The girl nipples have eyelashes

[lizbee]

In case you missed it, there are Tumblr shenanigans ahoy.

An extremely rough timeline, assembled from my own fuzzy memory without recourse to sources:

• Tumblr's app got dropped from the app store because the site carries actual child porn. This has been an issue for the site for a while, but only became an actual problem they were motivated to solve when it affected new sign ups and therefor revenue. Because Tumblr is THE WORST.
• Various accounts have been deleted and tags wiped since, largely based on reports? Because Tumblr is THE WORST, a lot of these were just regular fan sites and innocuous tags that attracted reports, because a noisy minority of fans can't tell the difference between "a pairing I don't like" and "child abuse material". Allegedly the "chronic pain" tag was wiped, too, but I can still see it -- I think caching might be an issue there.
• I woke up yesterday to discover that Tumblr has announced that, come 17 December, all adult material (including "female presenting nipples") will be banned from the site. At this point they say written material is safe, but the actual terms are fuzzy.
• The entire internet loses its mind over "female presenting nipples", because that's hilarious. 
• But also Tumblr's new Offensive Content Detecting AI is out automatically flagging posts as sensitive, with a notable bias against even the most chaste of queer content, eg, my friends' engagement picture, a screencap of Dax and Kira and a declaration that DS9 is lesbian culture, Alexander Siddig's face, etc. 

So even if you don't post or consume adult content on Tumblr, as a platform for fandom, art or social interaction, come 17 December, it's going to be a lot quieter and less fun to use. 

I'm honestly kind of bummed. I whinge a lot about Tumblr, and I think that it's a terrible platform for interaction, but it's great for sharing. Especially fan art -- I'm not a great artist, or even a very good one, but I felt comfortable throwing my silly sketches out into the ether.

And it was a wonderful place for just going, "Hey, I like this." You didn't have to create fanworks, or even write up a post to express your fondness for something, you could just reblog a gifset. It was easy to be a casual fan. Dreamwidth doesn't have that capability, which is why I think it's perceived as a more challenging platform. 

Eh. Platforms come and platforms go, and Tumblr won't disappear overnight. But it's a shame. 

(Pillowfort is being touted as the alternative, but ... well, it's back from its security audit hiatus, but the servers are robust in the most Journalfen sense of the word.)

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

I realised eventually that your post title was about how cartoon characters are marked as female, but for a while I was thinking about Shelley's alleged drug hallucination of a woman with eyes instead of nipples.

[lizbee]

That's exactly the sort of sick thinking that Tumblr's trying to stamp out!

(I have seen some EXCELLENT sketches of nipples wearing false moustaches in the last 24 hours.)

[jamethiel]

Tumblr had it all over for dreamwidth for graphics, and low-content shitposts. The trouble is, for me, the low-content brain-dumpy shitposts combined with a lack of fannish activity meant that I didn't post to Dreamwidth. It kind of feels like the last five years have gone by without any sense of accomplishment or progress: they must have existed, but I can't remember any of it.

[lizbee]

Yeah, I need to download a back-up of my Tumblr, and then go through it to sort out what's worth copying to DW and what I can lose without regret.

[sabotabby]

I like Tumblr but I'd like it more if people came here. I guess I'll check out Pillowfort, but I am Old and don't want to make a new thing.

[musesfool]

Pillowfort may be back but it truly is robust! And also apparently is on a domain that doesn't allow NSFW content? Which might be a problem. *hands*

I agree that tumblr was a good low-effort way to participate in fandom - I have spent many a night scrolling my dash and liking things because anything else was too much to handle. And I will miss the easy access to fanart and pictures of my BSOs. But wow, they really screwed the pooch with this policy change.

[lizbee]

Pillowfort may be back but it truly is robust!

And, when it is working ... well, "working" ... I clicked on Post 1 to read the comments. That was slow, but it worked.

I clicked on Post 2 to read the comments. Got the comments for Post 1. Had to reload my feed to get the comments for Post 2.

Tried to read the comments for Post 3. Got -- try to contain your shock -- the comments for Post 2.

And also apparently is on a domain that doesn't allow NSFW content?

So I learned! And some people on Twitter seem quite cross at me for pointing it out?

(Other sites which host adult content are also hosted on .io domains, but that just means the rule is not, right now, enforced.)

[cathyw]

fwiw they've said they're aware of that and will be looking for a new domain. but. sigh.

[musesfool]

So I learned! And some people on Twitter seem quite cross at me for pointing it out?

*rolls eyes* Of course they are.

Other sites which host adult content are also hosted on .io domains, but that just means the rule is not, right now, enforced.

Exactly. But as we have seen again and again, at some point, it will be. Usually when a big sale is involved.

[ironed_orchid]

I'm currently in can't take my eyes away from the trainwreck mode.

[sugar_fey]

I'm mostly in the tired, "this has all happened before and this will all happen again" phase. One thing I've learned in my many years of participating in fandom is that Fandom Finds A Way. Often this results in a shift in fannish culture, like how things used to be text-based in the LJ heyday and now everything is driven by visuals, but fandom itself survives.

You're right about tumblr making it easy to be a casual fan. One thing I do dislike about tumblr as a fanfic writer is the lack of any community-style space. In the LJ days it was easy to find a community for your ship or fandom and read through a lot of fic, especially as a new fan. On tumblr you have maybe a 2-3 day window for your fic to get reblogged and find an audience before it gets buried in the tags, and once it's buried it's very difficult for new readers to find it. So if people start bringing active communities back on Dreamwidth I'd certainly welcome that.

[lizbee]

Agreed! I've seen people talk about it being hard to find fic on LJ and DW, but I think a lot of folk have forgotten that communities were/are a thing.

Which reminds me, I should post the links to my completed series to spacefungusparty.

[starlady]

I think at this stage in my fannish life I have accepted the fact that every fannish platform will always be imperfect--no one has enough spare cash to set up a site that does everything we want and that is user rather than ad-revenue supported. (There's a whole book to be written about how the ad dollars Tumblr is chasing are all fake ad dollars anyway and the site was never really monetizable in any way but user support, which they never did or wanted to do, but I digress.)

I wish I could have any confidence in Pillowfort. I'm skeptical of DW, and DW has been around for 10+ years at this point.

[marymac]

Not even getting into how amazingly unaware of GDPR Pillowfort are. I don't think they can stand to lose 4% of their turnover (what turnover)...

[laurenthemself]

I'm not even going to attempt Pillowfort.

[sabrina]

I need to backup my tumblrs, and then figure out what I want to save, etc. I've cross-posted a lot of my FIC stuff over here, but not much else, really.

Short of fandom really taking the effort to create the space (like they did with ao3) this is going to keep happening, so.

[askalis]

the servers are robust in the most Journalfen sense of the word.

... This is quite possibly the greatest sentence I had ever read about server stability (and, given that it's literally a part of my job, I read a lot of them).

Also: I am still totally holding out for art- and low-effort based fandom to slowly discover Mastodon (and for longform fandom meta to come back to Dreamwidth, ofc).

[nenya_kanadka]

Oh, hey, I'm actually *reading* my flist for the first time in...months!

*waves enthusiastically*