It's not very much like Tumblr, it's more geared towards long form writing than pictures and other media. It has excellent privacy controls, letting you filter posts so only certain friends see certain posts, e.g. my friend recently asked if people wanted to be on a filter about pregnancy details. But its biggest achievement is that I was able to port my LJ to it easily when Putin gained control of LJ.
@skyfaller Further thoughts. The problem is that no other site has picked up Tumblr’s unique reblogging style, originally called tumbling, in which a post can be reblogged with added comments almost endlessly, and that style is what imo makes Tumblr the best place on the internet. Posts get reblogged with additions by all kinds of people until they show up in your timeline full of great information, hysterical quips and gifs, or poignant comments, sometimes all 3. It’s unique.
@nancywisser Yes, I agree, tumbling is very cool and enables fascinating conversations.
I think it's worth separating the original tumblelog concept, which seems to be quickly reposting different types of media found online, from Tumblr's further innovation of endless commentary on the posts themselves: https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs
Early tumblelogs can easily be replicated by simple standalone static websites. Tumblr-style discourse either requires a unified platform or a very robust protocol.
@skyfaller Thank you. I didn’t know about it. I’ve known about Pillowfort for a while since they’ve been actively courting Tumblr people. This was their post yesterday. After that I couldn’t resist.
@nancywisser Personally, I'm not interested in investing time into proprietary websites/apps that do not have a plan for how I can meaningfully exit if they die or turn evil. I have the same problem with Pillowfort and Cohost. I've been burned so many times over the years. At least Dreamwidth has the track record where I've already successfully moved my account to a new service once. Same thing with fedi, I've successfully moved Mastodon servers before, and I expect Pixelfed etc. would work too.
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