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

[prettyarbitrary]

A thought on this front:

I agree Tumblr reblogs can do a lot of damage to human community boundaries. But on the other hand, the ability to reblog content so you can let people in on the context of a conversation you're involved in and would like to invite them in on CAN be a useful tool--one I've been feeling the lack of since I came back over here.

On Tumblr, when a post is reblogged, the original content of the post is frozen, but the OP loses control of it for purposes of editing, access, or deletion. They're unable to erase the presence of that post or break their own role in the conversation. Awesome for artists wanting attentio for their art, but bad for a meta writer who finds themselves embroiled in a controversy, targeted by abuse or just regrets what they posted.

On Pillowfort, the post remains forever and only in control of the OP, with the sole exception of who might see it, but they can also choose whether to reblog it or not to begin with. Awesome for the OP, bad for people wanting to engage in any kind of conversation - but also bad for bad actors who want to use it as an opportunity for abuse.

On LJ, as I recall, reblogging actually reposted the post, with a copy back to the original. But the reposter had the ability to edit their copy of the original post--which has the potential to create cases of misrepresentation in a heated debate, or diversion of attention/traffic from an artist who just wants proper credit.

What worked well for me on Tumblr, though, was that if you included a read-more in a post, then even if it was reblogged, that read-more acted as a cut back to the original post. Thus, anything I put under it stayed under my control for editing and deletion, but anything I put outside it was preserved and traveled with the reblogs.

A setup like this, with the added ability to control permission to reblog, could solve all the issues possibly?
* The OP could decide whether or not to set their content free to begin with
* The OP could decide how much of their content to protect or expose
* The OP would retain the ability to edit/amend/delete core content, and to remove themselves from the conversation
* The reblogger wouldn't face the threat of losing the context or content of any conversations that might build up around it
* Potential rebloggers would have the information they need to assess their risk and interest in reblogging
* AND it creates a context of its own--one that disavows the reblogger's ultimate responsibiilty for the content under the read-more, and adds a layer of protection against immediate, unwilling exposure to altered content--thus addressing concerns I've seen about "what if someone makes a widely circulated post on Pillowfort and then changes it to bestiality or something?"