Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress | TechCrunch
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Tumblr is making the move to WordPress. After its 2019 acquisition by WordPress.com parent company Automattic in a $3 million fire sale, the new owner has

So… if the backend gets moved over to Wordpress, and Wordpress can already federate, I guess this means Tumblr is coming to the fediverse? 😮

  • poVoqEnglish
    119•21 days ago

    Given how crufty Wordpress is, I don’t even dare to imagine how bad the Tumblr backend must be that this is seen as an improvement by the developers.

    • @[email protected]English
      32•21 days ago

      Right? At this point I’m just sticking with WordPress because I can’t be bothered to migrate a bunch of sites off of it. Every year for the past decade it’s felt jankier. Tumblr’s backend has to be a dumpster fire for this to seem like a good idea.

      My criticism aside, WP still has the convenience factor of being the open source web platform that has a plugin for just about any need. Whether those plugins are gonna break for site or introduce interesting new vulnerabilities is a different discussion.

      • Flamekebab
        6•21 days ago

        Same boat here. I had some good times with it but these days it seems to be a bloated mess. Are there any good, lightweight alternatives these days?

        • @[email protected]English
          5•21 days ago

          I’ve been looking off and on for a few months, but it seems like there aren’t many options anymore like there were 20 years ago. A couple I’ve found are FlatPress and WriteFreely, but I haven’t tried any yet.

      • AmbiguousPropsEnglish
        5•21 days ago

        You’re not alone, I’ve still got clients with WP sites and it feels more and more patchworky every time I use it. The vulnerabilities may keep me up at night, but it would take a ton of effort to move them over, and my clients certainly don’t want to pay for that.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•20 days ago

          I see this all the time. People complain about WP but think the alternatives are better, when they’re just trading problems for others.

          WP core is stable AF. I’ve shared in many prior comments how I spend so many more dev hours fixing other CMSes over WP.

          And if you don’t even need a CMS, fuck it all and switch to static hosting and markdown.

          • AmbiguousPropsEnglish
            2•20 days ago

            Oh yeah, for sure. Joomla still haunts my dreams.

            All of my own sites are static because it’s easy for me to modify. But my clients need something a bit more user friendly, unfortunately.

    • @[email protected]English
      31•21 days ago

      This smells to me like WordPress reducing their workload more than anything since they own Tumblr (unless maybe there’s some sort of financial incentive to increasing the number of WordPress blogs?).

      But also, considering that at one point in Tumblr’s history, you could edit other people’s posts, maybe it is an improvement.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•20 days ago

        But also, considering that at one point in Tumblr’s history, you could edit other people’s posts, maybe it is an improvement.

        What 😭

        • @[email protected]English
          10•20 days ago

          So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.

          • threelonmusketeersEnglish
            2•20 days ago

            I don’t remember that. He had his posts edited, or he edited someone else’s posts?

            Doesn’t he have a funny username, like “FishingBoatProceeds” or something?

    • @[email protected]English
      10•20 days ago

      It makes sense.

      Supporting Tumblr backend with patches vs building on top of stable WP and improving it seems like a win win.

      • poVoqEnglish
        30•21 days ago

        Wordpress is a pile of decades old php code* that is held together with string and tape pretty much.

        *php isn’t the problem itself, modern php is actually pretty nice.

        • Aatube
          18•21 days ago

          I’ll take your word for it. Apparently tumblr and WordPress (and WordPress.com) are owned by the same company, so this change would make sense to reduce maintenance workload.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•20 days ago

          WordPress core is pretty wild. But modern WordPress isn’t working purely in that. The latest WP uses PHP primarily as a backend, and modern JS as a frontend and passing data through filters->DB.

          I won’t call it elegant. But it’s not the PHP experience from five years ago.

        • Draconic NEOEnglish
          3•20 days ago

          And despite all that it’s likely that the Tumblr backend might be even worse.