Occupy Wall Street, Notorious RBG, cottagecore. These and several other lasting internet trends and IRL movements of the 2010s were born not on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the mainstream media but on Tumblr. You might remember it as the blogging platform that became one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 (back when a billion still felt like a billion), then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials’ formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z.
Zoomers have gravitated toward the pseudonymous platform, viewing it as a safe space as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers. As in its heyday, Tumblr is still more about sharing art, culture, and fandom than individual status. More posts about anime and punk rock than bridal trends and politics. In 2025, 50% of Tumblr’s active monthly users are Gen Zers, as are 60% of new users signing up, according to data Tumblr shared with Business Insider. And several of Zoomers’ icons, from the “Fault in Our Stars” author John Green to the pop superstar Halsey, have come back to the platform.
“Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet,” says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021. She still uses her own Tumblr regularly as the internet’s resident meme librarian. “It allows for experimentation that’s not tied to your face.”
I mean looks around
Are we invisible?
Hello! Fediverse over here!
Community maintained!
Fresh memes!
rings bell
Come and get it!
I left every single western social network because they’re all filled to the brim with angry, asshole people. America has a ton of miserable people that will go out of their way to be rude to others on every social network. I’m sick of that energy.
If it’s not rude people, it’s ad after ad.
The only things I use now are Xiaohongshu (Rednote) and Lemmy (my own instance).
This comment is going to piss just about everyone off, but tik tok was actually amazing for the couple hours America was banned. That’s not an endorsement of tik tok just an observation.
Funny enough, this is why I’ve enjoyed Rednote a ton. I’ve found that a lot of western folks are there as a reprieve from how insanely volatile Meta and other platforms have gotten. It’s a different vibe and the platform was specifically built for people to learn and grow together. The audience there very much strives to keep a good vibe and will call out anyone that tries to disrupt that.
Besides a bit of the fediverse, I’m back at reading blogs via RSS. I’ve never stopped using RSS and it’s just so nice.
I used to have a really robust RSS feed but lost it when the service I was using changed. Need to rebuild that.
Based instance name.
Thanks! Never thought I’d own a domain with “yachts” in it.
The people’s version of owning yachts
It’s the closest I’ll ever get.
It’s even more fun when the angry asshole people are mods on the platform!
See: reddit
Tumblr is owned by Automattic.
The WordPress plug-in company?
The WordPress company, as in the developers of WordPress itself.
Yeah, the one with the lawsuits involved and blocking plugins and such. Search for Mullenweg.
Been out of the WordPress dev scene for about 10 years. Didn’t know they got so big
When asked specifically about how Bluesky might fit into these plans, a spokesperson would only comment on its ActivityPub progress.
Based. But yeah tumblr has been talking about activitypub for years now and i get that this takes a lot of work, but damn they are taking a while.
Also, Bluesky doesn’t use the ActivityPub standard, so it sounds like bullshit.
Early 2000s, pre-smartphone internet was better. That isn’t a romanticized claim.
Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm.And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.
In many ways it was better. More organic and even the big names like google and amazon were more quirky upstarts rather than the evil megacorporations they are today.
That said lets not sugarcoat it too much. The early 2000s were edgelord central and message boards like 4chan and something awful were quite influential. Then you had gaming message boards like gamefaqs and the like. Woof so much bad trolling. Some of it funny and well done to the point of art but most just abrasive and annoying. The small message boards and communities were amazing though.
Pre-plattform was better i would say. The problem are all these plattforms they have to much power and dictate markets, opinions and life in generell for to many people.
Pre-portal?..
Nah, there was a time before all the legislations and regulations, a time with more freedom to… do whatever. It wasn’t all for the best, though.
Mushroom mushrrom
So, on the plus side that means they’ll be on the Fediverse soon.
On the negative, by now I fully expect Matt Mullenweg to flip out over some perceived slight or rivalry and ruin Tumblr for everybody 🤷
How will https://sh.itjust.works/c/curatedtumblr work when Lemmy is Tumblr?
