Hello and good day, this is Aiko, also known as Clover Zero.
This is a long time coming, but, I FINALLY decided to make a new, secondary Tumblr blog for my works (illustrations, comics, etc). I'll reblog some of my old works and then post my new works at @clover-zero from now on.
This main blog, formerly named "clover-zero-art", is now "hako-aiko" to reflect the shift in content - my main blog for fannish and other various things. So there will be more interactions and reblogs here (hopefully). Of course, I'll reblog my works here too.
I keep "clover-zero-art" in a sideblog and put a redirect just in case.
What alternatives to the fandom ecosystem of Tumblr might there be? Are there any spaces where this kind of chaotic internet still exists? And how do we find or become a part of those spaces? Ik Tumblr doesn't really have any equivalents but it's the fandoms and niche communities I'm most scared of losing
the fediverse!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!
THE FEDIVERSE!!!
You have several tumblr-adjacent servers you can create your account at. And the best of all, all them talk to each other and you can follow people in every one of them, even in those different from the one you are in!
Blorbo.Social is a community of fandom nerds. We talk about our favourite blorbos from our shows, create fanart, fanfic, fanvids and other t
Wafrn is a social media inspired by tumblr that connects with the fediverse
Kobold is a community server for testing Goblin, @[email protected]'s fediverse Tumblr clone.
Goblin band is an attempt to replicate the collective creative energy that happens on tumblr and take it to the fediverse
In all seriousness Jv, how much is Tumblrcom worth now? IIs it too big for us users to band together to buy it? Or would the running of the website be too difficult.
No web experience here, just a Tumblrina wishing we could pull rescue here.
I've talked about this in the past... the problem is not how much would it take for Automattic to sell the site, the problem is the operating costs. Even if you get it for free, you need several millions per month just to pay the infrastructure of the site. Running tumblr for month, without even paying salaries, costs more than what AO3 makes in donations in an entire year. It's not "let's get the money together and buy it!" it's "let's get the money together... every single month, forever", which I don't think can't really work.
This is nothing against the anon, but posts like this make me so sad. Like people really have no idea
1. how much it costs to store their gif sets and serve web traffic and push notification and w/e
2. how much Zuck and others have been making from brutally harvesting and exploiting your private information
3. that maintaining a social network like this is a full time job for MANY highly skilled people, and that running datacenters is expensive, and using cloud services is more expensive
4. Like seriously, how is your mind not blown every day that you can still view some gifs uploaded in 2007. That's 10 megabytes that's been viewed (downloaded) a million times. Perhaps some were viewed 100 million times. That's 1'000 terabytes (1PB) of traffic just for one popular gif. It had to be on several hard drives, safely, all that time. You've been lied to if you think that costs nothing.
And again, not saying this about anon and not judging anyone but like. Statistically, over 99.9% of you don't want to pay for Tumblr Premium. How many of you would suddenly want to pay for Open Source Tumblr. How would you talk to the New Staff. How would you react if you disagree on any UI changes they make. If people send death threats to staff over a free social network, how much more entitled do you think people will be if they actually have to pay for it. What if you see some CSAM or revenge porn or something. Who will review it. Who will delete it. Who will be in charge of banning those users. Who will read bug reports. Who will validate complaints about inappropriate DMs. There literally is enough work for hundreds of people every month even with a financial sinkhole as Tumblr is right now. How do you think it would get managed as a community project. Who will keep track of 200 volunteers. Who will replace them when they burn out. Who will make sure there aren't power hungry cliques abusing their power. Who will make sure it's not hijacked by political parties or corporations to push their propaganda and oppress or data mine a minority and sell the data to ICE. Who will make sure a creepy mod isn't just reading all your DMs. Who will carry the legal responsibility if Nintendo sues the site for copyright infringement. Who will do audits. Who will represent it in court. Who will respond to DMCA takedowns. Who will wake up at 3am to mitigate a DDoS. Who will take legal responsibility when the database gets hacked and email addresses get leaked. Who will make sure the database admin isn't actually working for NSA and that's why he can afford to volunteer for free.
Running an ethical, large-scale, rich-content (with images over a few kilobytes large) social network is just incredibly complex. And by complex I mean impossible.
