Hard to believe Tumblr lasted this long even. They killed like 3/4 of their content (and audience) when they decided to not have any porn like 4 years ago. Everybody left. An early example of enshitification.
After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.
Other companies would’ve used the opportunity to fire most of the team. Kudos to Automattic.
Tumblr has been “on life support” for years now, if it’s gonna croak then I’ll believe it when I see it.
yeah since they banned porn lmao
I’m really surprised theres no Tumblr esque fediverse website. I wonder if them teasing activitypub support killed want for other developers to want to work on one
That’s not good, especially as they wanted to join the Fediverse in the future.
Word from insiders communicating openly about it was that it wasn’t going to happen for the same reasons behind this soft end of life: there wasn’t profit in it and they needed to find profitability.
Word was that the project to federate was internally put in a “too hard let’s try later” basket. Of course none of that was made public. But this life support status is really just the other shoe from the broken federation promise.
Interestingly, I suspect there’s a conversation to be had around how difficult it is to federate with the fediverse and AP, whether from the ground up or as an add on. I’ve seen conversations about how it really is difficult work. If it were easier, maybe things like tumblr would have done it earlier and the fediverse and it’s various platforms would be richer and more successful.
Damn it costs $30M a year to keep Tumblr running? I figured it could be handled for like 20 cents a day. Like those starving kids on TV.
The server time alone is probably in the millions a year. Server time is cheap on a small scale, but it adds up.
