Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!

[denise]

With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it's legal under US law, it's okay to post here. We're 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we're here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.

Tumblr's definition of "adult content" seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It's definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr's, I won't lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it'll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that's small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.

For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don't at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we've been working on but haven't yet finished, because we're dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced -- it's looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr's content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content -- so even once we have one, it's even odds on how long it'll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We've been trying to improve the website's experience on small screens in the meantime, and that's an ongoing project that we'll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.

Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you're here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we're happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!

(Comment notification emails may be delayed for an hour or two, due to the high volume of emails generated by a dw_news post. This was posted at 2105/9:05PM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notification emails until at least two hours after that. I also apologize to anyone who gets a notification for this post twice; we're trying to figure that one out.)

Comments

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[denise]

We sure do and we sure are!

That sounds like I'm being flippant, but the question of "what is pornography" has been, for hundreds of years, the tool used by societies, governments, and corporations as an excuse to censor and suppress anyone who doesn't match the societally-accepted attitudes on gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and sexual expression. Because of how "societally-accepted attitudes on etc etc" are formed, "pornography" as a label falls disproportionately on minority populations and their cultural practices and the cultural, social, and legal penalties for producing "pornography" follow.

US judicial precedent, for years, defined obscenity primarily by the classic "I'll know it when I see it" -- that is, personal, subjective opinion. (Today's definition of obscenity that's replaced it is less pithily-summarized but equally personal and subjective; one of the three elements for a judicial ruling of obscenity specifically includes community standards, although nobody has ever defined the "community" involved, and so it is equally subjective and equally inequitably-enforced; in practice, it's been impossible to get a conviction for obscenity in the US in years, precisely because of the vagueness of the definition.) Our goal from the beginning was to remove as many subjective judgement calls from ToS enforcement procedures as we could, because subjective judgement calls, especially on adult-content related issues, lead to the burden of enforcement primarily landing against those who are gender/gender-identity/gender-expression and sexuality minorities, such as LGBT folks, trans folks, gender non-conforming folks, sex workers, and the like.

We sidestep all that by saying, flat-out, that with certain limited exceptions that are necessary to preserve the quality of the service for everyone, such as spam cleanup, it's okay to post here unless it's inherently illegal under US law. This undoubtedly includes a lot of content that people think shouldn't be allowed to post, but everyone's line for "people shouldn't be able to post this!" falls differently, and by outsourcing our particular definitions to "inherently illegal under US law", it lets us have a single standard that involves very few subjective elements.

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[starsandsockgarters]

I wish I could like DW comments.

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[clippedwings]

Honestly, if I could like posts and replies, and then @-symbol users or comms that would be perfect for me.

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[meinterrupted]

It's a little more complicated than Twitter or Tumbler's @'ing and doesn't notify them of your comment, but you can tag users/comms easily:
<user name="meinterrupted"> becomes meinterrupted

You can even specify a site: <user name="shinykari" site="tumblr"> becomes shinykari

You can find more info about the tags on the DW FAQ (where I just found out that the quotation marks are optional, but I'm too old to change now!)

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[kore]

Just comment with "Excellent comment!" XD

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[lavendertook]

You just did. Words are awesome.

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[starsandsockgarters]

Oh my god all y'all

It's exaggeration to express agreement

I know 'words are awesome' and I know you can comment to express liking a thing, that is literally what I did, it was shorthand for 'I wish I could express in more ways than currently available to me how much I like this thing because I just like it that much'

Please stop being pedantic and condescending over a Joke

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[kore]

the question of "what is pornography" has been, for hundreds of years, the tool used by societies, governments, and corporations as an excuse to censor and suppress anyone who doesn't match the societally-accepted attitudes on gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and sexual expression. Because of how "societally-accepted attitudes on etc etc" are formed, "pornography" as a label falls disproportionately on minority populations and their cultural practices and the cultural, social, and legal penalties for producing "pornography" follow.

THANK
YOU

Beautifully said, and this comment is a great example of why I'm here, and why I stay here.

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[magnuschase]

I've been on this site for just a day and I already love the owners.

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[denise]

I have a tendency to drop thousand-word mini-essays about the sociology of social media (and all the things it leads to) in comments to news posts, heh. It's been a running joke for a decade that if you took away my parentheses and my semicolons, I'd be unable to communicate ANYTHING.

(Welcome, btw! I'm half the ownership team; mark is the other half. He's on vacation in Finland right now. I'm beginning to think that us going on vacation is the trigger for social media sites to meltdown; the last two big ones also happened when one of us was on vacation...)

