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Let’s all go back to Tumblr

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Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#81

Post by blueflow »

pjc50 wrote: post #77
b5 wrote: post #63

This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017. The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use…

> I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.

I was on tumblr until around 2016 and i can confirm the observations - harassment for totally misrepresented things, just to demonstrate virtue. From the few persons i met IRL it doesn't seem like an false flag.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#82

Post by blueflow »

Grue3 wrote: post #67
intertextuality wrote: post #40

Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso. This is quite different from reddit or hn where…

It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in your screenshot.

Wrong, that change only happened in the dashboard, not on the actual blogs.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#83

Post by vertex-four »

habi wrote: post #55
geofft wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way th…

If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus]( https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/ ) plugin connects your site to the fediverse. I don't know if there's such a thing for your static generator, though...

OStatus is currently implemented by Mastodon but essentially none of the rest of the post-Activitypub fediverse - we’ve more-or-less standardised on Activitypub as a protocol which solves many of OStatus’s problems.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#84

Post by chriswarbo »

bunderbunder wrote: post #48
CM30 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.

Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism. Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Mos…

I operate on the principle that the Web was invented for publishing information to the world, so I don't publish anything (blog posts, comments, etc.) that I don't want available to the world. Hence I'm fine for bots to scrape it, copy it, aggregate it, whatever (as long as it's not plagiarised, but that's a different discussion ;) ).

Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#85

Post by pferde »

lmm wrote: post #76
eahman02 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the Twitter platform.

There was a great article I've never been able to find again about how the UI of Twitter naturally guides users into de facto bullying, and most of the advice given by experienced Twitter users (e.g. check existing replies to a tweet before adding your own) is working around UI choices made by the system itself.

I wonder how many of those bully-inducing UI features are also present in software like Mastodon or Diaspora, and are therefore disasters-in-waiting, to be triggered once critical mass of users is reached.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#86

Post by chriswarbo »

phyzome wrote: post #7
tomjen3 wrote: post #3

A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/

This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me.

How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).

You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).

You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#87

Post by genezeta »

phyzome wrote: post #7
tomjen3 wrote: post #3

A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/

I use a wiki (Dokuwiki in particular).

Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#88

Post by makomk »

b5 wrote: post #63

This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017. The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use…

Very much this. Tumblr has features which seem designed to actively encourage harassment. The quote-tweet feature which that post about Mastodon the other day complained about? As this points out, Tumblr's had its own version of that since the very start, and unlike on Twitter deleting your post does nothing about the quoted copy. It also allows anonymous asks by default, which are widely abused to harass and threaten. It also has an utterly toxic culture built around all this which the press seem to downplay for political reasons, just like they downplayed the Russian influence op which reached pretty much all of Tumblr whilst writing endless articles about Facebook and Twitter.

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#89

Post by [deleted] »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #74
CM30 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle. Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...

Plenty of people on social media/blogosphere who have no idea how to do even that. Just because "it isn't that hard" doesn't mean the barrier to entry isn't incredibly high.

[deleted]

Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr

#90

Post by wastedhours »

phyzome wrote: post #35
randomsearch wrote: post #23

Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises: 1. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever) 2. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities. 3. A d…

It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?

(1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.
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