Conversation

Every time there is some scare about Tumblr closing down, a sizeable part of the Tumblr community discusses how seriously about if there is a way to make Tumblr user-owned, or make it something similar to how Archive Of Our Own is owned by a non-profit funded by its own community.

Then a bunch of us over there try to explain that AO3 model doesn't work for Tumblr because the volume of both users (Tumblr userbase is one order of magnitude bigger than AO3's) and the kind of media (one single tumblr post with a particularly large gifset may be bigger than an entire year of new fics in AO3. And that a Kickstarter to buy Tumblr collectively wouldn't work because the problem is not the price you could buy it for, but the monthly costs of keeping it running: you can expect to kickstart hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, forever.

What people don't realize is that what they want, a user-owned, user-managed, non-profit, trans-friendly, anti-capitalist Tumblr is just within easy reach if they just accept: dropping the trademarked name, and giving up on keeping the Tumblr archive.

If you really would pay for a user-owned Tumblr, you can do it already. Get a web server and install Wafrn or Goblin. Install Misskey or any of its variants. Hell, install mastodon and set the post character limit to 10k. Invite all your Tumblr mutuals. Connect with the servers of other Tumblr users jumping to their own servers. If you don't have the technical skills to manage your own server, throw some coins to those who do to help them to pay for a server. If you can't afford spare the coins, move your content to one of those servers so more people are more easily convinced to do the jump.

Once there is a critical mass of Tumblr users moving to user-owned, federated servers, then Tumblr users, in practice, would have migrated the tumblr community to a version of Tumblr that is just what we all have wanted for years.

We can do this, the pieces are an in place. We just need the collective will.

(This post have been written in goblin.band, my own Goblin server, and auto imported to tumblr. Most of my posts on Tumblr are actually written in Goblin since a year ago)