I mean, hear me out. The reason we don't want to pay for tumblr premium is because staff openly despises us and every time they interact with us it's either to ban a trans woman, ban a bunch of funny Black people, or to whine about how unprofitable the site is. The administration views the website as a way to turn a profit for a private capitalist company that we all hate and correctly view as parasitic on the site's functioning.
I honestly would pay for tumblr premium if I felt like the website was on my side instead of banning me or a friend of mine every few weeks for no reason. There are people on this website whose ko-fis I'm subscribed to because they help me fundraise and I want 'em to have a little walkin' around money. And people are subscribed to me too even though I'm literally annoying and have fifteen years history of terrible takes on here.
How would New Staff talk to us? Would they work to get the trust of the userbase? It shouldn't be hard if they're users of the website. If they had the trust of the userbase -- trust that was so freely given back in 2023, remember, back until they pissed us off with a series of obscenely stupid and completely avoidable decisions by staff tanked the mass exoduses who came here from Reddit and Xitter.
We're not just rude shitheads for the sake of being rude shitheads, staff just isn't doing it right, and if we get this place run cooperatively by people who do do it right that isn't hopeless, it would work.
Will they ban nazis and terfs and harassers or just funny Black people and smart trans women? There are many things that a staff could do to win the good graces of this website that the current staff just doesn't do.
The kind of internet you want, the kind of platform you want, will not happen on the scale of tumblr. You are right wanting a platform like that, but there won't be a tumblr, a twitter, an instagram, a tiktok platform that can be taken apart from the claws of capitalism.
Anything on the scale of modern social networks is going to need hundred and thousands of US dollars every month just in infrastructure. And you won't get any company that cover that while at the same time doing the morally correct thing in every case. The only way to cover that kind of costs is operating at scale: Getting as much users as can, so even with small gains per user, the costs can be covered. And you don't get to hundred of millions of users by having strict moderation and applying a strong moral sense.
Staff are employees, and they can only do whatever the company allow them to do. They don't set the rules they operate under. If they don't agree with a guideline, or with a decision, or the how something is being moderated, the most of what they can do is to complain and shout internally, outside of your view.
So the answer for what you want is not "a better company", the answer for what you want is "no company".
The only way to do that is to have a social internet done by people, hosted by people. You need a social internet that can be hosted in someone's spare computer that lives on a closet. You need a social internet that can be hosted by people paying for $20/month webservers they maintain on their own for all their friends.
The fediverse is that. It's internet made by people, not by corporations. And it's right there. Come join us.
Itâs Mastodon, itâs Threads, itâs the future, and itâs extremely confusing
To my followers: the fandom server blorbo.social that I'm always posting about is part of the Fediverse! If you join (here are instructions), you can interact with other people on the Fediverse, even if they're not on blorbo.social. Come on, join us!
Something else, you can connect a blog, if you have a Wordpress blog at least, Wordpress hosted or self-hosted doesnât matter, to the Fediverse. So not only will your blog updates post to your Mastodon account, but the interactions you get from the Fediverse, like likes and reposts and comments, will stay on your blog post. Itâs not the same as Tumblr in terms of smooth operation, but it does work together. I use Fediverse for non-fandom purposes like I use Tumblr so I donât see it as a replacement for tumblr for me, but there is a growing active fandom community (more than just blorbo.social mentioned above but other servers as well) on the Fediverse.
I just havenât figured out how to make multiple Fediverse accounts work on the apps yet so havenât taken my fandom needs there yet.
#throwing in a vote for Fediverse#I believe Bluesky is also running on the fediverse#but not connected to Mastodon like most is (via @thebookewyrme)
Not to confuse everyone, but Bluesky is running on a separate protocol. The thing that makes Mastodon and other Fediverse websites connect to each other - ActivityPub - is similar to Bluesky's (ATProto) but not similar enough to connect.
Not to worry, though. Someone made an unofficial bridge that uses bots to ferry posts from ActivityPub to ATProto. So if you opt in (they did it this way because Fedi people threatened to block the bots at the admin level and said that we all need to individually consent), and follow the bot on your side, you can talk to Bluesky users from Mastodon and vice versa.
Not very many people opt in, though. So it's not like Mastodon users have access to all of Bluesky or vice versa. Just the users on the other side who found out about the bot and said "yes, please" by following the bot. And not a lot of people know about the bot.
Find the Fediverse/Mastodon bot by searching [email protected] in your local search bar, and here's the link for the Bluesky version.
from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.
