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.
Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)
Reblogging this in light of the recent news, since we’ve been getting a lot of questions from people looking to join. If you’ve sent us a payment since the 16th of November you will receive your invitation email shortly after the site returns, which will likely be tomorrow! If you want to purchase more than one registration link ($5 per link, so $15 for example would get you 3 registration links) you can give them to anyone you want– the ones you purchase are not tied to your account in any way.
Now, Pillowfort will not always require a payment to sign up; we are doing this because we are still in the process of implementing our subscription plan, which will be our source of long-term revenue, and these payments through PayPal give us funding to make sure we can pay all our server expenses, employee compensation, etc. while we are still working on implementing our business plan. Once we exit beta you will be able to join the site and use all of its essential features
for free, with the option to pay for some extra goodies similar to what LiveJournal and DreamWidth offer in their subscription plans.
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