Prepare yourselves

How to Backup your Tumblr

I was just semi-complaining that I was still looking for a decent way to backup my +6k posts without having to use paid services or even just wordpress (which has an import from tumblr tool that asks for permission to access your blog and also make posts), when I decided to actually put some effort into my google search. 

Results were positive: I have successfully backed up my blog* 

*By which I mean: everything that I have ever posted.  Not included: drafts, queue, likes, followers, following, comments, notes, chat. 

I followed this method (word by word), and now have a 450 MB folder on my computer with the name of my blog on it containing: 

1. Folder “Archive” (contains .html files listed by month) 2. Folder “Media” (contains gifs and images, mine has +1k files in it; might contain also audios but I have no way of confirming that because I’ve never reblogged an audio post from this blog) 3. Folder “Posts” (contains single .html files, each one a post; I have +4k files in it) 4. Folder “Theme” (contains only my avatar, but it might be a matter of if you have personalized themes or not) 5. .html file “Index” (by opening it it will give you the archive of your blog organized by month; clicking on a month will open up the archive for that month, and you’ll be able to read all the posts for that month as if you were on your blog**, except sans your theme graphic, with each page containing 50 posts)

**I can see gifs, links, embedded videos, tags, number of notes (but I can’t open up the notes, clearly), text is also correctly formatted. 

So yeah, in case anyone wants a very quick way to back up their blog, it took me less than 10 minutes. 

P.S. I didn’t have any issue, but to be on the safe side always check for spyware and virus threats before and after downloading anything. 

this is actually really useful if you have an art blog full of years of work that you otherwise no longer have access to the original files. A lot of the art I have in the early days of my art blog are in that boat. I did this process JUST for that reason and I was pretty astonished at just how many pieces of media it backs up! (literally all of it) Drawings I didn’t even realize were sitting in my archive due to having been posted to text posts or undercuts, or untagged for years! It’s worth it if just for that, even if tumblr isn’t shutting down or deleting your blog.

For those of you wondering: This includes your posts in all forms, and your reblogs, as well as the number of notes they got. Furthermore, it’s implemented in a way that archives your posts by month in an index.html file that can be used while offline. You can search your tags per month by simply using ctrl+f. The only thing it doesn’t do is save the images that are in the reblogs, and it cannot save videos.

I just did this and it took less than ten minutes, and while I can say I would not have much difficulty if it had more obtuse instructions, the format of the steps is extremely simple and easy to follow for people who may be intimidated with this method.

honestly supernatural outliving tumblr is the biggest plot twist of this decade

people on tumblr linking all the alternative ways everyone can find them like 

Me: Tumblr Should Have Perished Years Ago.

Also Me: I Need This Site So I Can Yell About My Current All-Consuming Interest Of The Month, Because If It Were, In Fact, Deleted, I Would Be Strangled Within Minutes For The Greater Good.

deviantART, Google, etc’s TOS

Everyone is panicking over TOS-es right now as they find a new home as Tumblr gets flushed down the toilet. I don’t like those random TOS breakdowns because the analysis is always wrong. 

Anyway this is what people pay me to do and I will now do it for $0 because I’m tired of everyone spreading misinformation. This post is not a substitute for legal advice etc. Reblogs are appreciated because I literally see TOS nonsense on my dash every day. 

Any more experienced copyright lawyers please feel free to weigh in - it’s part of my field yes, but my wheelhouse is more film production COT rather than derivative works.

Google Drive (TOS)

deviantART (Submission Policy) (TOS)

AO3 (TOS)

Wordpress (TOS)

Dreamwidth (TOS)

Hope this helps. Feel free to force me to read and explain any other site TOS documents. Again, more experienced copyright lawyers, feel free to correct me if I clowned up somewhere.

Yes, Virginia, Tumblr is important for all those other reasons and also...

There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.

The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)

Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem. 

I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart. 

Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma) 

This. As someone who is half French half British I’ve forever struggled with the frankly pretty Puritan British attitude towards sex and our bodies and the open French attitude. I know which is healthy and which isn’t from personal experience. People not discussing sex, nudity etc in a safe environment leads to so many issues around lack of education, understanding and future deep emotional and physical issues for young adults trying to figure life out. It can last our entire lives if not addressed.

