Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous.
I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956
There is no reason to think this would not work out. The only code being rewritten is front end theme code, and some Wordpress plugins to support any unique tumblr features.
I would also say that migration to WordPress is explicitly a marketing strategy for word press, their main product.
Migrating a product you bought to be part of your main product is a pretty common corporate move.
Because likely it is not an internal migration with no user impact. Guess which part isn’t true, if they’re telling us.
“A longtime popular place to socialize, blog, participate in fandoms, and more, Tumblr originally exited to Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent) for north of $1 billion under then-CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership in 2013. The hope at the time was to transform Tumblr into another social media powerhouse and to grow its ads business. However, the subsequent years were rough on Tumblr, as sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit dominated the space.”
That last sentence just skips the whole story.
Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017, thinking the way to "grow the ad business" was to dump the "and more" part of Tumblr in 2018. It took less than a year for Verizon to look for a way to avoid being reminded of this miscalculation. Asking 0.3% of Yahoo's price did the trick in 2019.
This isn't so long ago. The omission is interesting.
I hardly ever saw adult content on Twitter.
When Reddit made its infamous API changes over a year ago that caused many third-party apps to shut down, a less-publicized part of the change was that NSFW content would no longer be available in the API at all, even for apps that paid for the API access.
There was a analysis done a while back which showed the impact that this had on overall posting behavior, because of how Reddit's algorithm works (a drop in visibility across the board will effectively downrank large NSFW subreddits more than small NSFW subreddits, because Reddit artificially boosts lower-volume subreddits in your frontpage so they don't get drowned out). You can also compare total vote counts from August 2023 to June 2023 to gauge the difference too.
Twitter is kind of a cesspool, really. Even more so post Musk.
Even 4chan removes child sexual abuse material at lightening speed. There isn't any major social media site that allows this. If it's even more now, would you be able to name an account that shares such stuff? Or are we supposed to believe this without evidence?
And as far as porn goes sure. The thing about Twitter is you wouldn't see porn unless you specifically go and look for it. Which is why I always find it amusing when people complain about this "problem". There is no porn in people's feeds by default, one has to train the algo to show it by searching for it and interacting with porn accounts. It's especially funny since on Twitter itself there are always conservative or Christian accounts complaining to Musk that they see too much adult content and that he needs to ban it.
I don't know any such accounts because I don't go looking for such things. It's just a well known fact that Twitter has a CSAM problem. A quick google search will show you plenty of media coverage on that fact. It's also well known that moderation on Twitter has suffered under Musk due to massive layoffs.
Of course, most of this porn stuff is never seen by most users because it's not favoured by The Algorithm. I'm just pointing out it's definitely all there. As far as legal porn I'm generally in favour of it being allowed on most platforms.
Also naming names of criminals is not illegal, I'm confident you know this.
As for naming accounts, it's not just "naming criminals". It's effectively equivalent to sharing CSAM if I'm telling people specifically where to find it. Even if I knew where, which I don't, I'd prefer not broadcast that information. And I'm not sure why you're so eager to learn specific account names. It's a pretty weird thing to ask for on a public forum, honestly.
Not everyone has solipsism at the core of their epistemological worldview. Even without knowing your jurisdiction, I would discourage you from seeking out CSAM; the laws do not have an exception for curiosity.
If Twitter didn't have a handle on porn in general, what makes you confident they had CSAM under control?
I was drawing a lot at the time, and many of my portraits with no nudity at all were deleted. That was my sign to leave.
The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple so migrating it to whatever database running on whatever OS is probably not too hard. The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.
Dunno why you'd say that, that's the exact thing I'd expect them to do. I realize it's idiotic and will end in failure, but I still expect them to do that.
So it sounds like Automattic would need to implement a conversion layer between Tumblr's template language and data model, and the corresponding ones in WP. Their functionality and data models also don't line up 1:1 conceptually, so this is no easy task.
> The chance... is absolutely zero
Unsolicited advice: practice more intellectual humility.
I'm not sure what your source is for this, but it's not correct. The combination of scale, age, and number of product features makes it quite challenging.
My knowledge of Tumblr's db infra is about 6 years out of date, but by my math they hit the milestone of 1 trillion distinct relational rows (on primary databases alone, i.e. excluding copies on replicas) a few years back already.
During Tumblr's peak popularity (~2012 to early 2013), the daily posting rate at times exceeded 100 million posts/day. For sake of comparison, Twitter reportedly received about 5x that at the time, but Tumblr posts are larger and far more media-heavy on average. So it's accurate to say the total volume was almost comparable.
That all said, the scope of this migration pre-announcement isn't totally clear. My assumption is they just plan to move the public blog network front-end to WordPress, possibly using some sort of shim layer. But an important point here is the blog network is a minority of Tumblr's traffic, and always has been. Most HN users who have never actually created a Tumblr account fail to understand this: the popular part of Tumblr is the social network / logged-in dashboard experience, not the public-facing blog network.
If they plan to move the entire site/backend over to WP, that's a much more challenging migration. The ID mappings and differing sharding schemes alone make this an absolutely massive effort.
source: long ago I was personally responsible for Tumblr's database and cache scalability during its original period of hockey-stick growth.
Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense. I think they will leave all the tables exactly the same and just move them onto back-end hardware that is shared with WP. i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm. If would be nice if the press release were a bit less vague on this.
> Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense.
No one suggested that exactly, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
> i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm
You keep describing Tumblr's database infrastructure as if it's a single server. It's not. It's multiple discrete tiers of sharded databases, serving different purposes. You don't put a trillion rows in a single database. They have hundreds of database servers, hundreds of cache servers, hundreds to a few thousand application/web servers, etc.
Again, Tumblr is not just a blogging/CMS platform. It's a full social network, with the primary user experience being a dashboard activity stream, similar to the logged-in experience of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
The proposed migration here is about migrating some portion of Tumblr's codebase and data to run off of the wordpress.com infrastructure, likely to reduce operating costs long-term. It's not clear whether that will consist of migrating the entire thing, or if it's just about shimming the public blog network (i.e. not the social network part). But in any case this isn't about just moving hardware.
> The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr _into_ WordPress; it will just run on WordPress.
> ...
> You won’t even notice a difference from the outside[.]
I suppose Automattic has a multi tenant version of WP, still, thinking on how traditional WP scales, having one instance per blog seems overkill.
But I imagine it is not exactly the same. They have tens of millions of tenants AFAIK.
I don't get the Beeper acquisition at all. But maybe it has some core technology value.
I'd imagine this is a different scenario. The content created by users will be put through some AI transformation and it will be completely and utterly unmaintainable slop (and a significant portion of it would have already been that anyway before they started since it's user submitted). They aren't going to care that much if some edge cases break. Users can go fix that themselves. It seems much different to me than trying to delicately move something you care about.
What do you imagine this move involves, infrastructurewise? Why is it boneheaded?
Realising something is a bad idea technically isn't really in their bag of tricks.
Wordpress.com, the hosted platform, has about 70-80 million new posts per month, in a massive, social-media-giant-type database, supporting a tightly locked-down, customised WP infrastructure (which even has a different admin UI AFAIK).
They aren't going to migrate tumblr to 600 million separate WP instances, are they? They are just going to migrate the posts backend into that infrastructure.
There are some challenges, sure, but it's churlish to suggest that Automattic don't know the intrinsic value of Tumblr and will just let it break. They rescued Tumblr from certain doom, and did so for love; they know what they are doing.
Lots of people here don't seem to understand what wordpress.com is, and the scale at which it operates.
> Given the blogging site’s continued financial woes, Mullenweg shifted the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at Automattic late last year and laid off others. At the time, he suggested that moving Tumblr to WordPress would be “tricky” but added that new technology like AI would make it easier.
It certainly seems possible it is more than a stack shift. It is definitely going to be a change for end users no matter how much AI he applies.
If you want anything that isn't built in you have to either link to some third party SaaS or run another entire server program for it.
It's not a radical idea; you can write your own thing that does only what you need it to, and that is an entirely appropriate way forward.
You will end up solving a bunch of problems quite like WordPress does.
All CMSes are at some level like WordPress, and yet there is nothing like WordPress. Because it's not about the application, it's about the tradition and ecosystem around the application.
Before wordpress.com users had to actively choose WP.
With the advent of wordpress.com and it's 'freemium' tier that arguably started to distort numbers. After all, stale, dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats.
Now, with Tumblr, Automattic will say they power X+% of the internet
When Automattic buys Blogger, that boast about powering % of the net will increase even further.
It's a takeover, not user choice.
dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats
The "WP powering X% of the internet" is just a nice PR/marketing blurb. It never had anything to do with user choice so I would bot conflate the two.
"Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress"
Tumblr's injection would result in a significant increase in the number of websites running WP.
Your original comment, about how a Tumblr migration would double the WP site count, was correct. That isn't what I replied to above.
https://automattic.com/2024/08/27/shipping-tumblr-and-wordpr...
Wordpress, to me, seems like the platform you start on. Easy to get up and running.
But when you get a mature product, you need something with better performance. I hate to say it, but anything with a plug-in architecture is always going to be slower than a custom stack.
I wonder how performance will be affected after the move.
Never used tumblr by the way.
In other words, they're proposing a migration of some unspecified portion of Tumblr to re-use existing infrastructure/code/services that power the wordpress.com hosted service. They're not proposing somehow moving 600 million Tumblr blogs to individual FOSS wordpress.org instances; that indeed would make no sense whatsoever.
A very interesting undertaking anyway.
The only reason to move it to some other storage provider would be to save on egress fees, but I'm sure that 95% of the content is never touched by humans after it's posted.
It may be crawled, though.
The vast majority of WordPress users, and even many people who call themselves "WordPress developers" never look inside the database. WordPress is, in almost every way, a terrible platform to develop on. What saves it is backwards compatibility, an enormous ecosystem, and being relatively easy to use for everybody who needs to use it.
From the perspective of the user it’s just another blogging platform. Tumblr blogs are not self hosted and isn’t based on open source code at all. Tumblr code seems too specific and part of a bigger machine, so it also doesn’t make sense to make it open source. AFAIK goal is to make this mostly invisible to the users and their blogs will be powered by open source.
Any improvements to Tumblr blogs will have a chance to make it into the core of WordPress.
I’d imagine it’s also going to be way easier to move your blog to any other hosting provider, giving the user a wider choice.