Do we know any more about the plans of Tumblr for when it will join the Fediverse?
Matt did say “ASAP” at the time. Start of July saying they’re still working on it, did he simply underestimate how big of an undertaking it would be?
This reply from July shows they’re still working on it, it’s just challenging: https://nitter.net/photomatt/status/1676415784548184065
Is Tumblr still working on this? It’s a little depressing to think Facebook of all companies might beat you to it.
Yeah 😕 They are orders of magnitude bigger and better capitalized than us. Not an excuse, just reality.
Yep, I linked it in the post text, I just wonder how difficult it could truly be
Tumblr scared, there’s porn on the Fediverse…
Also I have a feeling they lose something valuable (The ability to serve ads) for something not as important (Access to more publcly available content)
PS. They can of course serve ads, but what stops lemmy.world from connecting to them and sharing the same content ad free?
what stops lemmy.world from connecting to them and sharing the same content ad free?
That’s true, I hadn’t thought about that, but I wonder if he thinks that maybe Tumblr isn’t popular enough to see a big loss in doing that, since at most it would just get more interactions from a community that wouldn’t have joined a proprietary social network in the first place, so the missed ads would have always been missed, while in this way he gains more “free” engagement
About the porn, they could probably defederate from the largest NSFW instances at least
What do you mean underestimate? He said “ASAP”. That means “as soon as possible”, not “very soon”. ASAP can mean next week, or three years from now. He didn’t underestimate, he simply gave no time frame.
Maybe it’s just me, I know that it literally means “any time”, but I always felt it is used to say “very soon” in practice.
Anyway, I was just curious, I wouldn’t want them to rush it
I don’t have links, sorry, but I’ve seen posts on the fediverse from someone who claims to work there and someone who claims to have worked there up until recently.
From them it seems that they are technically still working on it but in a way that it’s clearly either a low priority or something that is now mostly a gesture that is never going to be done. The reason being that Tumblr isn’t in great financial condition right now and once they started thinking about federating it became clear that there’s no financial gain for what would be a decent amount of work.
Basically, it doesn’t seem like there’s any good reason for an independently large and profit-driven social media platform to federate. In the case of Threads, they’re most likely driven by avoiding anti-trust activities.
For-profit entities can work here. Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium seem to all be having a crack. But for-profit social media entities? Dunno, seems like a bust. And if you want a Tumblr like platform here, we might have to build it ourselves (misskey/calckey/firefish might meet your needs in the mean time).
