Tumblr

Tumblr is a social networking microblog.
As of August 2019, Verizon acknowledges its failure and Tumblr is up for sale, possibly to Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Tumblr has been acquired by Automattic.
Tumblr allows for blogs that require logging in to view (https://memories.tumblr.com/) and password-protected blogs. Tumblr also has "private posts" that can only be accessed from a direct link ().
Since 2018, explicit content has been officially banned on Tumblr; any new blogs hosting flagged posts can only be viewed when logged in. Its icon is replaced with a generic icon and the blog can only be viewable in the dashboard (rendering any custom themes and the blog archive inaccessible).
Tumblr has irregularly and manually run "jubilees" for freeing up the names of blogs that are inactive. () This seems to consist of renaming blogs to have the suffix "-blog" (such as https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://bloggingmisha-collins.tumblr.com/ → https://bloggingmisha-collins-blog.tumblr.com/).
== Quirks ==
Users can change their account names into the format used for deleted accounts. Specifically, USERNAME-deactivated-[Any amount of digits, 0-9]. Users who do this are inaccessible via their main account page, or directly linked to posts. Their posts will still show up in searches, and their "archive" URL will work. This doesn't seem to have an effect on the API, and tumblr-utils will still work just fine. For an example of this tomfoolery, see the archive page of user "diediedie3344-deactivated-204913".
Another quirk is that Tumblr accounts that appear to be on a different domain name are still accessible at, and show up in searches as, their account name. Trying to go to any page on the accountname.tumblr.com end redirects you to the same page on the custom-url-here.com page. For an example of this behavior, see user "homosethsual" which redirects to ranpos.star.is
Aberrant posts lack a notes counter ( ).
Reblogs formerly were quoted plain text (the ability to "edit other people's posts"). (This is no longer true.) Post edits by the OP do not propagate to reblogs.
See also: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1317904369610731521
== History ==
Yahoo! has purchased Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. Tumblr allegedly doubled in number of blogs in 2014 were supposed to become profitable in 2015.
In December 2015, Yahoo put their Tumblr service into the "decide on" category in their Action Plan, according to their 2015 shareholder presentation.
In 2017, posts were restructured to use the "Neue Post Format".
In June 2017, Tumblr tightened up "Safe mode", which limits "sensitive content" to all users below 18 years old and the viewing of blogs marked as explicit, potentially causing a major move-away from Tumblr due to Internet Backdraft from its users. Given Yahoo's tendency to ax things that become less popular than expected, it might be important to keep an eye out for it.
As of 30th of July 2017, it is no longer possible to access NSFW accounts outside of https://tumblr.com/blog/<name> URLs. Attempting to access an NSFW account normally will now cause infinite redirecting. NSFW marked Tumblrs are inaccessible to signed out users.
On 3 Dec 2018, Tumblr announced that all NSFW content will be removed on 17 Dec 2018, with plenty of misclassifications detected. This will never be reversed.https://sreegs.tumblr.com/tagged/porn%20banhttps://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22977857/wordpress-tumblr-simplenote-internet-automattic-matt-mullenweg-interviewhttps://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-nuts-show-nuts-doesnt-work-in-2022
On 12 August 2019, Automattic acquired Tumblr from Yahoo!/Verizon Mediahttps://photomatt.tumblr.com/post/186964618222/automattic-tumblr.
In July 2022, Tumblr announced automatic conversion of GIFs to MP4s (the original GIF is available by changing the URL),https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/690135035533230080/making-gifs-load-faster upsetting GIF makers.
In November 2022, restrictions on content were loosened after the introduction of the ability to sort posts using "Community Labels", although "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits".https://staff.tumblr.com/post/699744158019190784/this-is-not-a-drill-our-new-community-guidelines
In December 2022, Tumblr launched "Tumblr Live", a livestreaming website tacked onto Tumblr (domains: https://api.gateway.tumblr-live.com/ https://www.tumblr.com/api/v2/tmglive/). 98.8% of "regular" Tumblr users ignored and largely despised it, and took offense to its intrusive carousel, its frequently-suggestive profile images, and the carousel being merely "snoozable for 30 days".https://www.tumblr.com/garfieldildo/725329098490232832 It was operated by MEETME, and was accused of extensive tracking. Tumblr Live shut down in January 2024.
In November 2023, news leaked that Automattic will move staff away from Tumblr:
We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks.https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/733551497286172672
In February 2024, news emerged that Automattic has formed a partnership with Midjourney and OpenAI;https://tinystepsforward.tumblr.com/post/742991439596748800/what-is-this-about-the-tumblr-staff-wanting-tohttps://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ the large art community on Tumblr will likely have a negative reaction to this.
As of October 2024, Automattic's CEO (photomatt = Matt Mullenweg) seems to be hellbent on destroying his company;https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/ what will happen to Tumblr remains to be seen.
The Tumblr community has accused staff of deleting all reblogs of posts made by various users who publicized their grievances,"list of users gone because of scortched [SIC earth"] as well as transmisogynist moderation and account bans in general. In February 2024 the CEO was accused of transmisogynyhttps://www.tumblr.com/carhammerexplosionmatthttps://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ over a particular account deletion and his public statements about the deletion; negative community response makes him wonder if "we should continue to invest Tumblr at all if it's going to harbor such toxicity and harassment".
== Lists of Tumblr blogs ==
* (2.6 million; Project Sonar 2018-10-26 FDNS data)
* (~7 million, scraped in april 2018, csv formatted with additional metadata. blog,url,post count,likes count, ... 5th csv field should be the is_nsfw indicator)
* (~12 million, scraped in april 2018, contains everything from above and more. schema as stated in first line of the file: tumblelog,url,posts,likes,adult,nsfw,groupchan)
* (96.7k; scraped from Bing on 2018-12-05 with the adult keyword list at )
== Migrate your Tumblr ==
If you have a blog on Tumblr, you may want to migrate its content to Wordpress. You can then easily export all the content in a usable format, keep the Wordpress blog as a backup, or even jump ship. An easy and comprehensive tutorial is available at https://kinsta.com/blog/import-tumblr-to-wordpress/
== Archiving ==
We still need more archivers! As usual, follow instructions on the tracker and the tumblr-grab repository.
As you probably heard, Tumblr is fighting users and archivists. Please limit your concurrency to 1 per machine/IP address.
As the sources above are incomplete, blogs to be archived can also be submitted using this form.
== Internet Archive collections ==
Tens of thousands subdomains from the December 2018 emergency archival are flowing to https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_tumblr
Over 800 domains were archived in 2015: WildArchives-Tumblr.
== References ==
== See also ==
* FAQ on tumblr-grab
* gettumblrpics, simple script to download images from a Tumblr feed as they appear in it
* tumblr-utils, tumblr_backup.py can make a local backup of posts (XML default), video, audio and images. Uses APIv2
* Tumblrsagi, Code to grab blogs from the API and stuff them into a database for rehosting, used by this Tumblr archive
* can automatically mirror the contents of a Tumblr blog as they are posted, which may be useful for maintaining an offsite-copy which can be archived later.
* TumblThree, Can archive an entire blog by feeding it an URL, including asks, text posts and reblogs to XML format and can download all images. Downloadable here. Windows only until the dev implements mono support.
Category:Microblogging services Category:Yahoo!