Let’s all go back to Tumblr
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.
An "upgraded" version of it would be to parse another RSS/Atom feed for your blog. Make an excerpt of the content that's 496 - <link_length> and then construct the toot to be "<excerpt>... <link>".
Of course, native integration would be far better, but it would go way out of the scope of static site generators.
https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume
I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.
(Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
The ActivityPub part requires dynamic processing of messages from peers, as well as sending or forwarding messages.
Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
That's already above the 'interested enough to do it' threshold of 99% of the population
Its easy to install, but its not easy to keep up & maintain the VPS WP installation for an average user like me.
Last year I came across GitLab pages & jekyll; & now its easy to maintain. Yes, not easy to start.
If you're a HN regular, you can probably build a site using GitHub Pages. I'm just not sure about the Facebook-using public...
I've been using this method since WP was first added to Fantastico, way back in the day. A form of lazy versioning I guess.
We're not talking about companies who need high availability. Your personal blog can handle a day down while you restore from backup (it's just a few clicks from the CPanel, the wait for the email saying it's ready).
If playing an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to keep up with the a constant stream of vulnerabilities seems fun, then sure.
Personally I wouldn't touch WordPress with a 10-foot pole. I would consider something like Ghost instead.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
Until they are aware of this.
I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do.
If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.
I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).
You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).
You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
What I'm envisioning is a desktop or phone app where you author posts and comments and read other people's posts and comments. The information is stored locally, but published out via a dumb server, with end-to-end encryption. Essentially, the server becomes an async dumb pipe (can just use WebDAV for this) or optionally a synchronous dumb pipe (if you add in a streaming protocol for notifications, such as websockets).
The software could also push up a static website made of any public posts, I suppose. :-)
I feel quite strongly that most users would benefit from their own device being the system of record for their posts, with the server functioning as coordination point and secondarily as an emergency backup.
(I'll be posting in more detail about this if you follow my blog's feed.)
You're right that some other solution would be better for "private but shared" content (although it would likely be tricky w.r.t. both security and psychological/social aspects like getting people to follow good practices to prevent leaks).
Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.
There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such.
only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option.
there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing.
Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available.
You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
What if there was a reddit, but designed like a Planet Blog aggregator.
Comments would go back to your own site, but the ranking in the list would be based on votes.
Wish people wouldn't use medium.
- Longer form allows for less heated conversation
- Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post encourages fighting
That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we shouldn't allow trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh?
My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth, main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)
For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method, and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too.
A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a previously approved comment."
I see topics for great initiatives on sites like Reddit however everything about its engagement is just wrong.
Comments are poor - people know how to game it, posts have a limited life span affecting comment quality, when a post disappears from the front page engagement drops to what seems 0%. Re-posts are looked at negatively, reddit community gets bored of seeing the same topic even if there is an interesting change or update.
There is something fundamentally wrong about it. Forums allow for longer discussion and are a good way of promoting long term activism when needed, there are threads forums lasting years, are a joy to read and follow.
The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.
This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)
I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.
I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.
In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.
This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.
Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a lot of stuff on Tumblr that leads me to think there's a very active, very angry, very threatening trans lobby on the platform. I've seen repeated threats of violence and worse from trans-identified individuals directed at feminists who want maintain female-only safe-spaces. These posts are rarely taken down and the community will often rally against the "TERFs" being threatened ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists").
I know one woman who'd posted about keeping changing rooms for females separated on a sex basis. Her employer and college were contacted repeatedly by a pair of people who said she was spreading hate-speech online. Their goal seems to have been to have her fired. These same people had been making threats of violence against her, culminating in a rape threat. At this point the police became involved and I'm not sure how it's since been resolved.
Obviously this is a tiny minority of people but it's a tiny minority that often aren't actively censured or disowned by the larger community, and whose extreme views are reinforced by a sympathetic echo-chamber of like-minded people. Some may be "false-flags", but I don't think they're in the majority by any means.
Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it.
This is quite interesting though:
"Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free." </b>
So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?
Sort of, if you've got the rare personality that can turn a blog into a form of entertainment. Along with the unrelenting dedication to do it in a rote fashion week after week for years. Once the audience latches on, you're not allowed to take a long hiatus or change what you do. Dooce (dooce.com) comes to mind, her blog had very primitive beginnings prior to growing into a serious monetized traffic destination for a time. I like to call them Howard Stern personalities, people that are gifted entertainers. You may not like their brand of content or personality (I don't care for people like Stern and Glenn Beck for example), but they've got the magic sauce for some audience base.
