L A B S

The official Tumblr Labs blog, where we're working on silly experiments.

[staff]

Tumblr! They’re here. Communities are finally here. 

Communities are a new and easy way to connect with the people on Tumblr who get it. You can invite mutuals who share your obsessions to a private Community or start a public Community for the things you love and watch all the new friends pile in. Like a clown car, Communities can fit (almost) as many people in ‘em as you want.

Today, we’re hatching Communities out of their beta shell and launching them at your collective Tumblr experience—for you to enjoy and tinker with as we continue to build them out. We’re talking globally, on web, iOS, and Android. Buckle up, baby. We’re going to be so normal about this.

You can make a Community for just about anything. Art. Gravity Falls. Knitting. Your current D&D campaign. Photography. Obscure ships. The gay people in your phone. Music. Science. Fashion. Design. Baldur’s Gate 3. You’re the wielder of your own destiny. And, thanks to our delightful early testing users, there are already so many for you to join. Hazbin Hotel? Check. Arcane? Check. The Phandom? Check, check, check.

How do you get started? 

You can browse Communities over here. 

Find specific Communities by tapping the Communities tab at the top of the search results page.

Want to create your very own Community? Right this way, maestro.

Here’s a help doc for any questions you might have.

We’re excited to see what you do with this. Go forth, hang out, have fun.

[wip]

What changes are you expecting to be made to Communities before they are officially released and done?

Answer: Hey there, @lunaeclipse1057-ao3!

First of all, we don’t have any real definition for being “done” with Communities! There is a long, long way to go, so we’ve been thinking in terms of milestones and releases.

We had a limited alpha release with only dozens of participants and then a closed beta with hundreds of participants—and we’re now in a kind of open beta with many tens of thousands of participants. We are still working to open the floodgates one bit at a time and get hundreds of thousands of participants.

But there are many millions of people on Tumblr. So you could say that we will consider the Communities feature released in a more official fashion, no longer “beta”, when we’ve built everything out in the native mobile apps.

There are a lot of things coming for Communities. We’ve been sharing roadmap updates and more in the Communities Feedback community, for example—the latest is here! Don’t miss it.

Thanks for your question! We are glad for your interest in Communities—we hope you like it.

[wip]

morning wips! i wanna get involved with the communities rollout! i've submitted a couple of them for review already. however, even for someone like me that is v ready for it, it's hard to engage with communities as a concept because it's not clear what they'll be, not possible to browse existing ones, and there's no info about how they might look or feel like to use. could we have a list of communities that are already happening (even if we can't access them yet), a walkthrough of how communities look or some other descriptive resource? the current info about communities isn't telling very much. these suggestions are made with positive enthusiasm - i WANT to get hype - but it feels v much like we're fumbling in the dark/contributing to something that we don't get to see atm and i think some clarity would help. kis kis kis !!

Answer: Hi there, @moitt!

Thank you for these. All great, fair questions!

And we are happy to answer them. Admittedly, we are fumbling in the dark a little, you might say—that is why it’s still an experiment. We have our own ideas for how Communities could work, but really, we want to build it based on what people actually do with it. This is why the current functionality is fairly simple and limited. We’ve wanted to see what feedback we get and to understand what people ask for and expect—rather than spending a long time building something that may be unappealing to the people we hope will use it (we’ve made that mistake many times in the past!) You can see a little bit of that dialogue in the Feedback community.

To your point about seeing communities—right now, we’re working on ways of integrating public communities into existing feeds, search, tagged pages, etc., so that they can be discovered by people who aren’t in any yet (which is most people on Tumblr!) We hope that by seeing other people use it, you’ll get a better explanation than anything we could try to provide—because every community is doing things in their own interestingly unique way right now. We don’t want to be prescriptive about how they should be used.

By the way, the same is true with how blogs work on Tumblr—we don’t tell you how to blog. Instead, we hope you try to figure out your own way of blogging by seeing how others behave on the platform.

We hope that helps address at least some of your queries. We would also advise that you have a little look at this handy Help Center explainer into Communities. Above all, we hope y’all like it.

Stay tuned!