While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.
Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.
And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.
Some suggestions:
Pillowfort and/or BlueSky
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)
Dreamwidth
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth.
While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there).
Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.
But what about Discord?
By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom.
Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't.
So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.
Image hosting
It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.
Closing thoughts
Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.
Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.
Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.
If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.
Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.
To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.
I'll be the one guy to say "hey Mastodon/fediverse is also an option!" for the casual and quick microblogging aspect.
I am on blorbo.social, and I can give invites if yall ask đ€ seriously, just message me here or email me. you can also sign up yourselves and wait in the queue. I like blorbo cuz the TOS is good for my art, and the mods are very good at shutting down racism/transphobia/harassment in my experience.
The cool thing about fedi is that any of the connected sites can talk to each other. So if I'm on blorbo.social, and you're on mastodon.art, and we have a silly friend on aethy, we can still see each other's posts and comment! And they're all mostly independently owned by people just like you n' me, so we can actually talk to the admins when there are issues we want to change, and donate for the relatively smaller server costs đș
BSky has a very restrictive TOS and moderation for my taste - they can and will delete users for art (including noncon and guro), as well as marking accounts as "spam" if they are posting requests gor mutual aid (as I have seen with Palestinian users). Not to mention that the same trolls on twitter are on bsky too lol cuz bsky doesnt have rules against million follower accounts spewing racism/transphobia/etc. (also it's another one of those venture capital socmeds that has no monetization plan so I fear it will inevitably start sucking the souls out of the users with forced LLM scraping and web3 crap)
Like bsky is the same as twitter to me - big audience, I have an account that mirrors my fedi losts, but I never log in to look at things cuz there's too much nonspecific crap going on. I don't fault people for using it cuz some people like performing for big audiences. I personally just prefer yapping to the one guy (shane) i have trapped in my basement.
Pertinent community guidelines for artists on BlueSky, especially in regards to adult art AKA PORNography.
from the community guidelines:
no "content portraying minors in a sexually explicit context", so if you're Steven King don't write the kids from IT having an orgy in the sewers while pennywise dances
no "depictions of excessive violence, gore, torture, dismemberment, or non-consensual sexual activity". Using specifically the word "depictions" makes me think that they're intentionally covering cartoon art as well as real violence. But of course there's still a vibrant guro tag:
https://bsky.app/search?q=guro
there's stuff in the noncon tag
https://bsky.app/search?q=noncon
And I'm sure there's people posting horrific gruesome special effects makeup from horror movies in other tags.
Just because there's people posting in the tag doesn't mean it's allowed. And any faceless platform can pull the rug from you, or change the rules without warning, or, orâŠ
So I'll happily stay on my current fediverse server and feel safe posting horrible gruesome centipedes in vaginas âș The finances seem stable, the moderators feel good (haven't seen any racists or nazis), and I can just link my art to anyone who wants to see it on other platforms. The rules are clear enough to distinguish works of art and writing from actual real videos and photos of death and torture and abuse.
But the wonderful thing about "federation" is that we can talk to each other no matter what site we are on :D Who knows if the bridge between fedi and bluesky will keep working with me if the content rules are different though :P
SO! If you are already on the fediverse (which includes Mastodon, misskey, ruffy, and other softwares), you can follow me on blorbo.social and we can talk to each other normally without any complex tech gimmicks. You can also dm/message/email me for an invite to blorbo.social. Or just sign up yourself!
If you're on BlueSky, you can follow me on the mirror of my Fediverse account :D (you can also create your own fedi->bsky mirror)
Public posts are my art, private posts are mentally ill rambles.
FUBfree = follow, unfollow, block me freely
[bridged from https://blorbo.
The mirror will post the same things I post that are public, which includes my art and other's posts that I share. If you follow the bridge account (which creates your own mirror), then you can reply to my posts on Bsky, and I can reply to you from my Mastodon account, and we can hold hands and sing.
It's kinda complex and full of tech jargon, so if you don't want to do all that, it's fine. It's an option if you have 5 minutes to spend. And my art will always be available to see on various sites including my own that do not require log-in to view.
Thanks for reading. This post was copy/pasted from my fedi account (woohoo 5000 word limit), then edited with more information lol.
Reminder that if you follow me on my bsky bridge, you have to follow the bridge account in order for me to see your comments, reply to you, or follow you back. If you don't follow that account, I will never see your comments because I do not log into BSky.