My friends and I got naked in front of each other as teens to change like it’s no big deal and yeah on occasion we looked and compared bodies, it’s thanks to this that I know that my nipples which I hated for being so huge are actually not that weird. My friends all have completely different body shapes and it made me comfortable in mine knowing it was ok to not look like a model/porn star and be different because we all were.

I’ve learned so much from tumblr just from discussion and I share this with others, it’s embarrassing how little people know about their own bodies due to a lack of a forum to discuss it. This is such a good place for it and I’m so sad it is so niche already let alone if that now collapses.

Due to lack of discussion of sex and just human bodies someone close to me didn’t address the pain he had every time he had an erection until he confided in me as an open friend and it turned out he needed a medical circumcision. He went 10 YEARS with this pain (and not having sex) because he had no one to talk to about it and nowhere to look it up. Fucking ridiculous.

So yes, even for non trans / queer folk it’s so important to have an open forum somewhere regarding these things let alone how hugely important it is for these communities.

While at the same time I’m also angered that sex and nudity is villainised while nazism and it’s ilk is fiiiiiiine.

This . Is . Wrong .

“also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual.”

This.

One of my favorite things about rl kink communities? That we also went to munches (get togethers at restaurants) and just hung out, and sure we’d probably casually mention/joke about being huge perverts at some point because it was safe to do so among people we knew wouldn’t be offended, but the nice thing was just being able to be around people and talk about anything.

God, yeah. I remember being wigged out at first when I got on tumblr and it was just this free-wheeling place where someone would complain about their bad day and their next post would be a reblog of pornographic fan art with graphic comments in the tags. 

You can follow people who make nsfw content (photos, fic, art) and get to know them as people. You can follow people that aren’t content creators and get to know their tastes in kinky shit. You can have friends you met because you liked the same kind of porn and find out all the other stuff you have in common and become real friends. 

I don’t talk about my sex life on fucking facebook (other than in very locked groups, lol). Hell, I’m not sure I’ll do it on twitter unless I start a separate one for that (which….tbh I might; I liked having a sideblog here for me to post nudes and sexual tmi). 

I’m really gonna miss the way that stuff was all mixed together here. 

Basic Dreamwidth for Tumblr users

For people who want to use Dreamwidth, but are totally confused about how it works!

What is Dreamwidth?

Getting around your account

Finding new things

Privacy controls?! That’s a thing?!

Comments

You will add new skills to your resume

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale is responsible for the Tumblr Titty Ban but both took credit for it when speaking to their respective superiors

#plot twist: all nsfw posts will be replaced with a Best of Queen album#the tumblrpocalypse (@nonasuch)

Is Pillowfort hard?

Okay, I’m seeing a lot of “Pillowfort is hard” posts. And posts that it’s not like tumblr. Fair calls. But let me see if I can describe a bit of the culture as it’s already built up there.

People have their own blogs and some of them gather a lot of conversation in the comments. @thursdayj, for example, hosts regular gatherings on their blog with lists of the day’s discussion topics. I’ve found folks to follow in those comment threads and other folks I just like talking to in the master thread. This is pretty LJ-ish, only easier to format and manage for those who weren’t deep into LJ and writing html.

The convention seems to be growing that one posts content to their own blog and then reblogs to various communities. This makes for some dash repetition when you follow them both, especially since using readmore breaks isn’t general etiquette yet. But because the user owns the post no matter where it’s reblogged, any post can be read from any place and still have the same content. You can reblog a post to your blog and it’ll show up to all of your followers…but it’s still that same original post and comment thread. That’s right: no more of those tumblr scattershot reblog trees where there’s a good comment here and then off on another fork, something else worth comment. Or where you can’t add a comment because some other commenter/reblogger has you blocked for…something and the whole post is off limits. There are people who post so reliably to some coms I follow that I don’t follow them individually. It’s a different dash management strategy to tumblr’s and once you make sense of it, one with more versatility and control.

