Well the message left on the website is certainly an interesting read.
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
To be clear, unless staff trips over the trail of extension cords keeping the servers running, Tumblr likely isn't going anywhere any time soon.
What the info we've seen suggests is that updates are going to slow down, maintenance is maybe going to get a little shaky, and we're going to see more glitches as time goes on and the remaining staff gets further behind their workload.
Is this a good thing? No, absolutely not.
Should you be panicking, jumping overboard, running for the hills, etc? Also no.
So what does it mean?
Well, for myself and several other creatives you all saw tagged in that post, it means we're looking around trying to figure out what to do in the long run. We're not running for the lifeboats. We're just eyeing the iceberg in the distance and getting our shit together in the event that the worst comes to pass.
Speaking for myself, I intend to crawl through the walls of Tumblr until they pry me out of the air vents armed with a broom and oven mitts. I'm not going anywhere until the lights go out, and even then, I'll be chewing on the wires.
But that doesn't mean I'm not looking around for somewhere to land when the time comes.
Myself and several others are not panicking about this, but we are trying to be organized about it.
I'm just old enough to remember when fandom websites being nuked overnight was a very real thing. You'd go to bed one night and wake up the next day to find friends you'd known for years were just gone with no means of contacting them because the site you'd been using got wiped. Entire collections of fandom history were just destroyed in the blink of an eye.
We don't want that again. And the good news is, we have time. We have time to back up our shit, time to swap contact info with our friends, and time to find a new place to exist within our communities while also staying here because Tumblr ain't dead yet.
She's just slowly going to wind down over time.
Unless, of course, they trip over the cables. Then we're fucked.
what's that one thing where they asked how ripely from alien was so realistic and believable as a female character in scifi for once and they were like "well we just took the dude from the original script and made him a girl and changed nothing else. it works bc men and women are the same?" and people were like "woah no way" and then didn't learn anything from that for 20 years
"how do you write such believable men as a woman?" "how do you write such believable women a man?" and the answer people who are good at it always give is "i just write people. were literally the exactly the same. do you think the opposite sex is some sorta totally different animal???" and people respond "woah that's wild. yea i do. and im not gonna stop thinking that goodbye :)"
this is a general, casual post about sexism in media not like a deep dive in the subject or a statement on how Alien has no sexism whatsoever or something. you are capable of understanding this post ok i believe in you
Me being gunned down in a New York speakeasy after Tony Pastroni found out I been sleepin with his girl
me at the cheese factory making the cheese
If you're in Australia you'll already know this, but for our international readers, basically the whole of Australia ground to a halt today because one of our two mobile/internet networks - Optus - just completely shat its dacks for about 9 hours, taking out the country's phones, internet and banking.
The funniest part though, is that apparently when the national broadcaster tried to reach out to find out what was going on - they discovered the quite forseeable problem that everyone at Optus used Optus for their phone and internet, so there was basically no way for their company to contact anyone inside or outside the company to work out what was going on or to try and fix it.
What a country.
Brought to you by the country that couldn't do the 2016 census because the website crashed on census night after they received an "unexpected DDoS attack" that turned out to be the population of Australia trying to fill out the census.
The Optus CEO having to WhatsApp call into the ABC from a local Maccas wifi rather than resorting to using Telstra, the only working mobile network, will never not be funny
i cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have gossipy bitchy littl pirvate group chats or discord servers with like 4 people in them whose stated purpose is posting “new kind of guy” or “this reddit post is so fuckin dumb” or “i got into a fight on twitter today look at this idiot’s reply” so your homies can still see it and laugh and back you up but more importantly, so you are not tempted to post these kind of things on main
seriously, there really is no reason to gossip, the whole “everyone does it” rings hard like all those “everyone spanks their kids” bullshit. Yeah they do, and you still shouldn’t do that. Pick up a weird hobby like organizing bricks by color in minecraft like the rest of us.
Mmmm, gonna back op on this one.
