But I have put (am putting, will put) a lot of effort into making a specifically *Wordpress-compatible* version of my Tumblr, and this WordPress-compatible version is probably distinct enough to deserve its own backup. (After all, if I *did* end up self-hosting one day, that’s probably the software I’d use.)
WordPress export files don’t include images, which would make it a massive pain to re-instantiate my blog using only an export file (not *impossible*–all of the images are also stored elsewhere–but painful, and if I wanted possible-but-painful I’d just re-instantiate from a tumblr-utils scrape), but perhaps a tiny, local server to receive site-to-site exports, not to be made outward-facing unless necessary.
I’m not sure yet what the most practical option is, and how exactly one goes about it. I’ll have to look into it. But I *am* going to look into it.
Tags:
#in which Brin is paranoid #(but what else is new) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #Wordpress #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #reply via reblog #oh look an update
How come I haven’t seen anyone talking about the end of dashboard nested reblogs except in future tense? I’m already seeing the new design. Am I actually in the first wave of a gradually rolled-out update for once?
I’m hopeful about it, really. Sure, every change takes some getting used to, and it’s a little annoying not being able to see at the beginning of a thread how many entries it has, but I do like actually having people’s names next to their writings.
shipwrecklight-blog said: I am a bad person for thinking it looks swank! Or, so has it been widely implied.
Tags:
#(September 2015) #conversational aglets #replies #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
(my Internet was out for most of the day, so it’s quite possible there are already posts on my dash along these lines that I just haven’t caught up with yet, but anyway)
Tumblr what are you thinking
I have already liked three of those four posts
(I was kind of hoping it would be all four so I could say “all of those posts”, but no, turns out I didn’t hit the like button on the Civ post. Still, three out of four ain’t good.)
theunitofcaring said: yeah, this one seems to be singularly useless at best. but. posts you’ve already /liked/ is a bit crazy.
Tags:
#(April 2015) #conversational aglets #replies #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
Sometimes, time context is important. If we say we pushed an update yesterday, and that post ends up getting reblogged by someone a year later, “yesterday” might get interpreted very wrong and confuse quite a few people.
But we’ve fixed that now! The Timestamps extension now puts timestamps on reblogged original posts by default. You can say goodbye to reblogging old news with a feeling of urgency, and hello to realising that all million-note posts are 8 years or so old (without any extra clicks).
You can also extend this to show timestamps on all reblog comments, letting you see just how quickly those hilarious interactions take place or how long it took before someone else thought of a better punchline to a post. Data junkies of all types, this one’s for you.
We’ve also done up the preferences! Want to turn off reblog timestamps? Easy. Want to only have reblog timestamps? Just as easy! Go take a look!
As always, if you have any problems, questions or anything else to say about this update, our askbox and Discord server are open as usual, or you can open a GitHub issue if you’d rather!
Enjoy!
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this update is fantastic and I highly recommend it #also I didn’t even realise until reading this that there’s an option to make *every* link in a reblog chain show a timestamp #(as opposed to just OP + the last link) #so I turned that on and now it’s even more amazing
Hey everybody, the ArchiveTeam tumblr project is up and running!
If you have resources, please install Archiveteam’s warrior program to contribute to the project! It’s very easy to set up on and install on any computer, there are step by step instructions at http://tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr/
We’re already up to 11TB and 187 million blogs archived, but we’re going to need a lot more help to get all the NSFW content before the 17th!
main project discussion takes place irc at #tumbledown on efnet, and you can add blogs to be saved using this google form: https://goo.gl/RtXZEq
Where did you get the 187-million figure from? It makes sense that the ~65k figure on the tracker would just be the sex blogs, since all of the blogs I’ve seen go by on it have been sex blogs, but I didn’t see any information regarding non-sex blogs.
I have unlimited Internet, cheap electricity, and a cool climate, so I’m in a pretty good position for (small-scale) volunteer computing. I’ve been running a warrior for a couple days now. I’ve been leaving my laptop on overnight because if I’m interpreting the instructions right, you only get to pause a task for a few hours before it’s considered abandoned and re-assigned, and I didn’t want to lose work. (especially since my current task has been 22 hours and counting; some of these blogs are pretty big)
I think I’ll continue helping out with their other projects once this one is finished: archiving is (as anyone reading this blog has probably noticed) a pet cause of mine. Since it mostly just needs bandwidth and doesn’t take much CPU, I can even run it and World Community Grid at the same time without problems (anti-disease efforts are my other pet cause).
nightpool replied to this post with:
the 187 number came from scott’s recent tweet, i’m not aware of the source of it but considering that he literally owns the computer all of these are uploading to (before being sent to the archive) he’s reasonably authoritative on the subject
Tags:
#(December 2018) #this concludes the retroactive application of my new aglet policy #(I looked at Twitter user @textfiles and was not able to find the figure) #(since it was not really that important I didn’t bother to dig further) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(still helping with their other projects by the way) #(they’re kind of saturated right now but I leave the client program running anyway) #(sometimes I get a task to run if I happen to be close enough to the front of the line when they’re handing out a batch) #(and next time there’s an all-hands-on-deck project I’ll be ready to leap into action)
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #this site isn’t home anymore but with the right approach it can still be made useful
This is a short-term fix that essentially undoes the new dashboard update (except on settings pages, sorry), including for any themes or userstyles you use. Grab Old Blue from the gallery today and fling yourself back in time to a more comfortable yesterday.
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 