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[magnuschase]

Hahaha, guess I got something to look forward to on this site---your sociology comments!

Thank you for the welcome. Gotta wonder what happens when both of you are on vacation at the same time...everything implodes?

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[lavendertook]

So where would you have to go to bring down Facebook? We can start a vacation fund for you . . .

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[alexseanchai]

Finland, huh?

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[bikergeek]

<3 Thank you for standing up for free speech and freedom of expression.

I myself arrived here not in the wake of "Strikethrough", but when LiveJournal chose to move their servers to Russia, where advocating for LGBTQ rights and related causes is illegal, and forced their users to accept a binding TOS written in Russian, a language I do not read or understand, and to agree to the jurisdiction of Russian law in all their dealings with LJ. I NOPEd right the heck out of there.

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[digophelia]

Thank you.

(frozen comment) RP journal, but what the hell

[attackpatternbattista]

Can I say I love you guys and how you've got our backs.

And how you're extremely transparent about how all this shit goes on.

Unlike, say, Tumblr, who'd do some arcane sorcery to their site, and then make the announcement.

[purpleartifice]

Thank you. How did this puritan have an account here this long and then balk at the mere idea of anyone seeing porn here. As long as the pedophiles, porn bots, and nazis (a huge problem that tumblr refused to act on) are gone; I'm good.

[attie]

Nazis are, I believe, legal under US law. I haven't seen any around, and I don't think they'd enjoy the DW infrastructure (it's so much harder to troll here), but if they were to show up they'd presumably be allowed to stay...

[alexseanchai]

Nazis are also, by definition, abusive. Y'know, what with the "wanting lots of demographics dead" thing. (denise is a member of multiple such demographics.) So I expect DW Abuse is perfectly willing to kick Nazis out on their ass.

[pauamma]

I'm not a member of the ToS team, so I don't know if any enforcement action based on that happened at all, but the DW terms of service prohibit "any Content that is harmful, threatening, abusive, hateful, [...]". That alone would severely limit any Nazis' ability to er, propagandize meaningfully.

[elf]

Nazi blogs may be allowed. Nazi trolling of other blogs won't be. Among the features that sent Nazis to Twitter and Tumblr instead of LJ, DW and other clones: You can't reblog other people's things; you have to comment - and they can delete the comments or ban you from their blogs. They can't set up a stronghold and then go stomp on people; it's too easy for the other people to just cut them off. Blogs can block anon commenting, and can block individuals, and can set some or all of their posts to "access list only" - only the people you've chosen can see those posts.

And while I don't think DW is going to delete blogs just for being pro-Nazi, they absolutely will delete them for harassment. (Unlike Twitter, unlike Tumblr.)

[purpleartifice]

I suppose that's the best we can hope for. And yes; That is better than twitter, tumblr, AND facebook.

[attie]

You explained it so much better than me, thank you!

[denise]

*cracks knuckles* Okay, you are the winner of the next massive word dump, heh!

The distinction we use in cases like that is really subtle, and sometimes people misinterpret it as "they support Nazis" or "they support pedophiles" (for the record, we are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-pedophile). Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.) This applies to anything like hate crimes or sex crimes or what-have-you, but I don't particularly want to keep talking about those, either.

* Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it
* Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).

Does that make sense? Basically, and for a lot of the same reasons we allow "pornography" that crosses some people's lines of That Is Not Okay, we don't try to judge beliefs, we look at what people are doing or advocating with those beliefs. It's still a fuzzy line sometimes, but we've taken out as much of the fuzz as we can.

(All of the above is theoretical, btw. In practice, we don't have anything to the best of my knowledge that even comes close to the line, aside from one non-English-language country-specific community that reflects the local prejudices of the country in question and is still pretty far off from anything like the major Nazi infestation problem Twitter and Tumblr have. But after having been doing online ToS enforcement for almost twenty years oh GOD I feel old I've learned that it's best to have your content policies set up to cover the worst-case scenarios ahead of time and communicate them to your users as clearly and as often as you can, so that people can make their own decisions about whether your site's content enforcement policies mesh with what they want from a site.)

If you want to read more, there's a whole bunch about our content enforcement philosophy in this older news post and in comment replies to people asking for clarification. (Oh, and porn bots fall under the category of "spam and the like" in my statements above: any account that exists only to promote or advertise something, whether that's porn site or money making scheme or even their dentistry practice or whatever, is suspend-on-sight.)

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[nenya_kanadka]

I came to DW because the interface was a lot like LiveJournal-that-was.

I stay because of things like this.

THANK YOU