Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

1. download and install python
2. create an application on tumblr to get an api key
3. create a folder where you would like to save your backups and right click to open it in the terminal/command prompt, or type cmd.exe in the address bar from inside that folder

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type pip install tumblr-backup, and then when it is installed type tumblr-backup --set-api-key [your oauth consumer key], and then finally tumblr-backup [your options] [your blog name], like so:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

“Rayban charity glasses event” is a scam don’t click any link in a post that says that.

Old tumblr users remember this scam back when it first went out.

Also no, this isn’t a joke. This phishing scam is 100% running its course again so watch out for your mutuals long abandoned accounts suddenly posting it. Please make everyone aware of it since most users here are newbies who have not seen it before!

im just… a bit obsessed with them

So I'm like … the god of the trauma center now.
And you're the son.
She's the holy ghost.

🚑 THE TRAUMA CODE: HEROES ON CALL (2025)

the combination of an older, world-weary dilf working with a pretty young thing with round eyes and a puppy personality is so fucking elite. never change, homoerotic "bromance" dramas, never ever change

What's up with him?

The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call (중증외상센터) 2025

reverse gatekeeping. I am on my knees begging people to engage with the source material

kitty car 🐱

yeah i’ve seen enough we need to kill cole

Your feelings for him won’t change for the better the more you’ll get to know about him btw. Don’t wanna spoil anything, but let’s just say, if there was a Hannibal crossover, he would’ve eaten the guy for being so damn rude.