Explanation for why you have to jump through hoops: BSky was SUPPOSED to be federated with sites running Mastodon, Misskey, etc. meaning it would be like email - gmail and yahoo and hotmail and other accounts on diff sites could send each other messages. Federated together, on a standard called the Fediverse. But BSky made its own communication method instead cuz I guess they wanted to create the standard with their wealth and status. So people have to hack shit together to make the software (Fediverse) work.
Notice how BSky asks you which server you want to sign up to when you make your account. That's their version of asking whether you want to join mastodon.socual or blorbo or aethy or whatever. BSky is their main site, like mastodon.social is the main mastodon server. There are other options of BSky wilth silly names like bridgy and plumbus that people will use to communicate with you.
It's like using email, gmail and being able to talk with yahoo and protonmail accounts. Actually a lot like that, cuz everyone decided to use Gmail instead of the billion other options because it's the most popular and well funded. But there ARE other options with different privacy policies, policies towards LLM/ai training, adult art policies, and moderation towards racism/lgbtphobia/general assholery.
Did you know that BSky's blocking policies let everyone browse who you've blocked? Seems kinda funny that ppl moved from twitter cuz of the new block policies đ€ and i really don't trust billionaire tech companies to protect artists against nonconsensual LLM/ai scraping...
Tldr: if you're using BSky you're kinda basically using a modded version of Mastodon lol and you ARE smart and tech savvy enough to join any other site on the Fediverse đđ
so yeah I REPEAT you can shoot me a dm or email if you want an invite to the Fediverse server I use with a robust policy against ai art, harassment, and bigotry, but strong protections for kink positive adult artists. Or you can sign up yourself if you mention something fannish/blorbo related in your sign up. Up to you.
At the end, all these social medias are secondary to my own site. So in the end, aside from all these stupidass shitty temporary sites with 5000 logins, all i want you to really do is keep up with me on my site, and make your own website too :)
this might be an unpopular opinion but sometimesssssss people ruin their own fan experiences by dedicating too much energy to (ultimately harmless) things that bother them pls utilize the mute and filter buttons u will be so much happier
Name: Rikka
Company: Holostars (1st generation)
Streaming platform: YouTube
SNS: X (Twitter)
Hashtags: Live #ăă€ăă / Fanart #ăă€ăăŒăš / Clips #ăĄăăăăŁă
Character/Model designer: Fuyuomi
Debut Date: October 20th, 2019
Birthday Date: April 15th
Height: 179cm
Introduction:
A "high-tech" Holoroid. Because his memory capacity is limited to 2GB, he can be a bit of an airhead.
His main charm was the gap between his soft talking voice and singing voice. Currently working hard to share his songs around the world.
10 QUESTIONS FOR VTUBERS
Q01. Tell us your main (streaming) content!
I mainly focus my streaming content on anything music-related. Things like making my songs, I also do tons of acoustic singing streams. I've also done music-related events/projects, with the recent one being The "VTuber Singing King" which is also my biggest project yet!
Q02. What was the cue that kickstarted your streaming activity?
As I am a Holoroid born of COVER corporation's technology, I've been born a streamer. I began my streaming career in order to understand more about humans. There are times when my listeners are often more knowledgeable so everyday has always been a learning day for me.
Q03. Please recommend us your ânewcomerâs friendlyâ videos or stream archive!
I recommend my 3rd year anniversary live, I think from there you would be able to discern what kind of activities I've been doing up until now.
I'm using "Live" itself as the concept for the stream, so you'll be able to see how I was from the start up until now. It plays basically like a rewind so I think it'll be an easy watch for newcomers!
As for games-related, I have a high preference for death-trap games so I think game streams I've done like "Super Mario Maker 2" will be fun to watch. Having to be stuck in the same area for so many times may not be good for the brain, but all those feelings get replaced with a cheerful sense of accomplishment the moment I manage to pass it.
The gap between my music-related and game-related content is something that could be fun to watch I think!
Q04. Tell us things that you like or something youâre good at!
My specialty is playing the guitar, making songs, and playing death-trap games. As for the things I like, it'll be chocolate, sake, and cats.
Q05. Tell us a hobby or content that has piqued your interest lately!