I kind of wonder what you’re picturing when you hear this, because what I’m picturing is stuff like critiquing the fanfic we read way more frankly than we ever would to an author’s face.
“Gossip” has a number of important social functions, and like any other social interaction it is a tool that can be used in good or bad ways.
We discuss positive and negative interactions we’ve had later and in private with our friend groups because this helps us process them. It can be a vibe check (“does it seem like this person was acting out of line towards me?”) or an analysis (“why do you think they did that? what do you think I should have done?”) or data compilation (“is this a pattern? has this happened to anyone else?”) or data sharing (“hey this alarming interaction happened, watch out”) or just venting to channel emotions into a place where they’re safe to have (“friend is processing bad thing and I’m upset on their behalf, so I need do my own processing somewhere else”).
If you can’t complain about your boss to your friends, how do you even figure out what bad boss behavior looks like?
And when some stranger’s being a dick on social media it is usually infinitely healthier and more constructive to go chat that argument out with your friends than to let yourself get sucked into fighting with someone very likely more interested in hurting people than listening.
Figuring out which social circles are the most beneficial places to have which discussions is a huge part of figuring out how to navigate the world and building yourself the support network you need.
“I never talk badly about anyone even in private!” cool high horse you’ve got there. I think you’re a liar though.
If you aren’t a liar now, time will make you one. You’ll eventually repress enough stupid little bullshits that you didn’t properly process for the back pressure to turn you into an asshole who thinks you’re justified. Worst kind of asshole, in my opinion.
Way better to be a bit of a dick in private with some friends about something annoying that you’re still able to remember is objectively Not That Serious than to be a chronic dick in general because you’ve repressed enough irritation that every new inconvenience feels like it’s a huge offense that’s pushing you over the edge.
This is a big part of it:
If you can’t complain about your boss to your friends, how do you even figure out what bad boss behavior looks like?
If you don’t gripe about “that bitch” with your friends, so they can gripe back about their own “that bitch” and you all agree that your complaints are mostly petty but they were annoying to you at the time… then you have no scale for noticing the difference between someone being a petty nuisance and someone being abusive.
Because a big part of the private friend group sharing complaints, is that sometimes one of them will say, “uh, that there? No. That is not normal and not okay. You should do something about that, not just complain to us that you don’t like her.”
Part of how you learn to recognize the difference between “unpleasant behavior” and “abuse” is by listening and sharing stories about behavior you don’t like. There is no nice sharp objective list of “XYZ behaviors are abusive and everything else is a matter of personal preference and you should just remove yourself from the situation if you don’t like it.”
Having a group of friends you can complain with is like having your own private AITA server. They can be supportive with “okay, you were sick and kinda overwhelmed by deadlines, but um, I think you’re a little overreacting here” or they can point out, “no, you’re right; that other person is totally unreasonable and it sucks that you have to put up with it” – or sometimes they can say “errr… do you know a good lawyer? Because this is a call-a-lawyer situation you’re in.”
You don’t have to be deliberately cruel and overtly vicious to find value in having a place to vent.
Also, like, you will have negative opinions about completely innocuous things for completely arbitrary reasons. Not everyone has the same tastes or tolerances, and that’s normal.
I have a very low tolerance for nasally-sounding voices and OOC moments in fanfic. There is nothing morally wrong with either of those things, nor is my opinion about them universal: I just don’t like them. And that means I can and will complain when I come across a nasally-sounding actor on one of my Broadway soundtracks, or when I come across a line in a fic that makes me immediately be like “He Would Not Fucking Say That”… with my husband, or one of my best friends, or a Discord chat of people I know, instead of, I don’t know, sending hate mail to Frances Ruffelle or bookmarking the fic with “extremely OOC and I didn’t like it.”
It is okay to not like things. It is okay to then talk about how you didn’t like it. It is better to do that privately with people who are not emotionally connected to the situation than it is to say it anywhere where it might get back to that person.