I spent a lot of time in the early blogosphere, circa 1998-2004 or so. Something that was amazing to observe, was how many very talented personalities were unable to break through to that ultimate next level of popularity. They seemingly had everything it required (whether wit, charm, skilled story telling, et al.) and still couldn't get there. The world has a lot of brilliant people that never break through for any number of countless reasons.
The existence of Wordpress would argue otherwise.
Who would you see as pushing it? Or do you mean it's monetizable?
It's definitely an excellent piece of software.
wordpress.com (not .org) is a platform for blogs.
This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested.
You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but especially in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there.
Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post.
So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too.
For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design.
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg
[1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.
I have legitimately seen 2MChar toots. They were automated, but gigantic Megachar toots.
This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of the media requiring “concision”¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be expressed concisely.
Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page.
Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than it is worth.
We need to look at the brain, and figure out how neurons work together in networks to produce truth. Then use that model for our social networks.
I suppose you think this is true.
Category error, surely? Whether or not something is true, it's truthiness or falsiness must exist outside of the brain percieving it, yes? In which case it's a process of recognition or labelling, not creation.
1. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever)
2. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities.
3. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and everyone's opinion is given the same weight.
(1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN.
It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad idea.
The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base.
I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible problems that causes.
tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at all.
In my opinion, an increasing problem with twitter and other discussion media is astroturfing and bot re-signalling, so I feel this needs an additional category different from (3), in that (3) is people who are incompetent. (4) would be people who are agenda-driven and/or malicious.
Or, to put it differently, (3) is about problems caused by people who can hide their incompetence. (4) would be about problems caused by people who can hide their identity.
I'm extremely pessimistic about this section of users, because in my opinion, an identity-based internet would just as radically screw up the internet in a different direction. I do feel, however, that that's the way governments are heading if things carry on the way they are.
I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you join to solve this problem.
Pretty much all been replaced by Instagram now which although has most of the same functionality the fact it's a locked in system with only the most basic form of linking and attribution makes it a completely different place for artists. People stealing work and claiming it's their own is a lot more common on IG, on Tumblr the ease of re-blogging and focus on curating allows users to flourish as either curators or creators without any bad blood between the two.
(Purely talking about the art side of Tumblr here, I wasn't involved in the other areas)
Yup. Tumblr totally doesn’t do any of that. I guess we are supposed to pretend it doesn’t because it’s a platform for the right kind of lies and hate?
I feel currently that the issue with social media is it's hyper stimulating. Speaking from a recovering social media addict point of view, the modern web latches onto human tendencies too well. We can be outraged, surrounded by people like us, 24/7. That's immensely fulfilling to most people, including me.
I don't use social media anymore because it's awful for me. And I don't think the echo chamber issue can be solved, at all. It's not a technology issue, it's an issue with how humans respond to these networks and the Internet in general.
Examples of less-toxic social media:
- Messaging: SMS, Email, GroupMe, Messenger, Skype, Snapchat
- Micro Communities: Discord
- Small purpose-driven communities, small subreddits, Discord
- Collaborative: DeviantArt, GitHub
- Long form discussion: Blog circles, Blogger, Tumblr sometimes
- Non-discussion: Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, StumbleUpon
I still use Discord and Github, and the social interaction there doesn't cause the same feeling that Facebook or Twitter do.
However, I might argue a select few of these sites or technologies can still be polarizing or unhealthy, particularly Instagram and Pinterest.
-bad porn
-signal boosting for political rants
-faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors
-cyber bullying
Let's not?
It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of crap in the first place.
Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?
It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.
This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)
I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.
I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.
In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.
This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
I've been waiting for the GDPR to destroy them for this, it's easily the biggest abuses I can think of. Your dogs case might not be that big of a deal but many people have put up some very explicit material of themselves and I doubt they are aware that anything reblogged is still on the site.
When browsing the more explicit info it looks like 90% of the content comes from now deleted accounts, so they're in a position where compliance would destroy a major chunk of their traffic.
Not a huge loss for the world though, the UI is the worst I've come across. It takes some spectacularly bad design to make a blogging platform that doesn't work well with tabs.