[wip]

With communities are group tumblrs finished? can group tumblrs be turned into communities? also will tumblr notify a user if their community idea is rejected? what about communities that have multiple purposes, can communities join together if they have the same goal? or will Tumblr make the communities decide on who can survive?

Answer: Hi there, @richardmurrayhumblr!

All important questions, so we are taking them one at a time.

With communities are group tumblrs finished?

Absolutely not. In fact, the code behind group blogs is what is powering communities right now! But they have very different purposes and only overlap in some ways. We have no plans to remove group blogs.

can group tumblrs be turned into communities?

Because group blogs and communities do share a lot of code right now, this is something we’ve been thinking about doing. Some of the inspiration for communities has come from group blogs that are run as a way for people to get together in one space and share content—that is exactly what we hope for communities, too. We can’t say when we’ll get to this, but it’s an interesting idea.

also will tumblr notify a user if their community idea is rejected?

This waitlist is temporary, so we’re not sending out notices for the communities we don’t approve. We may not even get through all of them before we open up creation for everyone, in which case, the ones we didn’t approve can be created then!

what about communities that have multiple purposes, can communities join together if they have the same goal? or will Tumblr make the communities decide on who can survive?

That’s an interesting idea! We’re not really sure yet. The way we’ve envisioned it so far is not to try to enforce the notion that there is “one community” about a given subject. Instead, there can be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of communities about a given subject, and each of them will probably be a little different in their own way. That’s how communities of people on Tumblr already behave, most of the time. We’re just building an easier way to structure them.

That said, we are very interested in adding ways for communities to link to each other. So if there are a bunch of communities about the same subject, they can form some kind of ring or cluster together.

All great questions—thank you for getting in touch. Keep 'em coming, folks!

[labs]

Communities open beta is here

Hello yet again! Last month we began our closed beta test of our new Communities feature, and yesterday we opened up community creation to everyone on Tumblr! You can now request to create a community and it'll be put on a waitlist (pending our approval).

So far we've gotten over 5,800 communities on the waitlist. We'll be working through that list as quickly as we can so y'all can start inviting people and testing this out with us.

If you're curious to learn more about communities, you can check out the Communities Feedback community for a sneak peek and the latest news on how things are going.

[labs]

Communities closed beta is here

Hello again! We’re back with an update on Communities, a big idea we had last year that we’ve been working on steadily since then. We’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re beginning a “closed beta” phase of this new feature, which means many of you will get to play with it soon!

We want to build this whole thing together, with as much input from all of you as possible. We’ve read and re-read the feedback from our previous post, and we’ve been surveying and interviewing people about this idea for a few months now. But it’s time to open this up even more for hands-on testing.

We’ve already begun reaching out to most of you who interacted with our previous post, as promised, with a survey asking whether you’d be interested in helping (check your email!). Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be using the results of that survey to narrow down who we’d like to help test Communities in these initial batches.

The process is looking a bit like this:

If you received a Communities survey email to your registered Tumblr email address, fill it out! If you’re interested in helping us in this beta test period, that’s your way of potentially getting early access. If you did not receive an email with the Communities survey, don’t fret! Communities will be rolling out to more people as we expand our testing. 

We’ll go through the results and choose a diverse range of community ideas to gather a wide array of feedback.

Selected testers will receive a second survey with more detailed questions about their proposed community. Very practical stuff, like the name, title, and description, whether it should be public or private, the About page contents, its own community guidelines, and more.

We will create the new Tumblr community on your behalf using the information supplied. We’re building the tools that will let people create and edit communities themselves, so eventually you’ll be able to change them without needing our help. But for now, we’re creating and editing them for you, as needed.

After we’ve created the community, you’ll be made its first admin. Everything from here on out is up to you – Tumblr staff won’t be in your community (unless you invite us, of course). You’ll be able to invite anyone on Tumblr to your community. However, your community will have a population cap to start, limiting how many people can be in it and invited, as a way of keeping this beta test somewhat contained and manageable for us. We’ll be able to raise that population cap for communities that are growing and if we want to test further in that direction.

And throughout, we’ll be asking for feedback, both in some special communities for everyone in the closed beta, and via more surveys and the Support tickets we receive.