Community Ads have a master list, so you can check them out by topic…and if it’s not what you want, fine, start your own. That’s a good place for finding chunks of new material for your dash.  Want to discuss? Just join in the comment thread from your dash. Or the com. It doesn’t matter because it’s the same. I’m slowly working my way through the ever-growing coms list, adding in the topics I’ve gotten interested in here on tumblr. Sure it takes time and that hurts after giving up that dash you’ve been curating for years on tumblr, but it’s not going to be easier anyplace else. I have accounts on both pfio and dreamwidth, and I find the former much much easier to add content and people to.

People sometimes get in a lather because the thread owner, the OP, controls the post and its comments. They can delete any comment or the whole thing: it’s up to them. And they can restrict whether or not their post can be reblogged at all. The whole structure is focused on ownership and civility, and so far it’s been working pretty well, at least in the corners I frequent. Reposting-without-credit is much less convenient there. I’m sure abuse will come with growing numbers, but the OP tool of banning a user from ever seeing anything you post means that repeat offenders are going to have less and less to work with.

Images. Yeah, there are file size limits. Image privilege expansion packs are supposed to be one of the extras we will be able to purchase. I like that: I just post small stuff so it’s reasonably thrifty for me not to pay for hosting everyone else’s big gif files.

I think that wherever we all go, there will be work to be done. First, work to back up what was on tumblr. Then, work to curate a new dash in a new place while learning how said new place works. And it’s only going to be interesting if enough people who interest you also end up there. For me, not interested in transferring all of my tumblr content to a new home (I consider it all ephemeral except for a bit of writing I backed up before I ever posted it anywhere), it’s a matter of picking up and establishing myself over there. I hope a lot of other folks I follow here will do the same. It’s bare-bones and under development, but it has a lot of the tumblr functionality we want with less of the tumblr abuse we don’t. That’s why I’m over there.

Good to know…I’ve resisted joining pillowfort because I’m quite comfy at Tumblr. But it looks like the way things are trending.

Same. I’m verrrrry loyal to platforms I’m comfortable in. But. Pillowfort is sounding promising.

I’m on pillowfort but haven’t really done much with it other than set up a blog and follow some people I know. But once their site is up and running I’ll be back over there.

“here are some alternates to tumblr! like newgrounds or pixiv" yall just, straight up stopped suggesting sites even remotely similar to tumblr and are just saying random shit now. guys lets all move to the comments section of youtube

you’re not thinking big enough. time to move to target dot com product reviews.

651. Fear is a strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. || 'Small gods'

Joyce McFadden, psychoanalyst and author of Your Daughter’s Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women in “My Barbies Had So Much Sex. It Was Great." by Ann Friedman. (via fuckyeahfeminists)

Oh my fucking god. Do you ever just have one of those moments where you read something that concisely explains in one sentence something you’ve been mulling about for years?

(via asfadedasmyjeans)

i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use

(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)

i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work

A General Rule

on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this

that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’

Tumblr

just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags

i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss

now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest

Dreamwidth

use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

WordPress

if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url

if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url

i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed

ArtStation

use username.artstation.com/rss

i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss

Mastodon

just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url

i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss

deviantART

use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername

i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis

YouTube

this one’s a goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first

in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit

you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit

i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w

Tapas

this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.

the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed

LINE Webtoons

ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button

the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed

Twitter & Instagram

these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason

twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.

right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username

i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne

… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg

@sollidnitrogen @sesphi this seems really valuable

More DW-related rambling

It’s also worth pointing out that for people coming from Tumblr, or people new to DW in general, the process of finding people to talk to on DW is actually fairly opaque and difficult. (I still find it hard to find people in new fandoms to talk to over there, and I’ve been on there since FOREVER. That’s one of the main reasons why I’m on Tumblr, actually! Because I can FIND PEOPLE when I get into something new!) 

