Tumblr recently announced they will ban all adult content from their platform starting December 17th, a move that has surprised many people because Tumblr has become a bit infamous as a platform for adult content, especially after Twitter and Google's Blogger announced they will stop allowing adult content on their platforms, so Tumblr was one of the few big social media sites left that seemed to embrace adult content.
After the announcement, many people joked that instead Tumblr is announcing the complete shutdown of the service, because without adult content, there would be nothing left. That's tongue in cheek of course, Tumblr is used for all kinds of things like all social media sites and at one point many companies had a blog there, although now Medium is the goto place for that. I had a Smalltalk-80 programming blog on Tumblr many years ago, when it was still new.
Tumblr has said in their blog they are doing this to make Tumblr a more welcoming place for more people, but since this announcement came so shortly after Apple banned the Tumblr app from the iOS App Store because of illegal pornography on the service, it's hard not to see a connection there. So maybe, instead of just banning illegal porn, out of desperation they thought it's better to just ban all explicit images and videos to save their brand.
Only time will tell if this will work out, or if it backfires and Tumblr, after losing such a big portion of its userbase, will slowly die off completely.
Movim
Due to this move by Tumblr, lots of people have been looking for an alternative and the best alternative to a centralized service is always a decentralized service, so it's interesting to see that Movim, a federated Open Source social media platform, has written a blog post where they welcome refugees from the great Tumblr purge and try to explain why Movim is a great alternative to Tumblr.
Movim is built on open standards, namely XMPP, Atom and PubSub. Movim can be used as a website, but there are also apps available for macOS, Windows, Linux and Android.
You can register a free account on a number of public servers, including a few provided by the Movim project itself, or run your own server with the Movim software.
Here is a short introduction video of Movim:
If you're interested in decentralized social networks, I've written articles about a few: Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt, Aether and Akasha.
Links
- Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601515
- Movim blog post: https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/hey-tumblr-users-here-is-why-movim-could-be-the-best-platform-to-migrate-to-BpGnsH
- Movim website: https://movim.eu/
- Movim source code: https://github.com/edhelas/movim
- Tumblr blog post: https://staff.tumblr.com/post/180758987165/a-better-more-positive-tumblr