I just want to encourage people coming in from Tumblr to try to be chill and avoid being in "prickly defensive and assuming the worst of people who don't declare the right faction allegiances" mode on here. Fight your enemies, not your allies.

I haven't seen anyone looking for a fight, but some intro posts give me the impression of expecting to need to be ready for one, and I think we've found here over the last couple of years that social media actually doesn't have to be like that.

yes, please let this place be chill, all i want is to see cool posts

I always think it's so fun how Tumblr's opinion on staff has always been fluctuating. For a while it was "we hate staff" because of all the updates that people disliked, for years. People have always made jokes about tumblr updates sucking, and some of those old posts circulate when a new update that sucks comes around.

Then, some time during (or "after") the pandemic, a couple posts went around about how staff was just trying their best and that tumblr is doing financially poor right now and how if you love tumblr, which practically everyone on tumblr during the pandemic was because no one who disliked tumblr was there, should support staff and think about supporting them financially.

THEN, even more shitty updates came out that everyone hated. Moderation that was morally dubious at best and malicious at worst. The transition from appreciating tumblr staff to hating tumblr staff was pretty gradual, though some people hated staff quicker due to a lot of different factors (I believe they silenced a lot of black creators. This was especially prevalent in 2020 with the BLM rallies, though I'm pretty sure the "appreciate tumblr staff" wave came after that). Also worth noting they bury Palestine tags when they should be on the trending page.

THEN, once everyone was already pretty sick and tired of tumblr staff, and even some shade thrown at the CEO, Matt, Matt decided to get defensive over the transmisoginistic decisions made by tumblr moderation, which had been growing rapidly over the past year and had affected posts that were not sexually explicit in the slightest.

I don't blame anyone for deciding they're just done with Tumblr at this point. I feel like we as a community had tried to give tumblr staff so many chances and they just fumbled them all. Obviously tumblr staff is more than just one person, and for a while I had just assumed there was just kind of one transphobic staff member that was responsible for a lot of the transmisoginistic censorship since they usually got reinstated after an appeal. Though with this new information it's harder to say that.

Tumblr was a great experience. Tumblr culture has always been a great interest of mine. I really hope some day tumblr gets over themselves and decides to try to better themselves for everyone on there that they've hurt. But that seems kind of unlikely tbh. I think that if it continues down this path tumblr could become a truly horrible cess pit of the worst people that remain.

Tumblr can get better. But we'll just have to wait and see if that happens. I hope everyone here has fun with Cohost. I'm really liking the community that's being built here. And while the site isn't perfect as there has been many criticisms I agree with, the site is only 2 years old, and I think the people behind it want to do their best to make this a wonderful place for the Cohost users. Happy chosting

You're right and that's why I'm here now. Experiencing a site with good moderation has been incredible. As a transwoman the first thing I did when I got to cohost was look through the r*dfem tags so I could block everyone there. And there was no one there. There was a single blank profile. It felt like such a relief.

Talking with my therapist, she broached the subject of the recent horror in Oklahoma and asked if I needed space to process it, as many others in her circle have been unable to cope with it, missing work and school and such. And I had to admit that I didn't, that in the midst of all the other awful things that have happened in this still early year, it has become difficult to feel each act of brutal violence individually.

But in particular, prompted to reflect, I realized that with the violence and hatred directed at transgender people, I presently feel a strange deja vu, and I admitted to her that I am feeling the distance of being over 10 years a transgender woman among people who have been trans for only a few years, or even less, for whom the violence is fresh and agonizing. The sensation has averaged out from instances of sudden, blinding pain to a continuous, bone-deep ache. The sensation compels me to grasp for a way out of the endless cycle of reacting and reacting, where we are always isolated objects to be acted upon by a collective of normative subjects, to see the cause and effect and where, by our own collectivity, it could be interrupted.

I don't know what it says about me, whether it's a strength or a weakness, but I no longer want to be comforted in the face of atrocity. I only want it to end.