This is one of the big drawbacks to DW: it runs mostly on word of mouth and networking. You can’t search/follow tags the way you can on Tumblr (well, it sort of has that function, but it doesn’t really work the same). FWIW, making new friends on Tumblr is equally opaque and weird for DW people, so it’s a mutual incomprehension. XD

Back in the heyday of fandom on LJ, it wasn’t nearly that hard because LJ had hub sites called communities, where everyone met and hung out. (If you hear Fandom Olds talking about comms, that’s what they mean.) DW still has this, but they aren’t nearly as active - although it’s always possible that they could be again. You just need a certain critical mass of users to make them work. Before there was Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook with dashboards and walls, there were LJ comms where you had a constant stream of new content to follow. (That, and your reading list. But comms were one of the main ways you found new people to follow in the first place.)

There ARE still comms on DW. A couple of the more active ones I know of include:

There are loads more. Perhaps people could reblog and suggest some?

The OTHER way people on LJ (and later on DW) found each other was through friending memes. These were (and still are) done as comments to an entry. You post your info so other people can find you, and you look through the comments to find other people who are into some of the same things you’re into. There’s one currently going on right now: you can find it here if you’d like to check it out and see how they work.

But otherwise, like … if you sign up for a DW blog and then it just gathers cobwebs because you can’t find people to talk to, I swear it’s not that you’re doing something wrong. It IS hard, and it was easier back in the old days when there were more people over there and a lot of active comms, but it’s always been a little bit difficult and to be honest I’m not entirely sure how we did it, any more than I’m sure how I’ve managed to find people to talk to on Tumblr. So I don’t want to try to sell DW as a magic bullet for fandom interaction, especially for introverts, which is like … 90% of us, I think. XD

DW is also more geared towards talking to people/making friends/making social connections than Tumblr is. Which could be a feature or a bug depending on what YOU’RE there for. Given that we (fandom) are mostly introverts, DW gives you a lot more controls for keeping unwanted people out of your posts than Tumblr does. You can very easily lock posts down so only people you’ve given access can see them. You can turn comments off completely, hide them (or just hide certain comments), and block people. So basically you can just use your DW for talking mainly to yourself, talking to a few select people, whatever.

But if you actually do want to make new friends, it’s worth noting that most people on DW also want to make friends (I think at this point, most of the truly antisocial have either fled for other platforms or gone into heavy lurk mode), so if you do too, and you post some things, and find some people to talk to and comment on their posts - there is, I guess, a shared expectation that “we’re all on this site to talk about fandom stuff” so that’s a big help with finding people to talk to. You can avoid this pretty easily by just lurking (I lurk a lot, tbh) but if you want to make friends, commenting on people’s posts and actively trying to start discussions on your own DW can work out pretty well. You DO have to work on it, but then, you do on Tumblr too.

Folks, I don’t post much to my fandom DW when I’m not in full fic mode, but I still consider it my stable base. If you know me from here, add me there (leave a comment if you have a different handle). I get comment emails and will be happy to hear from you!

(I also keep my personal journal over there, although it’s traceable to my meatspace self much more easily, so I don’t give tons of people the link)

Some DW comms to help find people and fandom activities:

https://the-great-tumblr-purge.dreamwidth.org

https://fictional-fans.dreamwidth.org/7315.html

DW welcome post: https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html

Friending meme: https://snickfic.dreamwidth.org/667727.html

There are other posts floating around with useful links as well.

on fandom and content policing

So, listen.

While we’re all having a good laugh and/or panic at tumblr’s incompetent censorship implosion, I just want to take this opportunity to draw a parallel to a lot of the recent fandom wank about what content should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3. Specifically: there’s a lot of people who want the Archive to ban particular types of fic, but who have no real understanding of how you would actually implement that in practice.

While there are legitimate arguments to be made about the unwisdom of tumblr’s soon-to-be-forbidden content choices - the whole “female-presenting nipples” thing and the apparent decision to prioritise banning tits over banning Nazis, for instance - the functional problem isn’t that they’ve decided to monitor specific types of content, but that they’ve got no sensible way of enacting their own policies. Quite clearly, you can’t entrust the process to bots: just today, I’ve seen flagged content that runs the gamut from Star Trek: TOS screenshots to paleo fish art to quilts to the entire chronic pain tag to a text post about a gay family member with AIDS - and at the same time, I’ve still been seeing porn gifs on my dash. 

