Tumblr is banning NSFW content, and as we’re already seeing, the automated filtering is terrible – extremely quick to mark false positives as containing ‘sensitive content’. (Because, you know, if you just delete everything, you’ll definitely get the porn!)
It’s likely that a lot of posts, nsfw and not, are going to be deleted in a couple of weeks, and it’s not at all clear how easy it will be to appeal these deletions. So if you want to preserve your Tumblr, back it up like, right now…
I’ve been working on my own script to do the specific things I want, but it’s too fiddly to really offer it for most people to use. Instead, here are a few options I’ve found:
This gives you a zip file with all of your Tumblr posts and IMs in it. Takes some time to process though – mine is still processing. Processing that zip file is all on you. I believe there’s a way to import it to a WordPress blog though.
Seems to have a GUI and a lot of good features re: download throttling, filtering, how it handles the downloaded posts, parallelisation etc. Unfortunately, Windows only.
Decently featured Python script with a bunch of command line flags. Seems to be designed to save them as static HTML with default CSS that you can edit, so I guess it’s relatively easy to republish if you don’t need them in a specific format.
Feel free to add more if you know of them. (But check the notes first in case someone’s already mentioned it.)
doubt it. it’s not really about skin tone per se – more like out-and-out race.
when an America-based, corporate company starts talking about ‘allows tasteful nudes’ but ‘does not allow sexually arousing nudes’, you have to think about what they’ll count as depicting something to arouse vs depicting something because ‘art’. because that standard is – despite what some would like to say – absolutely a matter of interpretation, which means somebody is going to have to sit at tumblr headquarters interpreting nudes all day.
historically speaking – in America, mind, I have no damn clue about elsewhere – images of cis female Latinx, Black, First Nations, and East Asian bodies are far more likely to be perceived as intended to arouse than images of cis female white bodies. this is partially because white bodies are ‘default’ and therefore seen as effect neutral (whether tanned or not, by the way), partially because of our ugly history of racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, and partially because of the interactions of economic situations, race/cultural background, and sex work.
so if you present a white person and a non-white person in artsy nudity, in the same pose and with the same camera angle, it’s more likely the non-white person will be flagged as intended to sexually arouse.*
is it possible that a white person who sufficiently tans will be mistaken for a brown person, or a brown person who is sufficiently pale will be mistaken for a white person? yes, because race isn’t a clear-cut thing (and it’s pretty racist to imply it is). but overall, I promise you the n sfw ban will have more negative consequences for non-white people than white people, and any artist who depicts non-white people.
*the joke is: even well-intentioned activists will potentially flag images of non-white people more than white people on suspicion of exploitation/exploitative imagery. (this is what happens when activism doesn’t center the decisions and voices of people it’s supposed to be advocating for.)
Also worth mentioning: Past “flagged as nsfw” as well as “tag removed”
drama on this site
has included stuff like the “latina” tag being blocked because porn bots often would post porn into it.
Basically what I am trying to say is even if not a single user was reading the images this way, the algorithm has a history of specifically censoring this. It’s not hypothetical.
A screenshot of a post flagged for removal from tumblr. It features a vest and a shirt that have the phrase, “silence=death” on them. This is a well recognized AIDS education slogan.
I mean at least staff had the decency to present the worst case scenario within the first fucking afternoon.
It was insanely fast in comparison and worked as intended.
interesting. i have done a couple of under-1k-post blogs, they seem okay, my main blog is somewhere well over 4GB, and i would expect it to be broken because zip doesn’t necessarily handle that well.
My blogs with under 2000 posts seem to finish processing in a few hours, and become downloadable. However, around the 2000 post point, even if the blog finishes processing, the download doesn’t actually work. It downloads half or a quarter or some fraction of the zip, and breaks.
The real cherry on this shit cake is that no one I’ve spoken to is getting any kind of email or notification that their posts have been flagged as explicit.
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.
After setting up the backup blogs, I ended up going through comments on my original WP blog that I haven’t used at all for years. Hadn’t even opened the admin dashboard for several years, for that matter.
A bunch of spam that made it through the filters, no surprise. I also ended up deleting some OTT hateful sounding comment that some rando felt a need to leave like 5 years after the post was published. Kind of surprised there was only the one waiting that I saw, even with that blog inactive, but hey.
Not often that I’ve had to shitcan comments, but there is ample fair warning that this will happen if you come into my house and get gratuitously hateful 😒
“lol the only people mad about the tumblr announcement just want porn lol”
Yeah, no.
Tumblr blocked the tag “chronic pain” in this mess for no reason
They’re flagging commonly used tags by queer people, sex educators, and artists who make their fucking LIVING on tumblr
They’re gonna take down genuine sex workers because they didn’t curb
the problem with spamming porn bots YEARS ago when tumblr users REPORTED
OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND *OVER* that it was a problem
Tumblr
IGNORED the bots, IGNORED the problems, and honestly treated it like
NOTHING until their app was taken off a store due to it.
They’re
fucking over a shit-ton of REAL PEOPLE who rely on tumblr for community
and/or income because they ignored users’ complaints about shitty porn
bots for YEARS until it had financial consequences
I can no longer even talk about chronic pain without the post being blocked from searches
I have drawn one or two nude pieces on my art tumblr which is 99% safe
for work but now I’m worried the blog will be taken down entirely
because Tumblr won’t bother differentiating between spam and REAL PEOPLE
just trying to live their goddamn lives
And god forbid I want to
talk about bisexuality or sex or kink in just… MY LIFE. As a
normal-ass human being who just wants to TALK ABOUT HUMAN THINGS
No, their solution to nuke a problem they’ve ignored for years is to take us all down at once
So maybe don’t laugh about “oh no not my pornz” because 1. plenty of
that ~porn~ is made by actual humans making their living and 2. WAY MORE
than “just porn” is being targeted
This along with Facebook
continuously upholding white supremacy by letting nazi shit fly by while
they ban people for speaking out against their oppressors and it’s
basically like we’re running out of truly free places to just… BE
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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