Automattic, the developers of Wordpress, currently own Tumblr.
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.
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.