From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal, deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit:
– don’t knee jerk delete. I know it’s tempting to peace out immediately but hang on and do the other steps first. Out right ghosting and erasing everything is how fandoms die.
– archive everything on your blog you want to keep
– tell your followers how they can archive and keep your work too. A lot of fic and art were only saved from ff.net and lj because other people saved it first. If you’re cool with other people saving your work for them to personally keep, let them know this. You can absolutely discourage reposting but I really do highly recommend you allow people to personally save fic and art they like and are worried will disappear forever. Digital Dark Ages are a real thing.
– tell people where you’re jumping ship to. Give links. Keep that info up, even if you’ve left the site.
– go through who you follow and find out where else you can follow them. Save their work if they’ll allow it. It’s tedious as hell but if you want to keep up with people on here clicking on their page to check in is the best way to do it.
– support places like ao3. This is exactly why ao3 asks for donations a few times a year. They are a 100% anti-purging, judgement free, ad free non profit run by an elected board and protected by lawyers. Places like ao3 literally save fandom so please continue to support them and other similar archives. This is exactly why ao3 is so important.
in bold countermove, PornHub announces new coffeehouse AU fanfiction category
FYI my suspicion is that the porn block thing is going to be a non-event in a few weeks time. Most social media companies do not allow explicit images. Text is not covered in the ban so fanfic and original erotica also curse words and whatever are exempt.
Likely it’ll devolve to nsfw creators hosting their content elsewhere and just linking from Tumblr to those sites. It’s a huge pain in the ass for good faith fan artists and others and it’s a huge disappointment but I’m not personally predicting the collapse of the Tumblr fandom community as we know it, I must confess.
I at least don’t plan to go anywhere else unless there’s a mass migration like there was from LJ to Tumblr and my smell of it is that’s not going to hit anytime soon (and such migrations tend to be more gradual).
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
FYI anyone bailing on Tumblr (I have no intentions of doing so, I will be here to the bitter end) but just in case I’m going to be Avelera pretty much everywhere and on Twitter I’m @Ao3Avelera
I’m also a real person with a real name on Twitter and Facebook (also various video games) and in some rare instances, if you haven’t already figured it out, you can find me there too or message me if you feel you should be able to find me there!
Avelera 