Do you think it actually promotes radicalization, though, or is that just the culture that developed there? E.g. Mastodon's interaction design is very similar to Twitter's, but the people are waaaay nicer, because that's just the prevailing culture. Compare to other parts of the Fediverse, such as GNU Social, which is much more Twitter-like in tone.
Either way, I think it's a good lesson in how public-by-default social media is kind of a terrible idea in retrospect. You wanted to share a non-sensitive post, but maybe just to people who are in any way socially accountable to you, not the entire world.
It's also easier for a nice community to become mean than for a mean community to become nice, so maybe give Mastodon some time and exposure and see what happens.
... how?
(archive link because the site seems to be down at the moment)
300 characters incentivizes driveby remarks rather than articulate conversations.
Twitter also has really bad content enforcement. Not inherent to the format, but it's worth consideration in the interest of practicality.
It seems to work 'OK' if there's a smaller community with a group of core dedicated users (which the moderation staff has a large overlap with); however even then it works only if there is a clear and unambiguous mission statement and laser focused guidelines of 'on topic' contributions.
I'm not familiar with Craigslist, and have only very limited observations of Reddit; but I think these sites are generally the closest to a sustainable model.
In my experience they let 'local' moderation do it's thing, sub-communities individually have their own flavor and groups; with active and positive ones seeing the most success. Moderate ones tend to languish until they trail off. The really bad ones get globally flagged and killed.
I think a logical next step might be 'supersets' where different user areas subscribe to a kind of moderation guild.
Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.
I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely).
I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.
I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it.
A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login.
So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually.
The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.
Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM.
Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis.
And lots of people do pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.
It didn't change a lot at first, but the wall street ad and censor machine started to creep in and it became obvious what once was a haven for sharing things you would never do on fbook, well it got a new moderation staff and more changes.
I stayed with it even after the change to hide the porn by default and such. Then one day one of my tumblrs got banned.
I understood, it very much looked like many of the rampant spammer's tumblr sites, I had thought thay by using a custom modded theme and other things a tumblr employee would see it was not a cut of mill spam blog but highly custom and completely unique.
I was wrong, the moderator that made the site disappear did not see it. When I emailed the next level staff asking why and suggesting that it was unique and not spam, they replied it was flagged as spam and is gone.
I wrote back one time begging for access to download a copy of my tumblr, it was all original content, all the text, all the photos. They did not care to even reply.
I tried to write the CEO, I reached out for an explanation on twitter even. Nothing.
I know, not a customer, the product, and your rights to speech are not rights when publishing on a sharecropper lords platform, but I expected more of tumblr. I was mistaken.
I later read about how some of these companies were employing a lot of people from places outside the USA and did some research on the majority of religions and morals of those areas and scratched my head wondering how the main people of tumblr could even consider such a move given the wide range of widely shared content likely being disturbing to so many in some of those places.
Then I realized, it was not just about the cheap labor, it was about have an excuse for why so much was mopped up without a second thought. IT wasn't the tumblr crew doing it right - this was the plan from yahoo and the future advertiser's and wall street and all that.
I'm so mad I did not backup my tumblrs when I had the chance, so mad that I gave them so much. Promoted it as a place to have fun without the stress of fbook, linked in and such.
Never again.
At least with other portals you know there is a chance at loss ( I routinely save my comments before submitting to any wordpress based site, assuming that akismet will likely flag my comment and make it disappear into the ether box not seen by blog admins.. and of course blog admins make them hidden as well.
Can't believe I'm about to say this, but I have more faith in G plus providing customer service and fair rules than tumblr. Boy that did not taste right coming out of my virtual mouth.
That's how pitiful tumblr is now, unless it goes back to being self owned / private or whatever, it is dead to me, And there is not backup for them to get of my past trust and love.
- Internet Archive
- Googling the URL to see if anything's still in Google's cache
I wonder if you'd be up to sharing what the tumblr URL was, perhaps privately.
Since the ban of the other one I've been too paranoid to post anything there for the fear of it being destroyed with no way to do anything about it.
I did manage to export a tumblr site into a wordpress at one point, and now control whether the content stays or gets removed and have backups. Wish I could of exported that other one, it was pretty custom.
