#and i've lost a lot of folllowings and accounts over the years for dumb reasons and my own attempts to subdivide my life

[orchidbark]

Tumblr has been such a formative site throughout my adulthood. Yes I'm a tumblr old, I'm sorry. But when I was a kid there wasn't anything like this. We all made geocities or angelfire websites and shared our cringy writing and art that way and we loved it.

But tumblr took me out of my tiny comfort zone many times. I learned a lot of stuff about myself and about other people that I might have learned about eventually anyway, but idk... my mind was open then, and maybe it would have been more closed off later. Who can say. But I can safely say that without it, I would not have come to understand my identity as it is, when I did.

Tumblr feels as close to the old internet as any site could nowadays. It was never perfect, not ever, but it always sort of felt like the lesser of many evils. We're all aware it's been circling the drain for a while. What's happening now, sadly, isn't anything new, but it seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back for many people.

I made a Bluski a little while back, I just made a cohost today, I've had a furaffinity page for a bit now, and I don't know, maybe there'll be more too. I encourage you to follow me on these places, and mutual please let me know if you have an account on these sites too!

But that sucks doesn't it? We're already all here now, and if tumblr dies tomorrow, everyone's going to choose the places they go to, and they're not all going to be the same. Twitter was never a big deal to me, but when twitter started falling apart that was a huge loss for so many people who had staked their following there. The parallels are obvious. Tumblr was already pretty small to begin with and that means the people that make up "the queerest site on the internet" will subdivide again, creating smaller and smaller communities.

There's no possible way we can coordinate a complete move to another site, and even if we could, there's no way to tell if that site will be around longer than a year, or if a userbase ever manifests. Discord servers are a great idea to keep in touch with folks, but I'm not a fan of those as a replacement (though obviously it's perfect for folks who just want to keep in touch but do not want to attract attention).

I like tumblr, insofar as you can like a social media website. But tumblr as a site is nothing without the gay little weirdos. And if my fellow gay little weirdos aren't here then what's the point of being here? It feels like Cohost might be the way forward, but we can never know for sure.

I plan to stay here as long as there is a here to stay, but I guess, idk I'm gearing up to leave at a moment's notice. That's just how it looks like it might be from now on, unless something changes to correct course. If a move never comes then great, but I'd rather be prepared.