This closed beta version of Communities is far from finished, and that’s part of the reason we want to start opening it up to more of you for feedback. There are a lot of rough edges and known issues, but we think it’s far enough along that it’s usable enough for testing. We need feedback in order to feel like we’re building the right thing.

The very first public community is called “Communities Feedback” for this reason! We want everyone helping us test out communities to tell us about it, so people in this closed beta will be in there by default. We want to use that space to be more public and real-time about new pieces we’re building, bugs we’re fixing, things we know are broken, and answers to common questions. There is an additional, private community for community admins, to help shape how administrating and moderating these spaces will work. And if you don’t want to use those spaces, you can always use the “Feedback” category in our Support form.

Stay tuned for more, and keep an eye on that Communities Feedback space if you’d like to see how things are changing over time.

[wip]

Now that Live is gone, will the “make post” button return to its spot between “search” and “activity” on the bottom menu bar?

Answer: Hello, @tisorridalamor!

Long story short: it’s unlikely it will return to the nav bar. 

It is still undecided what exactly will happen with this space, but we are actually playing around with the idea of adding an icon there for Communities, which we’re experimenting with.

Watch this space, here, so to speak.

[wip]

Will the new Communities feature include a live chat? And will it be possible to pin a post at the top with a welcome, rules and info? I'm curious as to how this will shape up!

Answer: Hey there, @vaguelygenius!

In short: right now, no live chat. However, we are interested in it, whether it’ll feel needed or not, per se. And we are also looking into some kind of Discord integration instead of building a live chat (again) ourselves.

As for pinning a post: yes! We are playing around with the ideas of an About page, a Community Guidelines page, a Pinned Posts tab/feed, and whether just pinning posts to the main feed makes the most sense.

We will want to play around with these ideas once we’ve got more people using Communities for their own usage. Pinning posts may make a lot of sense for big communities with lots of passers-by, but makes no sense for small communities that really want to use pinned posts as a “highlights” feed.

Thanks for your interest in it! We’re glad to see it and will reach out when it’s time to open it up to more people.

[labs]

Another idea: Communities on Tumblr

For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.

Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:

Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.

Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.

We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.

If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.

Stay tuned for more!

[labs]

Hello again, Labs here with a recap of our test of Collections! We introduced this prototype back in September and then handed the feature to a handful of volunteers sourced from the notes on that post. Thank you again to all volunteers! 

We got so much useful feedback, and wanted to share some of that here, and reveal some next steps we’re taking. There are a couple of big projects cooking in Labs, and Collections has taken a backseat lately, but it is important to us to not leave y’all hanging. We very much want to build things with you here.

Our goal with the volunteer-based super-early phase of Collections was to see if those volunteers actually use the feature, watch what they come up with, and check whether anybody they invite to Tumblr signs up and becomes a regular user of the site. Turns out, nobody did sign up — it’s not as useful of an onboarding strategy as we thought it could be.

However, one piece of feedback we got is that Collections make great custom feeds, which people on Tumblr have been asking for a lot over the years. We hear you loud and clear: you want to supplement the standard Following / For You experience with more intentional control over feed content. That’s really important to us.

With that in mind, for those in the prototype, we’ve moved the Collections list to the left sidebar / mobile navigation as an expandable area like Account, for quick access. We like this better than putting them in the dashboard tab bar, but it’s still something we’re mulling over:

We also heard the need for more filtering options beyond just blogs and tags. What about only including a blog’s posts that use a certain tag, or excluding posts using a certain tag? Or list tags with a boolean AND operator (“posts tagged [tag] and [other tag]”), not just the OR operator we’re using now for sourcing tagged posts. Lots of ideas on how to further customize what shows up in the feed, and better define what the feed is “for”.

There were other fun, tangential bits of feedback, too, like the desire to make these Collections a collaborative feature, so that more than one person can help build a Collection. There were also several usability issues that came to the forefront, which we’ve addressed. And there were some well-articulated thoughts and questions about etiquette, such as how to seek a blog’s “permission” to be included in a Collection – that’s something we care a lot about, to help prevent this kind of feature from being a source of abuse.