I tried to find the blog you mentioned, and sadly it has indeed pretty much fallen off the end of the internet. Neither the Web Archive nor Google's cache has it, sadly.
But I did find proof it once existed: https://www.sexchatsexchat.com/peeps/sexystuff/tag/sexy-quot...
I also found an archived registration record from 2014 for http://cn.sitexy.com/whois/sexchaterotic.com but I'm unsure if this was relevant.
I've sadly seen quite a few tumblrs be destroyed, in the form of users who I suddenly realize have a "2" or "-new" after their name. The content they're posting is sufficiently interesting to their followers that they get their network back reasonably quickly (one person finds the new account, follows them, then that spreads the posts back into the rest of the network), but they lose the link between the notes/reblogs and their ID.
And that's the thing. From the standpoint of "normal" social networking, having new people discover you, etc, you generally do want to keep your identity so people can track that you're you.
I guess for real fringe interests (although I can't really say what you're posting is that much of a fringe interest, at the end of the day, really...), Tumblr doesn't seem the best place to go - which _is_ pretty hypocritical, I'll give it that, yeah.
I can't find it now (agh) but I remember reading an interesting Yahoo report that said something to the effect of shutting down Tumblr. All I can find now about it is earnings reports, but this PDF was a bit more explicit about it than that. Tumblr will, eventually, one day be gone; and the world is going to be a very very strange place when that happens. :/
There's no point stressing out about that point now though; nobody knows how it will pan out - maybe some crazy-insane (in a very good way) bunch of people will band together to make their own new thing, or maybe everyone will converge on some existing site. I doubt _everyone_ will disperse, although that will sadly happen. IMO, any individual effort will be fruitless unless it fits in with the group dynamics that play out at the time, and I see no point in taking the chance that the frantic freakout efforts I make will hit that dynamic, so I'm just watching.
This being said, I definitely classify the question of archiving as something that is a very good idea to do right now, IMO. Sadly it seems so unnecessarily nontrivial to do so; I'm not aware of any software to download tumblr accounts that isn't a completely broken half-an-hours-effort-at-4AM job. This is sadly probably why there are few/no backups of more rare accounts. :(
It's possible the Web Archive might have something, but the few parts of their archives that are public are effectively impossible to search (you basically have to download GBs if not TBs of data, open it, go "nope", delete it all, and download the next set).
Hm, this turned into a bit of a rambling rant.
I'm really glad you were able to export the content into wordpress (was it the one I found above? lol). Is the WP installation hosted by you? That, along with picking a smaller hosting provider, and verifying ahead of time that they're fine with the content you want to post, should hopefully minimize heartache. (This is actually a general protip: go with a smaller provider who's one or two people, let them know what sorts of DMCA/takedown/angry emails they might get at your behest and how you plan to deal with them, and even crazy content (eg, obscure political views, flamewars on steroids, sex chat-related sites, etc etc) will stand a chance at staying up for a little while.)
Actually that makes me think of something.
The thing with hosting your own website is that, unless you operate, say, Sci-Hub, which has the kinds of enemies that can pressure domain registrars into deregistering you, you'll be fine, because, in the scenario where your hosting provider boots you (or gets yanked in the middle of the night themselves - this can sometimes happen with tiny outfits), you just switch providers, apologize for the downtime :), and move on. (Obviously you have a local site backup. Right?) DNS registration is a bit hazier thanks to reregistration bots that constantly sniff for expiring domains and snatch them. Some of the automated systems that do this will even pay $$$ to grab the domain early in the termination pipeline (expiring domains go to auction before they are fully un-registered) if they detect the site was popular.
It may be worth asking around Web hosting communities for a good registrar that doesn't boot fringe interest groups (there are fewer smaller registrars, so the hosting thing I mentioned about going with a smaller outfit can't apply here). I mean to do this but haven't yet.
So... an interesting ideal could be, you could register your blog with tumblr _on a custom domain_, do whatever customization you wanted, post whatever you wanted, and then, when tumblr yanks your site,
a) you still have the domain, so you just pivot that over to your own hosting...
b) ...which has all your content on it, either because you were posting it to both, or because you imported your continuous backup of the tumblr account :D
TL;DR, tumblr isn't for "real" fringe stuff, banhammers are both silly and horrible but unavoidable, using your own hosting will zero your chances of getting disappeared.
No, thank you.