It’s absolute chaos, which is what happens when you try to outsource to programs the type of work that can only reliably be done by people - and even then, there’s still going to be bad or dubious or unpopular decisions made, because invariably, some things will need to be judged on a case by case basis, and people don’t always agree on where the needle should fall. 

Now: consider that this is happening because tumblr is banning particular types of images. Images, at least, you can kiiiiinda moderate by bots, provided you’re using the bot-process as a filter to cut down on the amount of work done by actual humans, and also provided you’re willing to take a huge credibility hit given the poor initial accuracy of said bots, but: images. Bots can be sorta trained to recognise and sort those, right?

But the kind of AI sophistication you’d need to moderate all the content on a text-based site like AO3? That… yeah. That literally doesn’t exist, and going by tags and keywords wouldn’t help you either, because there’d be no handy way to distinguish what type of usage was present just on that basis alone. Posts about content generated by neural nets are hilarious precisely because our AI isn’t there yet, and based on what we’ve seen so far, we won’t be there for a good long while.  

It’s a point I’ve made again and again, but I’m going to reiterate it here: it’s always easy to conjure up the most obvious, extreme and clear-cut examples of undesirable content when you’re discussing bans in theory, but in practice, you need to have a feasible means of enacting those rules with some degree of accuracy, speed and accountability that’s attainable within both budget and context, or else the whole thing becomes pointless. 

On massive sites like AO3 and tumblr, the considerable expense of monitoring so much user-generated content with paid employees is, to a degree, obviated by the concept of tagging and blocking, the idea being that users can curate and control their own experience to avoid unpleasant material. There still needs to be oversight, of course - at absolute minimum, a code of conduct and a means of reporting those who violate it to a human authority in a position to enforce said code - but the thing is, given how much raw content accrues on social media and at what speed, you really need these policies to be in place, and actively enforced, from the get-go: otherwise, when you finally do start trying to moderate, you’ll have to wade through the entire site’s backlog while also trying to keep abreast of new content.

Facebook, which is a multi-billion dollar corporation, can afford to have paid human moderators in place for assessing content violations instead of relying on bots; however, it is also notoriously terrible at both following its own standards and setting them in the first place. To take an example salient to the tumblr mess, Facebook has an ongoing problem with how it handles breastfeeding posts, while its community standards regarding what counts as hate speech are, uhhh… Not Great. Twitter has similarly struggled with bot accounts proliferating during multiple recent elections and with the seemingly simple task of deplatforming Nazis - not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to take a quote-on-quote political stance, even for the sake of cleaning house. 

It’s also because, quite frankly, neither Facebook nor Twitter were originally thought of as entities that would one day be ubiquitous and powerful enough to be used to sway elections; and when that capability was first realised by those with enough money and power to take advantage of it, there were no internal safeguards to stop it happening, and not nearly enough external comprehension of or appreciation for the risks among those in positions of authority to impose some in time to make a difference. Because even though time spent scrolling through social media passes like reverse dog years - which is to say, two hours can frequently feel like ten minutes - its impact is such that we fall into the trap of thinking that it’s been around forever, instead of being a really recent phenomenon. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, tumblr in 2007, AO3 in 2009, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, tinder in 2012, Discord in 2015. Even Livejournal, that precursor blog-and-fandom space, only began in 1999, with the purge of strikethrough happening in 2007. Long-term, we’re still running a global beta on How To Do Social Media Without Fucking Up, because this whole internet thing is still producing new iterations of old problems that we’ve never had to deal with in this medium before - or if so, then not on this scale, within whatever specific parameters apply to each site, in conjunction with whatever else is happening that’s relevant, with whatever tools or budget we have to hand. It is messy, and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon.   

All of which is a way of saying that, while it’s far from impossible to moderate content on social media, you need to have actual humans doing it, a clear reporting process set up, a coherent set of rules, a willingness to enforce those rules consistently - or at least to explain the logic behind any changes or exceptions and then stand by them, too - and the humility to admit that, whatever you planned for your site to be at the outset, success will mean that it invariably grows beyond that mandate in potentially strange and unpredictable ways, which will in turn require active thought and anticipation on your part to successfully deal with.

