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The thing about tumblr’s death knells is… it’s news, but it’s also not. We’ve been watching company after company try to make tumblr profitable and fail for like a decade now. We’ve had sign after sign that this site isn’t sustainable. We had the NSFW ban. We’ve had any number of changes hostile to the userbase in the name of making tumblr more like this or that platform and trying and failing to appeal to new users. That tumblr’s staff is being reduced to a skeleton crew is unfortunate but it’s in no way surprising. Automattic was never going to make tumblr profitable in the way that a company wants a platform to be profitable and frankly, I’m surprised it took them this long to realize that. Because, and this is also a discussion that has been going on for years, fandom is not profitable.
I left here and came back once already, so my personal response to all of this is a big shrug. It’s a bummer, but we don’t have a lot of places to go. I like dreamwidth but it’s not a viable tumblr replacement and without major changes it’s never going to be, though I do encourage people who are interested in a mainly text-based platform and don’t mind an LJ-style interface to give it a shot. Back up your stuff, get in the habit of crossposting, and make arrangements so that you can keep in touch with friends across multiple platforms. And at the end of the day, recognize that any corporate-owned social media platform will ultimately be hostile to fandom, and approach them accordingly.
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