I'm currently hooked with "Street Fighter 6". Some of the Holostars members were also as addicted to the point we were already holding our own tournaments with each other. I always strive to finish any games I've started so I managed to get into Master rank now. I also like watching professional SF6 matches and learning from them.
As for hobbies, I like searching for B-grade horror movies. But rather than a documentary I prefer one that includes a lot of short footage. My favorite type of story is the one that depicts humans as the real terror itself.
Q06. Is there any VTuber around that has caught your attention? Let us know!
Shibuya Hal-kun and Machita Chima-san, if it's within the Hololive Production then it's definitely Hoshimachi Suisei-san.
Hal-kun is known within the VTuber-sphere as the organizer of one of the biggest gaming events, so I'm looking forward to what he could come up with next!
The first time I heard Machita Chima's voice, her singing skill is great but more than that she's highly expressive in her tones, she's such a wonderful singer and one I respected a lot!
And lastly, Hoshimachi Suisei-san is a talent and my senior from the same company, however just like her name-- she really gives an impact like a comet herself through her activities, I wonder how far those glimmers could take her, her existence is one I'd like to continue to observe and admire.
Q07. What are other things youâre paying attention to other than VTubers?
I've had the honor to work with voice actors before, so there are instances where I would watch their streams or catch up on their activities as a reference when I'm planning for a project/event. The ones I pay attention to the most are those I've collaborated with before like Eguchi Takuya-san, Okamoto Nobuhiko-san, and Ono Yuuki-san.
Q08. Is there a recent thing that left a deep impression on you, and is there anything else youâd like to try out?
I thought doing a PR for music equipment, instruments, or even a soundproofed room might be quite interesting. And I'm always open when it comes to death-trap type games (lol), my favorite is souls-like games.
Q09. What sort of content youâd like to challenge yourself for now?
I'd like to challenge myself with a solo live. It's my dream to perform solo on a stage with elaborate production and songs as my fans were hyping together with me. I would also like to perform for anime/drama theme songs, or even for commercials!
Q10. Tell us your message to the readers!
I would be happy if this interview gets you to watch my stream. My music streams are generally more toward the calming type, while my gaming streams are more stoic and fun. It would brighten my day if you could check me out, regardless of your gender.
You're doing great! Really love what you've done with the place so far. Now here's something important moving forward. If you are making a neocities - especially if you are doing so with the motivation to fight back against Web 3.0 and reclaim the web as a space for individual users instead of for companies - please, keep the following in mind:
An inaccessible web is not a free web.
Repeat after me: An inaccessible web is not a free web.
Resources for Beginners to Learn About Web Accessibility and Web Design:
W3C's Introduction to Web Accessibility | W3C is the organization that decides on the standards of Accessibility on the web. They are an invaluable direct resource.
A Beginner's Guide to Understanding Web Accessibility
Mozilla's Accessibility Overview
WebAIM's Introduction to Web Accessibility
What is Web Accesibility in 60 Seconds! [YouTube Video]
Accessibility: What's the difference between WCAG Levels A and AA? [YouTube Video]
FreeCodeCamp | FCC provides an extremely beginner friendly Responsive Web Design course. The lessons for this course integrate accessibility standards naturally, and also have individual lessons specifically for teaching accessibility.
FreeCodeCamp's Accessibility Tag on their News Page
HTML Dog's Tutorial's for HTML, CSS, and Javascript
MarkSheet's Free HTML and CSS Tutorial
W3C's Easy Checks
W3C's QuickRef on How to Meet WCAG | I have filtered the QuickRef link to only show Level A requirements. This is the easiest level to meet and is considered the "bare minimum."
autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)
I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.
If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.
the background
So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.
FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:
Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;
Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;
Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.
the WordPress ecosystem
A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.
Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)
Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future â 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.
There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.
Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.
Matt being Matt, tech being tech
As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress â for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)
But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.
ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening
WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.
There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.
Sep 17
Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.
Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and arenât perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesnât give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.
So itâs at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone whoâs going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone whoâs going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?
(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)
Sep 20 (WCUS final day)
WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.
Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.
He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.
For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus
â Twitter
I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support.
â Tumblr
Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:
âIf anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. Iâll do my best to help you find a new job.â
â source tweet, RTed by Matt
He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.
Sep 21
Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.
He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.
The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)
Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:
TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a âcancer to WordPressâ and urges community to switch providers
Sep 23 onward
Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.
Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.
Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.
WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.
Twitter link | Direct PDF link
This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to appear to pay him money before he tells his audience they're evil.
Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.
He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.
Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.
Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"
At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him â it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.
Old text: The abbreviation âWPâ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
New text: The abbreviation âWPâ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please donât use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is âWordPress Engineâ and officially associated with WordPress, which itâs not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.
anyway this fucking sucks
This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".
Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)
I think that the original mission â to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with â is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.
So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.
Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.
And people don't want to deal with any of this.
The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.
But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.
Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.
this looks like more meltdown matt (and probably is, in that he's misreading how he'll be received by the public yet again), but the community (across bluesky, mastodon, and reddit, largely) have unearthed enough stuff that suggests there's at least some pretty clear intent here.
probably the easiest source to follow is on reddit here. in short,
the WordPress Foundation filed trademarks on "Managed WordPress" and "Hosted WordPress" earlier this year.
for some fucking reason (bad reasons) Automattic holds the trademark to "WordPress", which means that while it's still completely fucking unreasonable to go after WP Engine after a decade of using it without issues, they may have a case about some of the ways WP Engine uses WordPress. Not the "WP" part though, which is the part Matt focused on.
companies, plugins, and so on have been using WP and WordPress if their businesses rely on WordPress since the very start, and there's never been enforcement quite like this. everyone is nervous.
the WordPress Foundation board is Matt and two other people, one of whom is in private equity herself, and the whole thing seems pretty fucking shady!
so it seems like shit's corrupt all the way down, but as always that matt both has a huge hand in it and is, you know, continuing to not log off and/or read the room. my guy i promise you it's not WP Engine employees that are downvoting you on reddit.
we're back in round 2 of "every single morning i wake up and matt has done something else" i guess
WP Engine has been blocked from WordPress.org's resources. The blog post about it is 100% Matt (since, as always, it makes no sense upon closer examination).
this means that WP Engine-hosted sites can't access the plugin repo or some of the other features of the free, open-source software they use and are able to modify under the GPL. (in general, as I've said to my dev friends who've asked for advice: you should be able to update plugins by downloading them and installing the latest version manually still. there may be fixes in the works, we'll see.)
beyond that:
WP Engine staff have been kicked out of WordPress.org and the core contributor Slack
people who still work for Automattic have been told to post some boilerplate publicly on their socials in support.
as some others have observed, being that all comms from the company are part of the legal situation now, doing that on personal socials is a bad idea.
here's one of the best reddit writeups of the whole thing so far.
i'm also fucking annoyed about him claiming that WP Engine "hacked" WordPress to remove his .org blog post about them from the dashboards of its users. that's.... a normal mod you can make, to hide blog posts from the dashboard if you don't care about them. i usually do, none of the non-profits or small businesses i help these days care about that shit. he knows better than to say that, he knows what hacking is.
this is so fucking weird. if you're in FOSS or just in tech in general and have seen anything like this before, i'd love to hear about it. it feels unprecedented to me. it seems like matt just wants the 36 million dollars and is willing to do anything to get it, which, what! this is bad for everyone! every wp dev out there is freaked the fuck out!
I think one of the more unfortunate consequences to creators being more interactive with fans is that a lot of fans/fandoms normalized this idea that creators have to explain/validate every headcanon they have.
I love Spirit Hunter: Death Mark's approach to the amnesia trope and the question of "If you can't remember who you were, are you even the same person?"
A lot of narratives play around with the weight of that, only to turn around and say "Of course you're the same, who else would you be?" The character gets their memories back and they're suddenly exactly as they were before, maybe with a life lesson along the way.
But Death Mark doesn't. Without all the knowledge and experiences of Masamune Kujou, Yashiki is fundamentally a kinder and less apathetic person, without any sort of prompting. Even when confronting dangerous spirits out to kill him, he takes the time to learn their stories and show them some small form of kindness. He listens to the recording of who he used to be, and he can't reconcile the callousness that Masamune had towards the deaths caused by his mistake with the way he feels about them, to the point where he doesn't even go back to using the identity that he's worked so hard to remember. Even when the game gives you the option to forgive Masamune, the options are still "It had to be done" and "I can't forgive him" because Kazuo Yashiki and Masamune Kujou are not the same.
And I think that's a way more interesting take than the protagonist just reverting back into the same person they were despite all the experiences we saw them go through.
