i was going to say "tumblr has really done it this time" but the last five years of tumblr have been a real rollercoaster of tumblr-doing-it-this-time. that said - they really have done it this time.

in the span of a week or two their ceo matt mullenweg had an insane meltdown where he personally singled out a trans user for saying that she 'hope(s) photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.' matt, who was actively on holiday, took this 'threat' so seriously that he banned user predstrogen and their backup accounts, before taking to twitter to make the freakout more public and more unhinged. this (rightfully) brought a bit of a shitstorm down on the website that has a documented history of A. not treating trans people amazingly and B. having kind of piss poor moderation (see: app store takedown and porn ban)

_{shoutout to carhammerexplosionmatt for documenting this screenshot and other photomatt screenshots in this dropbox}

soon after this, it was rumored and then announced by tumblr that they were selling their user data to midjourney for ai training. there is a setting to disable it, but it runs on an honour system for the removal of files which i frankly do not trust. you can see exactly why something like this would be done - it's extremely lucrative for the company, but it doesn't seem like a move that the core tumblr development team would push for. instead, it seems like a bit of a money grubbing move from the top to try and push the company back into the green. my art is obviously not being used to feed any artist-specific models, but i might figure out glazing and nightshading nevertheless.

post 1 and post 2 about the tumblr ai situation

in any case, this has felt like the sign that we needed to finally start shifting over to cohost. some other friends have recommended pillowfort which also seems like it could have potential, but on my initial skim cohost seems like the the experience i'm going to prefer. the difference has been handily summarised by my friend Aludra from the doodle crew art group

[2:49 PM]Aludra: Cohost doesn't follow an algorithm, you absolutely have to find people through tags. NSFW is allowed and must be tagged. You have the freedom to code just about anything into the posts. A browser game, music (they were adding that feature last time I checked), pictures, fancy wobbling text instead of a gif, etc.

[2:51 PM]Aludra: Pillowfort is like Tumblr and Reddit merged. The interface is incredibly similar to tumblr. Liking posts, reblogging, however you can't add your own notes to a reblog. You CAN however, reblog your posts into communities, which is where the reddit part comes in. So if you follow 5 different art communities, you can post your picture to your blog, but also every community you think the post fits in, to get noticed more easily

[2:54 PM]Aludra: Also allows for NSFW, and very, very long posts. No gifs yet (no gifs for bluesky either) because they apparently take a lot of funds to host, so hosting a gif yourself and inserting it into a text post (they let you add images wherever you want, unlike an image post) would be the better option

[2:56 PM]Aludra: You join and the only community you're automatically a part of is introductions. Post an introduction, then go search for things you like in the communities and join them. You can join but mute the community from being shown on your feed, but also just watch a community and not join it. This way your feed doesn't get cluttered with things you don't like or get filled too fast

how convenient! thank you aludra! we're living in a bit of a quiet renaissance of new grassroots social media platforms, and if it wasn't for the big hitters still having an absolute stranglehold on the market it would be super exciting. which is not to say that a site needs mass adoption to be fun to use, but it does need to hit the critical mass of more-than-a-couple-hundred-active-users.

in any case, im going with cohost for the time being because A. i haven't really missed reddit since i stopped using it and heading back to a site that is reddit-like doesn't really excite me and B. you need to wait for an invite or pay five bucks to get into pillowfort. say no more, i'll wait for it to open up properly. it's also a little bit ugly compared to cohost imho, which isn't a reason to not use it, but it is a nice bonus.

while pillowfort seems a little more wishy-washy in its goal, cohost is very targeted towards providing the old-tumblr experience with none of the corporate bullshit. theres a couple of things that i really enjoy about the site so far:

1. it's crowd funded - we'll see if this actually works out in the long run, but cohost has dedicated themselves to running the site off generous users rather than ads and tracking (see their about page for their full set of core tenets). whether that works out in the long run is yet to be seen, but if i get enough value out of it i would be totally happy to drop five dollars a month to help keep the site up

2. it's not about metrics - cohost doesn't have a like or share counter like basically every other social media site. i'm super into this, because i've always found them as an intrusive annoyance that makes me think more about fake social credits instead of making connections with my fellow humans or looking at cool art. this might also be something that actually pushes people away, because a lot of users tend to be driven by the number go up skinner box, but given that its a niche site to begin with, i suppose we'll see

3. they don't have mobile apps - i mentioned the apple app store takedown before when talking about tumblr's big problems, and cohost has a really clever system to bypass that. the site is focused entirely on the web experience, and leverages progressive web apps to make it a bit more convenient on mobile. pwa's allow for websites to be presented as an app and leverage some handy app features like native notifications and storage, if needed. this unfortunately makes installing it a little bit more of a fiddle (which could hurt userbase growth), but means that they're not beholden to google and apple to keep their app up and push updates

_{(this is what cohost looks like on my phone)}

theres a couple of other cute features that i like: because the app isn't on an app store they can bring back nsfw posts; i was never really that interested in tumblr as a porn location, but loosening up restrictions means posting art that is on the more risque side isn't risking your whole page being taken down.

posts supports full markdown and embeds, meaning you can post a youtube video or a bandcamp album or an itch.io game in the post - this gives loads of freedom on the user side and makes supporting out-of-site content a trivial job for cohost developers. i'd be interested to see if this ends up becoming some kind of security risk, but the security currently seems to be pretty solid, asking the user to either allow a full site (such as all posts from bandcamp.com) or just this one embed

anyway, i don't have a stellar way to end this thought vomit, so i'll probably just spruik my cohost - it's moving a bit slowly at the moment but i'm hoping my favourite artists will continue shifting over as tumblr continues to fall apart