Which is why, compared to what’s happening on other sites, the objections being raised about AO3 are so goddamn frustrating - because, right from the outset, it has had a clear set of rules: it’s just not one that various naysayers like. Content-wise, the whole idea of the tagging system, as stated in the user agreement, is that you enter at your own risk: you are meant to navigate your own experience using the tools the site has provided - tools it has constantly worked to upgrade as the site traffic has boomed exponentially - and there’s a reporting process in place for people who transgress otherwise. AO3 isn’t perfect - of course it isn’t - but it is coherent, which is exactly what tumblr, in enacting this weird nipple-purge, has failed to be. 

Plus and also: the content on AO3 is fictional. As passionate as I am about the impact of stories on reality and vice versa, this is nonetheless a salient distinction to point out when discussing how to manage AO3 versus something like Twitter or tumblr. Different types of content require different types of moderation: the more variety in media formats and subject matter and the higher the level of complex, real-time, user-user interaction, the harder it is to manage - and, quite arguably, the more managing it requires in the first place. Whereas tumblr has reblogs, open inboxes and instant messaging, interactions on AO3 are limited to comments and that’s it: users can lock, moderate or throw their own comment threads open as they choose, and that, in turn, cuts down on how much active moderation is necessary.   

tl;dr: moderating social media sites is actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people realise, and those lobbying for tighter content control in places like AO3 should look at how broad generalisations about what constitutes a Bad Post are backfiring now before claiming the whole thing is an easy fix.

It’s so incredibly odd to me to throw in “Twitter can’t even do something simple like deplatform clear Nazis!” after the part where you explain why that’s not easy at all.

I mean, can their image algorithms distinguish between:

Can it do the same for text, which is apparently even more difficult?

After reading this primer, why on Earth would we believe that deplatforming Nazis was any easier than deplatforming Adult content?

You’re conflating two separate points here: firstly, that it is easier for Twitter to deplatform Nazis than it is for tumblr; and secondly, that tumblr is being criticised for prioritising a ban on NSFW content ahead of deplatforming Nazis, regardless of the difficulty. 

Twitter, unlike tumblr, isn’t primarily reliant on algorithms to monitor content; it has a large number of actual, physical employees responding to reports of user violations and the proven ability to delete accounts en masse, as per their recent purge of bots. We know that Twitter is capable of deplatforming Nazis and white nationalists with a high degree of accuracy; they’re just really reluctant to do that, because of the unfortunate yet unavoidable fact that there’s a whole bunch of real, blue-check-verified politicians and public figures using their service, many with vocal support bases, who espouse or tacitly condone those beliefs. The problem here is that Twitter still thinks of itself as a ‘neutral’ platform, because it never considered being in a position to spread violent ideologies or political misinformation on this scale - but now that it is, and now that extreme right-wing positions are being increasingly normalised (in part because of its own negligence in letting those ideologies gain traction in the first place) it doesn’t want to be seen to sacrifice that neutrality by drawing what ought to be a basic line in the sand.

By comparison, what’s bothering people about the continued white nationalist/Nazi presence on tumblr during this purge - aside from, you know, the obvious - isn’t because we think the algorithms would somehow magically become more competent if directed towards Nazis, but because the decision to crack down on naked tits first makes it pretty clear that the priorities of those in charge are broken. 

So, yes: Twitter and tumblr both face difficulties in deplatforming Nazis, but the types of difficulties in each case are radically different. Twitter’s problems are, in order of priority, the need to acknowledge that the platform itself cannot be and is not politically neutral, the need to establish a coherent set of guidelines for users going forward shaped in acknowledgement of this fact, and - last but absolutely not least - the need to figure out legal standpoints and protective measures for deplatforming politicians, given the inevitable blowback. Tumblr’s problems are a bunch of broken algorithms that are nowhere in the ballpark of working properly, an ongoing conflict between tumblr staff and the ultimate owners at Verizon, and the fact that they are still overrun with Nazis. 

Hope that clears things up!

Twitter has already shown it is capable of deplatforming nazis in Germany - they’re legally required to do so, so things are blocked specifically for that location....rather than say....site-wide.