To: Tumblr Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr CEO New York City, New York, United States
Dear Jeff D’Onofrio,
On December 17, Tumblr will be banning porn from its site.
By banning “adult content” from your website in truth you categorically ban sex workers regardless of how they are using your platform. You cut them off from the ability to build an audience for their work, and what’s even worse, you declare their very existence as obscene.
Tumblr allows every content creator, artist, or small entrepreneur to build an audience and communicate with this audience at any moment in time – if you do not work in the adult industry of course.
Many brands use social media to sell products. Social media and eCommerce are interlocked. You take this now away from every adult content creator around the globe. And that is wrong.
You mentioned in a blog post titled “A better, more positive Tumblr”:
“There is no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”
You are wrong: There is a shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content, in particular when it comes to shadowbanning and the ability to also advertise on these sites.
Look, here is what we do:
Sharesome is a site that welcomes all the people that you just kicked off your platform. You gave them time until December 17th to export a backup of their blog to save their years of work. Meanwhile we will develop an import tool, so they can move to us, and we leave you with all the white supremacist Nazi blogs – because we ban that kind of shit.
I think this is where I’m headed. The format is nice and its easily accessible for adult and NSFW content.
I look forward to seeing our amazing hypno, kink and fetish community moving to a welcoming home. This feels like a good first stop to move.
I’m gonna check this out.
I have no idea if Sharesome is good or not – only that they really want to get the adult content creators from Tumblr on their site. That being said, a lot of people seem to be claiming the letter is fake and yet a simple visit to the Twitter account of the Sharesome founder would prove it’s an actual thing – the post is even pinned on his account. https://twitter.com/RalfKappe?lang=en
hey, this one might be an option for the actual adult content, if they’re really looking to pick up the quirky indie Tumblr contingent.
As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.
Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that.
Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult.
If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there.
If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably.
We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more.
Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.
yes this
most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this
is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes. are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.
but it’s not a ready-made replacement for tumblr. set your expectations accordingly.
YOU FUCKING IDIOTS MASTODON IS USED AS A MEETING HUB FOR PEDOPHILES BECAUSE ITS ALMOST COMPLETELY UNSUPERVISED
for further addendum
hey so
plus they cant interact with us and we cant interact with them. .social is its own thing entirely
I hate seeing posts like this with blatant misinformation garnering thousands upon thousands of notes so, here’s how Mastodon actually works for those that aren’t familiar with it (and also why you should recognize people calling it “a meeting hub for pedophiles” and “completely unsupervised” as just blatantly incorrect / fearmongering)
Mastodon is different from any popular social media you are probably accustomed to- tumblr, twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. It’s different in that mastodon is free software that can be set up and run by anyone. Mastodon is based on an open standard (called Activitypub) designed to be able to freely share Content in between “federated” servers.
If those words flew over your head, I’ll give an example. Basically, just imagine mastodon like e-mail. There are thousands of websites out there that you could sign up for to get an email address, such as gmail, yahoo, outlook, protonmail, etc. You could even set up your own email server if you have the technical know-how to do so.
Yet, despite the fact that all of these individual websites are owned and operated by different companies/groups, all with varying rules and methods of operation, no matter what email service you sign up for anywhere on the internet, any email address can send emails to anyone else on the internet, regardless of where they’re signed up for.
Mastodon works the same way! So, mastodon is not a single website, but a “federated network” of many different “instances” that all have their own staff, moderation policies, etc. Anyone can start up an instance at any time for whatever they want.
There’s no single person or group that controls the mastodon network as a whole, and therefor no single point of failure for it. There are simply many instances with many different rulesets and communities, and if you find out an instance you’re on allows for nasty stuff to be posted or shared, you can just jump ship to another instance. There are tools they give you to do this easier, as well.
https://joinmastodon.org/ explains a lot about how mastodon works if you’re not satisfied with my explanation.
Most popular mastodon instances have very strict rules against pedophilia, as well as even fascism/nazism or hate speech, much stricter than you would ever find on twitter or tumblr. There are in fact instances that allow such vile content, but most popular instances block the other instances that do allow nazism/cp outright. If the instance you are looking into is lax on pedophilia then just join another instance.
As you can see in the screenshot in the previous reblog, someone explains that the instance mentioned by the op is blocked outright by mastodon.social, the “flagship” mastodon instance. So even the most populous general-use mastodon instance blocks that kind of garbage.
NO, mastodon is not perfect. It has many flaws and problems with its core infrastructure that make it hostile to creative types hoping to get discovered on mastodon, and a lot of the lead developers make some (imo) pretty stupid decisions at times, sometimes dragging the whole community back. But, I dunno about you, but I’m not asking for perfection. Just something that works and is based on values which give more power and discretion to the end user.
TL;DR, op is spreading misinformation / fearmongering, for every mastodon server that condones pedophilia there’s 100 that blacklist that server outright and have strict rules against disgusting filth like that, including the ““main”“ mastodon server.
“why do we even need ao3/ why won’t they censor content i don’t like/ what’s that money going towards”
it’s going towards not arbitrarily deleting all your fucking blogs overnight because yahoo had a shareholders meeting, that’s what the fuck it’s going towards. if you don’t own it, they can yank the cord whenever they feel like it, for whatever reason, using whatever wobbly catch-all algorithm they want, and that is exactly what the fuck we’ve been telling you. “wellll i’m not a porn blog, it’s not going to affect me,” oh worm?? you sure?? this website is suddenly gonna be capable of censoring posted content with surgical precision? give ao3 ten bucks immediately and get real
The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.
Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.
Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.
Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.
Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.
screaming into the void since '89 