Another piece of feedback we heard repeatedly is the desire for Collections of posts. This is not really what we intended with what we built, but it’s not too far afield either. We totally agree that having better, easier ways of collecting and curating individual posts would be useful, so we’re going to investigate that as a separate project.

With all of this in mind, we’ve split the work on Collections into two separate tracks:

Shaping this feature as a “customizable feeds” solution, away from an “invite others” tool.

Building a new thing for saving and curating static posts.

Stay tuned here on the Labs blog for updates on when/if we’ll be moving these Collections tracks of work to more people on Tumblr. (If you are one of the volunteers who helped us with Collections, you’ll still have access to it for the time being!)

Thanks for reading! And please reach out to us via Support, the replies here, or your reblogs, if you have any more feedback, as always.

[wip]

The new Labs collection idea seems good, but I'm a bit concerned about the fact that similar user generated groupings on other sites have been used for abuse purposes. Will there be measures to mitigate this, such as notification, an option to remove yourself, report the collection etc.?

Answer: Hey there, @digitalisnarcissus!

We understand your concerns here, and, speaking frankly, we share them. This is why we are starting with an extremely limited volunteer-based test, which will be closely monitored. And, if anything goes untoward, we’ll take action on it swiftly.

It is for that reason that all of the above is being considered for the beta release, and we hope to learn even more from user feedback. And this is just why we want this kind of feedback early—so please do keep it coming!

Best,

—Lara and Cyle

[labs]

Introducing Collections

Hello again, Tumblr. Labs division here!

A while back, we announced our comeback as a new team that would imagine big ideas for Tumblr—and would build them in public (aka with you). We recently announced our first failure, and today we're very excited to announce our first possible success!

A bit of context

As we've said before, an essential part of how we're working in Labs is speaking to people who use Tumblr pretty much on a daily basis and those who don’t use it at all.

In those interviews and focus groups, we learned that curating the Tumblr experience around different interests and fandoms is a big part of making Tumblr feel like your own space — and one of the main ways you do that is through blogs and tags (be it following or creating them).

So here at Labs we're working on ideas to help you curate the content you care about, and to help share what makes your experience fun with other people, even if they are not on Tumblr already.

Ok, but what's the idea?

Have you ever put together a song playlist to listen to when you're in a certain mood, or share with a specific friend? Or sent them books you know they'll love? Now imagine if you could do that with blogs and tags on Tumblr…

Maybe you're a veteran in a fandom and have the best recommendations of who to follow for your followers. Or your best friend won't join Tumblr because they don't know that their favorite TV show is actually really popular here. Or maybe you want to curate and browse content from a specific fandom, or a group of your mutuals, your own way.

That's the idea behind Collections!

You can check out that example collection on the web here!

We want your help

The first way we're testing Collections is by inviting some of you to create your own and share with followers and friends—they'll be able to follow all the blogs and tags in your collections. So we're looking for volunteers!

You want to help? Great! Here's what you need to do:

Come up with your own Collections of blogs and tags, write it down somewhere. Focus on introducing people to Tumblr or recommending stuff to your followers. What would you want them to first see on your version of Tumblr?

Come up with a name, cover image, and description for it. Also try to think of who you would send your collection to, and where you might post about it.

Write out that idea as a reply or reblog on this post!

We’ll give it a few days, and pick a handful of people to play with Collections. We'll let you know. Then we’re off to the races!

If you decide to participate (and get selected), please note that this early release won’t work on the apps yet, only in your web browser. 

What happens next?

Our goal is to keep working on improving and adding Collection functionalities while you test what we've built (and share your feedback with us).

Next we’re exploring making a collection something you can follow on Tumblr, as a way to curate Tumblr around your many interests and moods, and to give you more freedom to curate content on your dashboard.

And if this idea is not for you, remember we have many more experiments in progress, so stay tuned!

With love,

Labs division

[labs]

Hello, Tumblr. Labs division here!

Back in June, we announced our comeback as a new team that would imagine big ideas for Tumblr—and would build them in public (aka with you).

Today we're very excited to announce our first failure. The first experiment we want to loudly, publicly admit didn’t work. We’re pretty excited about this because trying and failing are a big part of learning.

