walk outside, look at the sky, ask it to fall or tell you why
@willowsmarika
Marika (she/her), twenty-something, hungarian, dreamer, fangirl, mad scientist in training
sometimes i make stuff... feel free to drop by and request something :)
request something // talk to me // archive // random // resources
insta // ao3 // tw // and pretty much everywhere else @willowsmarika
— 𝖜𝖊 𝖆𝖗𝖊 𝖘𝖚𝖈𝖍 𝖈𝖔𝖜𝖆𝖗𝖉𝖘 𝖙𝖔𝖉𝖆𝖞, 𝖈𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖎𝖔𝖕𝖊.
Some things you let go in order to live
While all around you, the buildings sway
You sing it out loud, "who made us this way?"
I know you're bleeding, but you'll be okay
Hold on to your heart, you'll keep it safe
Hold on to your heart, don't give it away
You'll find a rooftop to sing from
Or find a hallway to dance
You don't need no edge to cling from
Your heart is there, it's in your hands
I know it seems like forever
I know it seems like an age
But one day this will be over
I swear it's not so far away
Albion Party 2021 Week four ~ Team prompt: BLUE
Honestly I think a lot of people who have never made a gif for tumblr don't get that it does actually take time and effort, its not just rip it from a video and post it- you have to download the video, in my case I have a video player installed that grabs continuous caps, figure out what parts you need, you have to open those in photoshop or gimp, depending on where you got photoshop you might be paying for it every month and then on top of that is actually sizing, cropping, colouring, sharpening, adding text, etc. etc. like it is something that takes time and effort for which the only real reward is creating something that makes you happy and hopefully people reblog it with a nice or funny tag, so maybe keep that in mind the next time you think gif makers are being mean or unfair for being upset about reposts. It is its own little artform that is fairly unique to this website, and that's a big aspect of why I have always loved tumblr, if all the gifmakers stopped posting things would be a lot more boring around here.
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 haven't read the article at the top of this post because there's been a 'TUMBLR IS GOING TO SHUT DOWN OVERNIGHT' panic roughly every 18 months for at least the past decade and there's nothing, beyond some note-farming reblog additions, to suggest this is really any different.
I don't normally reblog this kind of thing let alone add to it, but the scaremongering does piss me off every time and I'm seeing this reblogged SO MUCH, so: tumblr isn't going to shut down overnight. Even cohost, the most recent shutdown I can recall, gave users a bit of notice to sort themselves.
Also, this sudden "one day we all woke up and FANDOM WAS GONE" thing didn't actually happen with livejournal either?? There was Strikethrough, in which a lot of communities and users were removed suddenly in a clunky application of new content restriction rules (which has also already happened on tumblr, with the nsfw ban), but LJ still existed after (LJ still exists NOW, incidentally). A lot of communities did, too. I don't recall Strikethrough affecting me or any comms I was in directly. I'm sure some people left LJ for tumblr, but I think basically everyone I knew used both at the same time for at least a while. Same with twitter. It was a process. If you lost touch with people it was because one of you moved to use another platform exclusively and the other didn't, and that has always happened, and will continue to happen, regardless of whether or not tumblr shuts down.
Like if you're worried about losing blog contents of course try to back up (although I won't be, 90% of my tumblr experience is other people's gifsets gathered over about 15 years and I'm just going to have to let them go) but the same is true of any other website, at any time.
Just in case, i have pillowfort and livejournal, i don't use them, but still, you can find me there. My gifsets (most of them) are archived on ao3. My username is willowsmarika everywhere. You can also dm me for my discord if you want.
