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from my sources adjacent to tumblr–from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector–im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i’m hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don’t scroll past this one.
While I don’t think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It’s a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
To be clear, I don’t have any news about any impending doom. But I’ve heard a bit more about what’s going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.
I don’t think even the current staff know what’s going to happen, but honestly, I don’t see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.
And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷
for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.
In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.
Fair warning though, if you’ve been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr’s built in export to back that one up.
If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you’ve added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).
extract the tumblr-utils zip and open the tumblr_backup.py file in notepad
search for “API” and paste in your OAuth consumer key
then go back to the folder where you extracted tumblr-utils and choose open folder in terminal / command prompt, or type cmd.exe in the address bar while inside the folder
now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type “py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]” and hit enter. Example:
Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.
On that note I’m currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.
if you dont have an account on any of these I’ll also be sharing an update via my personal site’s RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!
tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down
if you have OCD that moralistic post it not about you. keep scrolling. i love you
yeah even the one that gave you that sinking terror and has you planning your penance behavior and going through your whole life trying to identify when you did whatever it said about prejudice or abuse or whatever. it’s not about you they don’t know you and they certainly don’t care about you