A little background

A few months ago, we ran interviews with lots of people on Tumblr to get a better sense of what works and what needs to be better. 

Among other things, we heard that people discovering (or rediscovering) Tumblr really struggle to understand how to make it work for them. They sometimes don't know how to follow the right blogs to curate their dashboard, or how to use likes, replies and reblogs to interact with a particular fandom. 

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really! Some might be lucky and have friends to teach them, but many come here to find friends in the first place, and leave feeling lost and overwhelmed.

So here at Labs we're working on ideas to help people discover what makes Tumblr a unique corner of the internet, making it easier for them to find belonging here.

Our (failed) idea

Our first idea was to simplify certain parts of our interface, thinking through each element and putting what is important to you front and center. We called it "Mini"—mostly because it was a cute name.

We started work on the post interface first, because that's the most important part of your experience on Tumblr, and we wanted to improve some of the problems there.

Our goal was to make labels and actions on posts easier to differentiate, and make each post the same height, so diving into a long post is a choice. To achieve that, we designed a new header, a new footer with separate actions, and a mini version of the post:

As we started to build it, we realized that scrolling through the dashboard after the changes… didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like Tumblr anymore. But we didn’t want to make a decision based solely on our own gut feelings… we needed to ask the Tumblr community. 

An essential part of how we're working in Labs is speaking to people who use Tumblr (and those who don't use it, but could love it) pretty much on a daily basis. So we showed them this idea, and their response was indifferent at best, and confused at worst.

We learned that it's hard to limit the height of a post without sacrificing the magic of reblogs, and that loss was too meaningful for us to pursue this any further. So we're putting it in the trash.

What's next

So Mini didn’t work out! That’s okay. We’ve learned a lot. While minifying posts might not be the answer, there were parts of the idea that worked, and you might even start to see some improvements being tested from what we learned. We’ll see where that goes!

We're working on other ideas at the same time, and some of them are getting a lot of love from people in research. So the next time you hear from us, we'll hopefully have something more successful to share—stay tuned!

With love, Labs division

[labs]

Labs is back

Hello citizens of Tumblr! If you’ve been on Tumblr for awhile, you’ve probably stumbled upon those Tumblr Labs settings we’ve had for several years now. Originally, Tumblr Labs was meant to be a way for us engineers at Tumblr to experiment in public, in an opt-in way. Experiments inside of Labs have come and gone over the years, and some have even made their way into the product as real features (soon, Reblog Graphs will graduate to “real feature” status), and some have been discontinued.

Going forward, we’re transforming what Labs means to Tumblr. Before this week, there was no group of staff at Tumblr considered “members of Labs”; experiments were built by anyone who felt like it, and they were usually small ideas. Recently it’s become clear to us that we actually do need a dedicated group of people within the company working on prototypes of big ideas, ones that could fundamentally change Tumblr as a platform.

The core values of Tumblr are good and resonate with people. Those core values are probably familiar if you’ve used Tumblr for awhile: we’re different from other social media, we value pseudonymity and co-creation and safe spaces, folks are here for their niche more than what’s trending. However, the product itself doesn’t always resonate with those statements – we want to make it effortless for folks new to Tumblr to connect with those core values. People who love the idea of Tumblr just aren’t able to “get it” quickly enough. Tumblr needs fundamental change to be sustainable and grow more, all without losing those unique, good core values.

But we’re not sure exactly what that change looks like, so we’ve assembled a new team, called Tumblr Labs, to figure it out as quickly as possible. We’re going to be prototyping ideas, some that may feel very familiar and natural if you use Tumblr and other similar platforms every day, and some that feel totally alien and weird to us as heavy Tumblr users. We’ll be testing these ideas in an opt-in basis with people who’ve been using Tumblr for years, and more especially with people who’ve never even heard of Tumblr (a difficult group to find).

More than that, though, we want to practice “working in public” here. The @changes and @wip blogs have been our first steps in that direction, and we think this blog is the next step. Give us a follow to stay up-to-date on what we’re thinking about, what we’re building, what has worked and what hasn’t, and for opportunities to help. We want your feedback as we work, and we hope to invite many of you to try out these ideas in the future so they can be shaped by you — so stay tuned!