The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.
Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that.
Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult.
If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there.
If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably.
We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more.
Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.
Seriously be patient with Pillowfort. They’re undertaking something enormously complex on a tiny budget. Y’all come in demanding it work just like Tumblr immediately – especially if any of the whingers start in with the “well where is all that money going!?!” bullshit – and it won’t happen.
So I made a tweet about how Maciej Ceglowski (aka Pinboard guy) should consult with fandom on how to build a new fandom platform inclusive of not just text, but images and multimedia.
And then Maciej DMed me and said if fandom (I realize this does not include all parts of fandom) can get a consensus spec of what this platform should consist of, he’ll see what we can do. I have split the document into requirements and nice to haves. I know I’m not going to get everything, but hopefully this is a good enough start to get the ball rolling.
I kind of laughed like “Haha, what hubris, my tech friends say it’ll take a couple million dollars to create a platform like this, one does not simply walk into Mordor” but then all my tech friends were like, “Uh, hon? It’s
Maciej Ceglowski. He either HAS a couple million to spend, or can talk his friends into fronting the money.”
So, uh… go make a wishlist!
I think my favorite part of the document is the minor hints of, “oh hey, could this be a nonprofit like AO3?”
Because yes. Yes it could. “Literary” is one of the types of nonprofits. “Place for people to share creative communications” is definitely in the range for nonprofit orgs.
I have read through the original ideas, and even as I normal user with no coding experience I could get behind very many of these ideas.
I feel like we don’t need another literary nonprofit for fandom, because we already have that. That’s OTW/AO3 and it does what it does pretty well; also Dreamwidth (also fan-owned and fan-run), Pillowfort, Twitter, and Discord exist for text-based folks like me. What we need most of all is what AO3 doesn’t do, which is 1) Image hosting and posting, first and foremost. In the Tumblr meltdown, fanARTISTS are the people losing the most, not writers. It needs to be a good platform for fanart, gifs, vids, etc. and also be able to link/share to other platforms easily.
this post will be updated as I find more websites to add! please check with the original before reblogging to see if there’s an updated version, and message me with more suggestions if you have them!!
for general use
myspace.com – yes, it still exists, i’m just as surprised as you
soup.io – very similar to tumblr, plus it can import your tumblr blog
twitter.com – allows posting both text and photos in sets, allows retweets
livejournal.com – still an option, but questionably safe for fandom
wordpress.com – old and well-established, often considered the default
geared towards artists and photographers
deviantart.com – huge community, allows posting art + sorting into folders
furaffinity.net – similar to DA but for furries, easy to display commish info
instagram.com – photo and video posts, excellent tag search
piczel.tv – allows both streaming and posting art / photosets to a gallery
pixiv.net – huge anime art community, allows livestreaming
paid platforms
patreon.com – subscription-based access to many diff types of content
pillowfort.io – still in beta, but should function almost identically to tumblr
typepad.com – similar to wordpress but with reblogging and a dash
ways to save your current tumblr posts
use the wayback machine! you do have to archive each page of your blog individually but once you do all the content, including media, will be saved exactly as it was at the moment you archived it.
wordpress and soup both allow you to directly import whole tumblr blogs, and if i recall correctly it’s something both dreamwidth and pillowfort have said they are working on.
if you have some knowledge of computers you can try this github solution which uses a python script to download your whole blog to your computer.
even if you don’t know anything about programming or the command line
they give a very good beginners tutorial on how to use it so you should still give it a shot!
TechieHux 