I Have An Undying Need To See My Fav Space Trio Fighting Tgt Again 😭

Bonjour @equipe, on a beaucoup de questions avec @gay-impressionist - et vraisemblablement tous les p'tits francophones du coin - notamment pourquoi "par Toutatis", mais aussi comment est-ce que ce texte a vu le jour parce que vraiment on s'est tapé la meilleure barre de l'année et je voulais vous remercier (les verres ont sûrement aidé).

nice

tumblr is not instagram. likes on tumblr, while appreciated, are effectively useless in helping a creator reach a wider audience.

when you like something, it goes into your own personal folder. and chances are good that, even if it’s public, no one will see it.

likes do not get shared to the dashboard, where others can actually see and have the opportunity to engage.

liking a creation only really benefits you, and not the creator or the rest of the tumblr community!

likes are great for bookmarking, saving posts with the intent of a later reblog, engaging with certain posts that don’t need to be shared (ie. personal posts), posts that you are not comfortable sharing, and prepping a queue.

REBLOGGING is the best way to support a content creator!

reblogs boost attention and engagement. it actually allows for that content to be shared with others. which, really, is what tumblr is all about!

tldr; reblogs > likes. please don’t take content creators for granted. this site would be nothing without them!

StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.

Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.

First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.

What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!

StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.

On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.

So, what’s included in the box?

The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.

A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.

Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.

Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.

An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.

Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.

What’s still to come

Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!

More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.

If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.

i’m currently going through the process of getting my new laptop ready for mobile development through Cordova, a setup with the reliability of a coughing baby. i’ve painstakingly written down notes detailing every single step over the years and it is still giving me headaches every time. everything has changed somehow. i’ve just reinstalled a precise version of gradle (don’t ask) and the folder architecture is apparently completely different this time around. help me

Hello again, Labs here with a recap of our test of Collections! We introduced this prototype back in September and then handed the feature to a handful of volunteers sourced from the notes on that post. Thank you again to all volunteers! 

We got so much useful feedback, and wanted to share some of that here, and reveal some next steps we’re taking. There are a couple of big projects cooking in Labs, and Collections has taken a backseat lately, but it is important to us to not leave y’all hanging. We very much want to build things with you here.

Our goal with the volunteer-based super-early phase of Collections was to see if those volunteers actually use the feature, watch what they come up with, and check whether anybody they invite to Tumblr signs up and becomes a regular user of the site. Turns out, nobody did sign up — it’s not as useful of an onboarding strategy as we thought it could be.

However, one piece of feedback we got is that Collections make great custom feeds, which people on Tumblr have been asking for a lot over the years. We hear you loud and clear: you want to supplement the standard Following / For You experience with more intentional control over feed content. That’s really important to us.

With that in mind, for those in the prototype, we’ve moved the Collections list to the left sidebar / mobile navigation as an expandable area like Account, for quick access. We like this better than putting them in the dashboard tab bar, but it’s still something we’re mulling over:

We also heard the need for more filtering options beyond just blogs and tags. What about only including a blog’s posts that use a certain tag, or excluding posts using a certain tag? Or list tags with a boolean AND operator (“posts tagged [tag] and [other tag]”), not just the OR operator we’re using now for sourcing tagged posts. Lots of ideas on how to further customize what shows up in the feed, and better define what the feed is “for”.

There were other fun, tangential bits of feedback, too, like the desire to make these Collections a collaborative feature, so that more than one person can help build a Collection. There were also several usability issues that came to the forefront, which we’ve addressed. And there were some well-articulated thoughts and questions about etiquette, such as how to seek a blog’s “permission” to be included in a Collection – that’s something we care a lot about, to help prevent this kind of feature from being a source of abuse.

Another piece of feedback we heard repeatedly is the desire for Collections of posts. This is not really what we intended with what we built, but it’s not too far afield either. We totally agree that having better, easier ways of collecting and curating individual posts would be useful, so we’re going to investigate that as a separate project.

With all of this in mind, we’ve split the work on Collections into two separate tracks:

Shaping this feature as a “customizable feeds” solution, away from an “invite others” tool.

Building a new thing for saving and curating static posts.

Stay tuned here on the Labs blog for updates on when/if we’ll be moving these Collections tracks of work to more people on Tumblr. (If you are one of the volunteers who helped us with Collections, you’ll still have access to it for the time being!)

Thanks for reading! And please reach out to us via Support, the replies here, or your reblogs, if you have any more feedback, as always.

“It’s a bit like the Hotel California.”

— General relativity professor, discussing black holes

Okay so I did some research, very basic research, on the user base of tumblr and how many of us there are.

There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.

Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.

If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.

If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.

If we want this to work, we have to make it work. We can even make it into a game. Just how long can we outlast the other social media sites?