I’m bursting to go check it out this weekend already. I’ve been drawing fanart in excitement for this adaptation since 2019, so it feels super special now that it’s finally here.
Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It’s hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
Reblogs drive the entire site. If you’d upvote something on Reddit, you’d reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you’re not required to.
The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
You can send an ask to someone, and it’ll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don’t want.
Tags aren’t actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can’t use quotation marks (“) or commas in them without fucking it up
You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you’ll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don’t:
Very old posts (I’m talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There’s no such thing as a post being "too old” to reblog
Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
You can screenshot someone’s tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called “peer review”
Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not “creepy” like it is seen as on other sites.
Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a “yes, and?” attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say “I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd” and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
Don’t try to do epic clapbacks here, you’ll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask “hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?” and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It’s generally polite to oblige, but “no” is still reasonable.
Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don’t get involved in it. Ever.
Don’t put fandom tags or jokes on someone’s posts about serious matters or personal shit
You’re responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don’t like, that’s probably on you. Don’t be afraid to unfollow.
Follower count doesn’t matter much here and you don’t have to make yours known if you don’t want to.
Reblog, don’t repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn’t “steal” engagement like Twitter retweets.
If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There’s a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
Get XKit Rewritten if you’re on desktop, it’s a really helpful extension
In the little drop-down menu next to the ‘Post now’ button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It’s good for spreading stuff out over time.
You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!
Great advice, but I’ll argue one point - I don’t think Likes are useless! It’s true content creators don’t love them, as they don’t share the post with a wider audience like reblogs do, but they can be useful on a personal level. I often use likes as a “save for later” function (though this would work better if likes could be organized at all, but alas), so if I’m in public and can’t watch a video/listen to an audio post but would like to later, it goes into my Likes. If there’s a long post or article I’d like to read but don’t have the brain power at the moment, it goes into my Likes. Then later when it’s more appropriate, I’ll go through my recent Likes and watch/listen/read and either unlike or reblog as I wish.
They can also serve a social function, especially among mutuals. If someone makes a personal post and I want them to know I read it and sympathize but it wouldn’t be appropriate to share via reblog, a Like can be a way of acknowledging the post without giving it to a wider audience than OP might want. I don’t do this often, usually only with people I’ve gotten to know somewhat well, but it is a valid function of the Like.
Now go forth armed with knowledge and enjoy One of the Websites of All Time.
Do people post their own TikToks on this hellsite or is that considered gauche? Either way, I made a video on how to use the OpenEmu.org emulator to play old Nintendo and Sega games on a Mac if you’re into that sort of thing 🤷🏽♀️
happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.
Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful
Please remember that “land back” does not mean “indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don’t belong in big cities,” nor does it mean “non-indigenous people can’t be farmers.”
What it DOES mean is that “non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from.”
It means, “there’s a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn’t caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem.”
It means, “non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem.”
It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.
My last painting of 2022, and I wanted it to be a painting carrying me into the new year, a tribute to an amazing and inspirational woman.
Star Trek has been a show I have watched since I was a wee one. I started with TNG as a child, but when I finally watched TOS in college, its impact was undeniable, both today and especially during the time it aired.
Although the famous speech says “final frontier”, Nichelle Nichols was a woman leading the way onto new frontiers, a beacon of hope, resilience and possibility. So that is what I wish to carry with me into the new year.
