Using Tumblr to Take Back the Internet

A year or two ago I used Tumblr to take back the Internet and own my data. I posted links, images, and videos on Tumblr to cross-post those to Twitter and Facebook.

Tumblr

While it felt good and I liked to look at my Tumblr stream, the Twitter and Facebook streams didn’t look as good. To no surprise all links in my Twitter and Facebook stream pointed back to Tumblr, which they should, but there was information and meaning lost in this, because they weren’t displayed as rich content. Also it wasn’t clear where these posts actually point to.

While I love Tumblr for the simplicity of creating video, image, and link posts, I don’t like the way the URLs for those posts look like. There’s always a unique ID between the blog URL and the post name. It’s there to be easier on Tumblr’s servers, which is of little interest for the user.

Having the data stored on Tumblr’s servers is not actually owning the data, but it’s much easier to get it out from Tumblr than from Twitter or Facebook. But it feels better to have my own posts on my own site, even if they are hosted on Tumblr.

I stopped after a while and decided “what the heck, I just post to Twitter and Facebook again.” All these posts are ephemeral and I don’t need to hold on to them. I even deleted my 8 year old Tumblr and moved some posts into this blog, while I deleted a healthy chunk.

Update 2023-09-24

I removed the tumblelog altogether, because it didn’t sit right with me the last couple of years, that all embeds come from big tech companies, which harvest personal data to display targeted ads. At least my YouTube embeds where privacy-friendly.

Privacy-Friendly YouTube Embeds