Beauty and garbage

The Future Is Like Pie #36

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
September 27, 2023

As everyone debates the merits of Mastodon versus Blue Sky, please allow me to present for your consideration: tumblr.

Look, I don’t have anything new or original to say about Twitter’s collapse—I’m Extremely Online, Twitter was everything to me, of course I’m gutted—but I do want to tell you that, for me, tumblr has been not only a balm, but a legitimate source of joy. And if you haven’t tried it, but you’ve been curious—well, today I’m going to tell you how to tumblr.

I joined tumblr seven million years ago (2009), and as I recall I mostly used it to reblog pretty pictures. Then there was this phase, probably around 2016, where tumblr stopped being cool—I don’t know, maybe it was just that Twitter was All Breaking News All The Time And Everything Was Very Important, and tumblr seemed like a lot of twenty-year-olds drawing pictures of vampires kissing, and my attention drifted. (Me today: where are all the pictures of vampires kissing?) Then, of course, the world / social media started grinding us all to paste on the daily, and—you know. You know how it's been. But I reimmersed myself in tumblr a few years ago, and I think it’s one of the best places on the internet right now.

It’s not a perfect replacement for Twitter, and it shouldn’t be! They do have some things in common—they are both feeds of posts from users, and you can find whatever kind of content you want, or whatever kind of people you want to connect to, in either place. But Twitter (in its heyday) was more about the public square—current events and real faces and local meetups. Tumblr is more anonymous, more evergreen, more pocketed. (Also, the feed is blessedly chronological.) It’s more—well, it’s more about the content, I suppose. You don’t get a main character. You don’t worry about virality. You sit and enjoy the words and pictures. You appreciate the dopamine hits that come from scrolling anticapitalist shitposts, thank you very much.

And this is the thing: weird internet is kind of my jam, and Twitter hasn’t had that kind of breathing room in years. But tumblr? Tumblr is full of beauty and garbage. It’s memes and manga and the most beautiful digital illustrations you’ve ever seen, and breathtaking nature photography, elaborate and extended inside jokes, commissioned drawings of fursonas, intensely personal essays, midcentury magazine spreads, videos of fainting goats, SAG-AFTRA strike updates, fandom polls, socialism explainers, poetry. Did you hear about Goncharov? We have Goncharov.

Like any space, it’s what you make it. Anyway, here’s your Tumblr 101:

  • Create an account, choose accounts to follow, then visit your dashboard to see your feed. If you like something, click the heart or reblog it to your followers. I prefer the interface of the iPhone app for scrolling the feed, but the desktop site for creating content.

  • Terminology: Mutuals are accounts you follow who also follow you. Notes are the combined stats of hearts, reblogs, and comments. Tumblr Live is incredibly stupid and nobody likes it. Blaze is a way to pay to push an individual post out like an ad, and people mostly use it for jokes (blazing very stupid posts) or for advertising their drawing services.

  • You can reblog other people’s posts with or without your own comments, like Twitter. Your comments get added to the bottom of the post, unlike Twitter. This can result in fascinating public conversations, with a better interface (imo) than Twitter threads.

  • Hashtags are a whole thing. They’re an art, really—usually meta commentary on a post, like asides, footnotes, and additional jokes. They’re often complete sentences, or several fragments making up a longer sentence; they can also act as search terms for finding similar content. I used to be good at them, but years of Twitter use broke me and now I never know how to write them on tumblr.

  • People generally include their age, pronouns, and sexual/gender identities in their account profile. The general demographic of tumblr skews younger, queerer, and more neurodivergent than I’ve seen on other platforms. (No social platform can truly be free of terfs and fascists, I suppose, but it’s a far sight better on tumblr than other spots.) (There is also an ongoing problem with content moderation disproportionately targeting trans users, so, again, the platform is not perfect.)

  • There’s no such thing as verified on tumblr. Some accounts will show blue checkmarks, which tumblr implemented literally just to troll Twitter. (It’s great here, I’m telling you.)

  • People often have multiple accounts, and accounts get abandoned or closed all the time, and no one uses their real name except for Neil Gaiman. (Also, Neil Gaiman is here.) Many tumblr names are shitposts in themselves; nothing quite captures the tumblr experience like finding a really hilarious cat video that you want to text to your friends but the post is from someone named pissvortex. You get used to it.

  • There are occasional influxes of spam and porn bots who just follow accounts en masse. They come in waves, like bad weather; just block them when you see them.

  • There’s a paid tier to remove ads. I started paying for it maybe a year ago. Worth it, especially now that FanDuel is legal in Massachusetts.

Tips for finding accounts to follow:

  • Look for the names of accounts you used to follow on Twitter, since they might be the same or similar—like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Dinosaur Comics, Humans of New York, and McMansion Hell.

  • Search hashtags related to your current fandoms or hobbies and see what comes up.

  • Try the blogs and hashtags that tumblr suggests for you. Suggestions appear in the tabs at the top of your dashboard (like “For You” and “Popular Reblogs”), and in modals between every few posts in your feed.

  • Ask your friends if they’re on tumblr. (Hi, I’m unsurprisingly at redsesame.)

  • Some accounts I enjoy:

See you on the internet.

Here’s a cause I learned about thanks to tumblr: a network of pilots who volunteer their time, skills, and planes to getting folks the healthcare they need. It's called Elevated Access and they need support: "We are a relatively new 501(c)3 non-profit which means for us that we are spending money to get everything setup including legal expenses, our website, and our IT systems. Besides start-up costs, we also have ongoing expenses to communicate, manage our relationships with pilots and access organizations, and track our workflows." And that doesn't even include fuel, which can't be covered through donations. Show them some love!

<3