What I don’t get is why Tumblr is receiving a relatively warm welcome, while Threads has had half the Fediverse gnashing teeth because of the big bad corporations coming to our turf.
Do people really like Automattic that much? How are they any better than the other tech conglomerates?
Tumblr users as a demographic are closer to fedi users than the Facebook/Instagram masses.
There just aren’t that many Tumblr users anymore, at least compared to the overwhelming horde that is Threads. The threat of diluting the culture is just a lot lower.
imo Tumblr has always been the ‘weird kid’ of social media. in the past it definitely stuck out as unique and nowadays even though they’ve tried to act more like xitter and Instagram or whatever the users tend to be vehemently against the changes
I would say yes? They make Wordpress which is pretty open and usable by default and it is properly opensource. Since taking over Tumblr they seem to have been making reasonable improvements and in general trying to keep it open.
In general they have been favourable to open source and open standards. So when they say they are adopting an additional open standard I have high hopes.
But FWIW I also think that Threads joining the fediverse is likely a good thing. It is true that it may allow many people to be more comfortable on a user-hostile platform, but IMHO that is their right. I think the biggest concern is that if Threads or a small number of large platforms are the majority of users they can add proprietary extensions but I don’t think the biggest issue. The biggest strength is making the fediverse more popular, and allowing more people to pick more open options without needing to ditch or convince their friends upfront.
Those of us that are still using Tumblr are very against data collection and adds, Automattic has made some mistakes and us users are not very happy with them so they know they are on thin ice
Saying Tumblr is corporate in nature is like saying the lord of the flies Island was democratic. If they so much as changes a rounded corner to be sharp or vice versa the entire site throws a shit fit.
This is something that should take time so that it is done correctly. It would be much harder to get people on board if you had to fix things after launching.
I assume it’s even harder to move an existing product to the Fediverse than it is to create a new platform from scratch
But they’re not moving people to the fediverse, they’re basically rolling out the same plugin integration that is available for WordPress already and the only reason they’re even attempting that is because they’ve not given up on monetizing Tumblr and in order to do that, they have to garner more traffic of which they feel that Tumblr can get with the rising tide of primarily Mastodon.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, people should move their Tumblr accounts to FireFish.
I have big sympathies for FireFish, but I feel like the target audiences so far are very different. Maybe call it the network effect, but it’s difficult for me to imagine a tumblr user who maybe is used to blogging about their SuperWhoLock fandoms moving to FireFish where there probably is no big audience for that. At the same time I would want to see these users and their niches in the Fediverse.
There is a very particular culture that is unique to tumblr which I don’t see moving somewhere else.
That’s fair, but the reality is that Tumblr has been dancing on a knife’s edge for a long long time. A community lead and funded effort like FireFish would provide the platform security needed for it to survive. But there’s no two ways about it, it won’t just happen magically. That said, TumblFish.social could truly be huge and propel FireFish to even surpass Lemmy in terms of users.
I have a really out of the loop question that will probably make me sound like a troll, but really I’m just old and out of the loop:
What exactly are the unique features of Tumblr? as far as I recall it was just a blogging site with support for specific post formats, right? Did it get more complicated than that?
Basically, the main feature that’s missing is that reblogging works the same way as replying does on lemmy except it’s expanded by default. So a lot of Tumblr culture is basically ‘Yes And’ improv.
I assume they haven’t put much manpower into it. There are various open source components that will handle most of the federation for them as long as they submit their posts in the right format.
I don’t really blame Tumblr, but I don’t think they’re this slow because they’re doing it right. I think a small team of developers passionate about the idea are given some time to work on federation, but it’s clearly not a priority.
And honestly, how could it be a priority? Joining the Fediverse means opening up your content and platform for free, with no data mining capabilities or ads to support the extra load.
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