This matters a lot. The previous fights for net neutrality were won in part with the support of scrappy online companies like Tumblr, whose CEO, staff and users worked together to send a strong message to Congress and the FCC about the importance of a neutral internet, free from ISPs who slow down your connections to services unless they pay bribes for “premium” carriage.
With Trump’s FCC set to slay Net Neutality, the internet is once again planning a day of coordinated action: on July 12, sites across the net will send their users to the FCC and Congress to demand that ISPs be held to a public service standard befitting the trillions of dollars in public subsidies they receive every year in the form of access to rights of way through our cities and between them.
However, Tumblr is not among the companies presently slated to participate, and sources within the company told The Verge that the company and its CEO, David Karp (once a staunch Net Neutrality campaigner) have been given orders to sit this one out.
This btw – is why if you have fic on this site, you should probably work on copying it over to Ao3 now. Because the nature of Tumblr is likely to change with the new ownership… remember strikethru and prepare.
Heyyy everyone Have you been backing up the stuff you have only posted on tumblr? Because you should Gentle reminder Tumblr does not count as backup
This. Start backing your shit up. Having lived through a few seismic internet shakeups, I can tell you right now, these tremors feel awfully fucking familiar. Just… bigger.
(Not just your content. Figure out a way to keep in touch with the people you want to keep talking to if all your social media hangouts fall into the ocean. Protip: IRC is the indestructible cockroach of online chat platforms and will probably outlive all of us.)
I have a paid WP account to back this place up. If you can, I recommend it. You can find me by this name damn near anywhere. Except Twitter, which isn’t technically a fan space, just has fan content from time to time.
I am only sporadically here these days, so drop me a line about where to find you if the apocalypse comes.
The slow exodus from Tumblr has already begun. I’ve been at fandom for longer than some people who use this site have been alive, and I’ve learned that fandom follows where the fan artists go. The fan artists have been increasingly moving over to Twitter.
The problem with Twitter is that it’s a terrible space for people who primarily fan via text rather than art. Who knows where everybody will end up, but might I suggest Dreamwidth?
