this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Café
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Welcome to our virtual third place, The Café.
Come on in and make a new human connection over a cup of coffee (or Teh Tarik). This is a casual community, do whatever you want, share your oyen pics, your frustrations, and even organize a weekend picnic with the community. The world is your oyster.
Rules are simple, be kind and civil with each other. As with any other café, rude patrons will be kicked out.
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Tumblr's been getting shittier for a long time. They lost alot of popularity when banning nudity back in 2018, and then they introduced "blaze", where you pay for visibility... Some people started returning when Twitter and Reddit turned to shit, but the platform had already deteriorated so much, the only ones who still chose it over the Fediverse are people whose think it's too complicated to use.
I wouldn't say it's going shittier, my words on the fediverse community to the contrary. Tumblr staff do listen to feedback, for example finally reversing the default tab to Following (chronological feed) from For You (algorithm), they brought back reblog graph, they removed by default long post and reblog trail (the combination of which is called the reblog chain) but gave toggles to turn them back on. I know whole groups of people who were on the earliest LiveJournal who are still active on Tumblr today - they did hit the right spot there. (Those group are resigned to the porn ban, not angry, because they are the kind of people who track things and figured out banning porn and queer contents were about advertising back in early 2000's, tumblr's hands were tied and if people took them seriously back then we might not have advertising-related enshittification today. Those people brought AO3 into being, they are perfectly capable of coding a tumblr clone if they so wish. or move en masse like they did LJ to Dreamwidth, then Tumblr).
The dashboard redesign took everyone by surprise, but xkit the third fixed it in about a week, and if they were really serious about making everyone use the layout they want xkit wouldn't have worked for about as long as tumblr has existed. xkit developers have come and gone from working on the extension. Tumblr's paid features are fun, extremely regiftable and targeted advertisement doesn't use tumblr data.
I wouldn't say they are doing things perfectly, but they are the only long-form chronological tagged blogging platform left aside from making your own site.
Fediverse isn't complicated to use - fediverse offerings are whole different things together. Tumblr users live and die by the tags and chained reblogs. Mastodon has tagging (hashtags) but it is a microblogging system and posts cannot be chained organically (1/12...12/12 style isn't) while Lemmy does not even have a tagging system and based on the people who are actively developing it, will never have. You cannot interact the way tumblr users interact on either.
And Blaze...has no influence on popularity. Pay x dollar to put this post on y number of random dashboard. One single transaction. No one is going to follow you if you blaze crap.