Oopsie @mimeswhodocrimes - Tumblr Blog

raiinc

pseudowandered-deactivated20251

roseate wilson if he was girl and also uhhhh miss acacia and joe

jv

Hey friends 🫂

jv

Be nice with staff today, folks

jv

Ok I wasn't planning to share anything about this because I was waiting for any official comms, but I'm seeing people from outside of Automattic sharing this screenshot in a WordPress-related public discord server, so I guess the cat is out of the bag:

Image screenshot-20231006-005401-2-1 hosted in ImgBB

TLDR: most of the current staff is being moved to other automattic divisions and Tumblr will be run by an skeleton crew

dualumina

For folks not incredibly tech/business savvy; this basically means the website will still exist, it will still be functional for the most part. However you may find that fun updates won't be as frequent, or full on stop occuring. Reports for harassment or bugs might be slow to reply, or you may receive no reply at all (from a human, automatic messages are still a thing) depending on the situation.

The wording states that the majority of the 139 staff in Bumblr will be moved to other projects. That means at max 69 people will stay while at least 70 will leave the project. That's at bare minimum cutting the team in half. Have no idea if Happiness and T&S are also tumblr-centered crews, so them not being affected could be a blessing or at worst have no affect on the matter.

Google really doesn't offer any good indication whether Bumblr is a goofy name for tumblr or an actual team that manages something specific to the website. Any tumblr staff member is welcome to clarify any of that if they want to, and can (nondisclosure agreements are a thing).

If Bumblr is a specific subset of the staff then they might be in charge of content updates, like check marks, events, things like that. In which case the usability and moderation will likely see little to no changes. Which is good! Trust us; you'd rather want a functional website with no new content than a non-functional one desperate to pump out updates.

Does it suck people are technically being fired from such a great (fingers crossed it's great at least) job? Oh definitely, but this isn't THE end of tumblr.

There will be change and we may not like it.

You should definitely save anything important just incase; less people means sometimes accidents will happen more frequently. Share your contact info with anyone you want to keep in contact with.

Prepare for the worst but hope for the best.

jv

Some clarity:

Happiness -> Support

T&S -> Trust & Safety

Bumblr -> Product development, editorial, marketing etc.

The "reduction" don't affect Happiness or T&S because they weren't "Tumblr" to begin with, they are a different divisions within automattic that are cross-product (cover all the products from the company). So if automattic has (I have no idea of the real numbers numbers) 100 people working on T&S, maybe half of those were working on tumblr until now. But if tomorrow they decide to left only 10 of them working of tumblr, they don't need to move the other 40 anywhere: they are still in the same team, just looking at a different JIRA board every morning. Same with Hapiness. So the fact that there are no changes in those divisions doesn't have to mean there won't be less people on them working on tumblr.

Technically, people are not being fired over this (though some of them had been, today), they will just be moved to other projects (WordPress, WooCom, Day One, etc).

But yeah, your post is very good.

cassieoh

A skeleton crew doesn't mean a site is going away (though it likely won't get updates and bugs/outages will take longer to fix), but just in case anyone is concerned, here's a link to instructions to download your entire blog

mtfoss

Just checked the link and a quick heads up the code recommended in the article has moved from the link provided to here:

A Tumblr and Twitter Blog Backup Application. Contribute to TumblThreeApp/TumblThree development by creating an account on GitHub.

cardo-de-comer

☂️

micromime

draw your fav eating grimace meal

vixendoe-archive

After 4 months of collaborative work, I'm proud to finally post the don't starve MAP I storyboarded and organized! A big shout out and thank you to everyone involved with the project

Credits are all within the video description. A slight warning for lyrics about parasitic fungi, for anyone who might be sensitive to that idea.

This was a huge project, and I'm happy to finally share it with everyone ^-^