14 years of Tumblr

I was 14 years old, still in school, and discovering who I was and what I wanted to be. I joined Tumblr in 2010 back when it was a very different website. When we were just in the beginning of Web 2.0 and the internet still had the shiny glow of potential and frequently went down and had little to no features.

Tumblr was a place that I met new and interesting people from all over the world. I remember coming home from school every day and logging on, scrolling through my dashboard all the way down to where I had left it (remember chronological feeds? and ones that didn't have update every second?); sometimes when I refreshed the page, nothing new would appear for hours. I remember only being able to post one photo at a time, and when that finally changed and you could post multiple photos, everyone being ecstatic over it. I remember how much porn was on Tumblr, and how Tumblr became known for having the best porn. I remember how shitty the Tumblr video player was. And the mobile website.

The internet was still slow then, it was still largely curated by people and not bots or algorithms, there weren't ads everywhere, and it wasn't serious. Tumblr was a place of silliness and everyone was silly together. It was a microcosm of trendiness and if you used it, you became associated with a group of people that were different. Different from those who used Facebook or Twitter. I remember the 'aesthetics' and when 'aesthetic' was first used to describe something visually pleasing and 'alternative'. I remember 'soft grunge'.

I remember reblogging, what were the first memes, over and over again. I remember how cool GIFs were back when people were obsessed about how you pronounced GIF. I remember when Vine took over the internet and my dashboard.

I remember finding a community of queer people where I didn't know any in real life. I remember speaking to people from all over the world. I remember sending them messages to their inboxes until we would both hit the daily limit (remember that?). I remember the different times of the day that Tumblr would change that was synchronised to the timezones of who I followed. I remember staying up way past my bedtime and going to school the next day on three hours of sleep. I remember using TinyChat and entering the world of group webcamming before it became a work tool. I remember writing to my first penpal. I remember meeting people from the Internet in real life for the first time. I remember going to my first Tumblr Meetup. I remember lying to my parents about it. I remember meeting my first boyfriend. And my second.

I remember getting 'anons' and all the drama associated with 'anons'. I remember sending horrible anonymous messages to people. I remember bullying people. I remember being bullied and receiving horrible messages. I remember when the internet finally 'got real' to me and it wasn't just a playground anymore.

I remember all the iterations of my blog: my obsession with Iceland, meme posts, fashion. I meticulously edited my blog's theme over and over to get it right and best represent me at the time. I remember staying up all night for weeks at a time watching runway shows live as they happened and then immediately blogging about them. I remember the passionate conversations I would have with my mutuals about something we had just saw. I remember when my blog had only 500 followers, being obsessed with my follower count, and seeing it as a validation of who I was and what I was putting out into the world. I remember hitting 40,000 posts and being proud of that achievement. I remember being terrified of the idea that someone from school would find my Tumblr.

Tumblr was such a defining period of my life. I grew up using Tumblr and it grew with me. The people I followed grew up too. I stopped using it regularly after high school because Tumblr no longer seemed to be what it once was to me. While I don't use it anymore, I have left my blog intact as it was. It's a relic of a different time and when I was a different person.

The internet is a very different place; it's not even a place anymore, it's everywhere. Rather than coming home and racing to my computer to log on, I want to turn my computer off and read a book or go for a walk. The internet is scary now and not silly.

Still, I think fondly on the years I spent here and what they mean to me. I am now 27 and thankful for that time.