Lemmy won’t be tumblr, it will just federate with it 🙂 So I guess c/curatedtumblr will work even smoother when it becomes possible to just cross post over ActivityPub.
Circlejerk?
Curated circlejerk 🧐
Ok, this is actually pretty funny. I accidentally commented in the wrong thread and it turned out that it also made sense. I guess the internet trully is one big circlejerk
There truly is no
spoonwrong thread 😂
i’ve been there since david karp. you can take tumblr from my cold hands.
I’m wondering how Tumblr is a safe space while it’s still filled with porn-bots. I tried the platform several times and no matter what I do, I always get smacked with some random NSFW content.
I get spammed on Lemmy each week by “Nicole the Fediverse chic from Poland”. Each time from a different instance.
I hope she isn’t the start of the end.
Nah, there’s always going to be bots in any public network, it’s normal, should be fought and all but there’s always adversarial individuals, we definitely should find who’s this Nicole person and get them to stop this crap, but you’d be surprised how NORMAL it is to have anything on the public internet under constant, 24/7 attack
When people are talking about safe spaces in the current socio-political climate they aren’t talking about porn. They’re talking about Nazis.
Majority of tumblr nsfw seems like some kind of black and white artsy erotica made by touch starved girl nerds so what’s not safe about it
I am going to tell a sad thing that will make you all feel offended, but I can’t refrain:
The problem isn’t in the place/server/whatever. At least that is the minor part of the problem. The problem is in the people themselves. No matter where they will go, they will bring their shit with them to that new place.
You underestimate how much interface and algorithms impact how people interact with eachother.
Facebook has spent millions figuring out how to make your feed as divisive and confrontational as possible. I don’t think it’s had a good outcome for humanity and I think it’s more in the powers-that-be’s hands than the above person thinks it is.
It’s inevitable for ads supported social media.
They need to keep you “engaged” to show you more ads, and the most effective way to do it is to foster conflict.
I agree with this. I 100% believe the lurch to the right’s acceleration in America was fueled by social media algorithms.
It started with billionaires buying up all the media, but was further accelerated by the algorithms.
This and clickbait. Both were a race to the bottom for information and debate quality motivated solely by greed.
Yep. Yesterday I stumbled across a few old Reddit threads back when TikTok initially get banned. specifically subreddit drama posts.
Reading through it, and seeing how gen z moaning about how they won’t be able to connect and find new people and info. I still think they are addicted to the algorithm but I also am able to empathize somewhat in the connection part. Facts are they were born into and grew in near total “antisocial” environment. Constant connection to the internet so it’s easy to forego face to face meeting, leading to a cycle of not hanging out physically like older generations did.
Then there were the COVID lockdowns helping itself to the pile of shit.
Peer influence going to TikTok, and then getting fed constantly with their algorithm using the short form content TikTok is infamous for.
It really is tragic when I look at it honestly.
What good did the increased face-to-face meeting do for previous generations?
From what I can tell Gen Z have lower teenage pregnancy rates, lower rates of alcoholism, lower rates of violent crime and are the most “educated” generation ever.
Meeting face-to-face taught people that words and actions have consequences, sometimes to be counted in the number of teeth hitting the asphalt.
Lower physical contact reduces some risks, but also fails to teach about them.
Is that why there was a higher murder rate? Higher rates of violent crime? Are those benefits?
When and where? In civilized countries, violent crime rates have been pretty steady until the introduction of TVs, and have a better correlation to leaded gasoline usage.
Define “civilized country”?
In the US murder rate was higher throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/
https://www.infoplease.com/us/crime/homicide-rate-1950-2014
https://jeffreybutts.net/2002/03/28/risefall/
European murder rates are also down from their 20th century peaks. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-rise-and-fall-of-homicides-in-europe
Damn people… They ruined humanity!
