Even in its prime, Tumblr was never profitable. It was sold and resold to several companies who never had a clear vision for what to do with it, other than run ads to generate revenue. Its main draw was its users. For several years it was the social media platform for LGBTQ and fandoms, along with many niche interests.
Like Reddit, many users had a love-hate relationship with it, and as its policies grew more and more at odds with its power users, the communities which existed fell apart. Banning NSFW content and the heavy-handed automated moderation meant to enforce it was the final straw for me. AI was used to try to detect images of nudes, but tagged a huge amount of false positives such as pictures of animals or even sand dunes. I had my main blog incorrectly tagged as NSFW which made it harder to keep in contact or be discoverable by other users, so I quit. Reddit’s over-reactions to large subs being set to NSFW shows this is a pain point for them. u/spez has made it clear that he will push through whatever policies he wants, regardless of vocal feedback for the actual users of the site.
Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self. I check in every so often. Only a handful of the blogs I followed are still active, mostly ones that didn’t interact much with others to begin with. Trending content is incredibly generic, even moreso than /all. Very few of these posts hit more than a few thousand “notes” (for comparison I, a fairly obscure blogger, had about 80,000 notes on my most viral post). When July 1 rolls around I expect Reddit will start to follow a similar pattern. The power users who haven’t left already will drop off the grid one by one until Reddit loses its center of gravity.
Further reading, first one with NSFW-ish photos
https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/the-death-of-tumblr.html
My biggest concern when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy was the fact that all the main Lemmy instances had big “No Porn!” rules front and center. Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet, and the foundation of human inventiveness and drive for innovation.
Fortunately that seems to have largely been swamped by the Reddit refugees. Along with the disturbing prevalence of tankies, the second biggest concern I had when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy. Things seem to be well on track now.
I’ll take “true things they’ll never teach in school” for $200, Alex.
My hope is that federation will be a good solution to these issues. Users can choose a home instance based on the types of content they do or don’t want to see. Instances with conflicting focuses or policies can defederate from one another.
Or a death match. Idk. Just thinking out loud here.
There’s legal issues involving hosting, and that includes mirroring, or acting as an aggregator for, porn. Many admins simply don’t want to deal with the headache of that.
It’s fine if the fediverse is (mostly) split into sfw and nsfw sides, after all, most people had different accounts for both on reddit in the first place, and much of the rest should have.
And it’s not like admins are defederating lemmynsfw.com – they’re only blocking nsfw posts, lemmynsfw wisely has a strict “tag everything” policy. Which means that if someone wants to use their lemmynsfw account to engage in discussion on the sfw side, nothing’s stopping them, as long as it’s sfw.
If there’s no porn how come I had to get a user script to block all the god-damned porn?
The infinite feed bug kept forcing porn into my face so often i still don’t feel comfortable looking at lemmy at work.
As I said, the no-porn rules appear to have fallen by the wayside once the surge of Reddit refugees started arriving. Before then, though, all the major instances had no-porn rules.
I don’t see how NSFW content can make its place on non-profit fediverse. NSFW is very taxing to moderate, so it makes perfect sense to me that volunteers would refuse to deal with it and outright ban porn (while still being more understanding of non-pornographic nudity than say Instagram, which banned a museum from publishing pictures of nude statues 🤦).
Your view of the internet must be pretty sad
Your view of the Internet is naïve and unrealistic.
This isn’t Reddit people! Don’t downvote a perfectly good comment just because you don’t agree.
Add a reply (or upvote one that already shares your thoughts) and move on. Keep the discussion thriving. Downvote hate and spam.
It was the last line of their comment that earned a down vote from me.
If you can’t get porn on it, then it isn’t a viable platform.
That’s just how it is, the ability to use a medium for pornography affects the popularity of that medium. Consumers want porn, and if they can’t find it here they’ll go somewhere else.
Wtf? Why are people upvoting this garbage?
Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, there are TONNES of “platforms” that literally ban porn content from being uploaded to them. What are you talking about? Not viable? The biggest fucking social media site on the internet does not allow porn, the biggest video site on the internet does not allow porn.
Redditors have seriously broken brains and only know how to repeat what they’ve read other broken redditors repeat and upvote ad-infinitum without every actually thinking for 5 seconds about how ridiculous what they’re saying is.
lemmynsfw.com is an instance specialising in exactly that type of moderation. It’s easier when you specialise and don’t simultaneously have to deal with other stuff, at least in a fine-grained way (that is, more fine-grained than “import standard instance blocklist to not federate with instances full of nazis, griefers, and other types of brigades”)
Porn was one of the things that drove development of many of the tools of the internet. It just happens that those innovations have non-porn benefits as well. Things like video and audio compression rates that allowed low-bandwidth streaming. I still find it amazing that I can watch moving video with synchronized audio at speeds barely faster than dialup.
In a post T1 world, we sometimes fail to see what our ingenuity and our desire for certain outcomes created.
We can always debate whether or not the normalization of nudity and sexual experience is good or bad for a community or society. But it can’t be denied that the American desire for pornographic materials was a significant factor (if not the defining factor) in the development of consumer-driven internet.