So it’s been a few months since the great exodus from Tumblr and so I thought I’d write down a few thoughts.
I could make a list of a thousand sites that I’m not on, like Twitter, PornHub and Patreon, but instead I’m going to talk about my experiences on the platforms that I am on:
WordPress.com
WordPress.com certainly has the most flexibility, being a full CMS and all, but the free service does have some limits. The most annoying of these is the themes, I can’t do any custom coding like I could on Tumblr. But even beyond that they are a little bit of a nanny site in the sense that they seem to think they know what’s best even when that’s not what you want. In this case I’m talking about infinite scroll.
When I first set up my Tumblr I *loved* infinite scroll, it seemed great. Then I post hundreds of items and quickly found that infinite scroll is really annoying if you want to scroll back in someone’s history more than a few dozen posts. Your web browser quickly starts eating up memory and at some point it slows to a crawl and then falls over.
That effectively makes my older posts virtually unfindable unless you do a search and know what your looking for. Now getting back to wordpress.com, they enforce infinite scroll with no option to turn it off. They do this because they have metrics that show users are more engaged on infinite scroll sites, which is probably true if you’re just browsing around, but on sites with thousands of posts, that users want to go back to, that doesn’t work so well.
I’m not unhappy enough at the moment with wordpress.com to move, but there’s an itch in the back of my mind that says that I probably should. Maybe to a self hosted WordPress site, who knows.
The other problem with wordpress.com is the lack of engagement with users, other than basic page hits, few people create wordpress.com accounts just to browse publicly available blogs. I think I miss that the most from Tumblr.
I am, of course, grateful for the few that have done so and the comments they have made, but it’s no where near the level that Tumblr had.
I can’t blame anyone for not creating a wordpress.com account, their back end is a mish mash of technologies that range from a classic WordPress backend (that’s easy to work with) to a half complete JavaScript based replacement (that’s painful to work with) to a “Reader” UI that’s more concerned with giving you suggestions than showing you what your following.
Overall the problem with wordpress.com is that it’s just not a social platform really, it’s a standalone blogging platform, which seems kind of quaint after using Tumblr for all those years.
DeviantArt
I was already lurking on DeviantArt so I was pretty familiar with what to expect. I know people do post text stories to it, but their allowed content seems pretty limited and I don’t really want to have to worry about getting banned.
However, their user engagement is pretty high and you can like and favourite things there pretty easily. There are lots of people that, like me, have created a lurker account there to follow others with.
I’m satisfied enough with DeviantArt that I’ll be keeping that account active.
Literotica
I started posting my back catalogue of stories to Literotica last year and have continued posting my new stories there as well. Well, mostly at least.
I haven’t posted anything that I wrote in another author’s world, like my OTTII or BimboTech ones. Likewise I’ve had at least one story rejected by the editors as it was a continuation from my blog.
This is something I very much dislike about Literotica, they are very “anti-linking” in their archive, so I can’t even add my standard “come visit me at” author’s note.
Sure, I can add it to my profile page, but that doesn’t seem to be something most readers go to.
Beyond the editorial quirks, Literotica has some good user engagement, with comments and favourites. A *very* small number of the comments are a little harsh though 😉 Good thing I have a thick skin.
The only other comment I’ll make on Literotica is about the site design, it seems to be stuck in the 2000’s. Not only do the stories only take up a small percentage of the screen width, many of their fields (like short description) are painfully truncated.
It’s almost more effort than it’s worth to post there.
bdsmlr.com
One of the places some of the Tumblr refugee’s seem to have collected is over at bdsmlr.com. I do have an account there, but I haven’t been posting anything.
When I first joined it seemed to be a cheap knockoff of Tumblr. And by cheap, I mean cheap.
Many of the functions that made Tumblr easy to post on were missing. Like scheduling, a good editor, rebogs, comments on reblogs, etc.
But I give them credit, they’ve been working hard at adding those features and more. So while they’re still a buggy mess, it looks like in maybe another six months of so they might be something I’d consider using.
Though they still don’t have custom themes, so maybe not 😉