I feel like people maybe flipped out a little more than necessary, so I want to remind everyone that Yahoo tends to beat websites to death and then leave their corpses in the street – Del.icio.us was an anomaly in that respect – so it’s not like Tumblr’s going to disappear tomorrow. If Yahoo sells Tumblr we’ll hear about it first and have time to take appropriate measures.
(Who the fuck would buy Tumblr? Microsoft. Microsoft, owner of Bing, would buy Tumblr.)
That said, BACKING STUFF UP IS A GOOD IDEA. BACK UP YOUR SHIT. DO IT, LISTEN TO YOUR INTERNET FATHER. You know when I learned this? When in 2008 my livejournal was hacked and I lost five years of my life. I resurrected about 80%, and you know where that 80% came from? Google cache, Archive.org, and notification emails people happened to have saved. BACKUPS. And even then I had to copy and paste every post and repost it backdated. It took me eight months.
When del.icio.us was sold, data was lost, but more importantly, the data that remained had to be moved, which was when I discovered that about a quarter of the fanfics I’d bookmarked were now deleted, locked, or otherwise missing (this was pre-AO3 but fanfics can be deleted from AO3, and they can be deleted from Tumblr). I rescued a few from archive.org but I also lost a good number, which is why I use Evernote to archive not just the URLs but the stories themselves.
No technology is infallible, unhackable, virus-proof, or incorruptible. Back up your hard drive, or at least the parts with your favorite music and family photos. Back up your tumblr, or at least the entries that are important to you. Love that fanfic? Save a copy of it.
You know what happens to people who don’t back up their shit? They get sanctimonious but ultimately correct lectures from Reed Richards.
Maybe I missed this post, but what technology are you using to crosspost between Tumblr and DW?
I’m using a website called IFTTT (If This, Then That) which I’ve programmed to check my tumblr every 15 minutes and crosspost anything it finds there if it’s tagged properly.
IFTTT does this by yanking the post off Tumblr, throwing it into an email, and emailing it to Dreamwidth, which means you have to set up Dreamwidth to accept email posting.
Any of these recipes can be used to crosspost to an active DW/LJ where you talk with friends and they read your posts, or they can be used to crosspost to an “archival” account if you just want to archive off-site. Be aware however that IFTTT only pulls the first image of any given post, so if you archive a multiple-image post it will be incomplete.
Here are some resources:
Universal Crossposting: this post (not by me) has instructions for how to set up IFTTT to crosspost everything you post on Tumblr to your DW/LJ. It also contains instructions for how to set up Dreamwidth for email posting.
Crossposting only posts you tag to crosspost: set up IFTTT to crosspost ONLY if you tag the post “crosspost”. This has some quirks; it will include the first image in the post, but if there’s no image attached to the post it will put a big “NO IMAGE FOUND” banner on your DW post, which is ugly. So:
Crossposting only TEXT posts you tag to crosspost: this recipe (by me) is identical to the one above, but it uses the tag “textpost”. It will only crosspost posts you tag “textpost”, and it will not include images, even if images are attached to the post.
I hope this helps! Also be aware that if you click “advanced options” on either of my recipes, you should be able to change the tag from “crosspost” or “textpost” to a tag of your own choosing.
Crossposting between dw and tumblr. Great instructions. Pls use in the tumblr exodus
Re: tumblr. I feel like some things are getting lost in the ‘omg the children’ stuff. Now, that is totally legit. There was absolutely some nasty stuff on the site that they weren’t catching. However, it goes deeper than that.
Tumblr really couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it for the last two-three years because in large part the usage base was young, broke, and at the fringes of the internet. I saw a stat yesterday that .0001% of people had a tumblr. No clue how accurate that is but what I do know is that it was heavily tilted to people on the LBGT+ spectrum, PoC, etc. Tumblr, in essence, was a conversation between people on a comment to comment level. Someone posted something and the real conversation happened in the reblogs and in the tags. It was a space in which you could follow a tag link and go down a rabbit hole of everything that was tagged with that post. And users liked it that way. They totally flagged things that didn’t belong in the tags (like pron) and it was a great way to find people with similar interests without having the gatekeeper of a moderated forum.
Here is where it gets into the real world tho – Tumblr got bought by Yahoo a while ago and Yahoo is owned by Verizon. The biggest investor in killing Net Neutrality and managing and controlling your internet experience. There is an interview with the president of Verizon that came out today that says in essence ‘we wanted tumblr but not the pron’. Well, yeah, except by going wholly in on destroying the pron they wiped out huge communities of people talking about their bodies. Chronic pain communities are gone. LBGT education communities, breastfeeding, trans support groups, sex education, and yes, fandom. They crushed huge categories of content where people were just figuring things out about themselves and they cloaked in SESTA/FOSA because what they want is sanitized content to serve ads.
So Verizon told Apple to pull the tumblr app a month ago because of the porn (Nov 17?). They removed a whole swath of tags from searchability (you had to know a username to find someone and then scroll their whole blog) in the week that followed. And yesterday they sent out their, guess what, we’re deleting everything we’ve flagged as sensitive which everyone is having a good laugh at, including me. Now, checking tonight it looks like they’ve removed a lot of those flags and people are calming down but I don’t buy it. A lot of that content is gone already and it’s not coming back.
Net Neutrality is failing, where it hasn’t failed already. Fandom as I know it is moving but the infrastructure isn’t there yet and I know a few folks are trying the distributed network stuff but we always, always lose folks when this happens. Anyway, it’s about the porn but it isn’t about the porn.
but really porn is just the canary in the coal mine that our supposed general purpose computing devices are tightly controlled by a duopoly that makes Microsoft in the ‘90s look relaxed and open minded: Apple doesn’t want porn apps on its phones, so there are no porn apps on its phones; other apps can stay if they tithe 30%, but they’re on thin fucking ice.
you can leave Tumblr and go to another social network, but if that gets sufficiently popular it will face the same threat, there is no escape.
the last bastion of freedom is the open web, and I anticipate the day when mobile Safari blocks access to sites that aren’t signed by Apple, for security reasons.
the right to install whatever software you want on your own computer is a vital one, and we should be fighting for it.
Tumblr Exodus 