A few months ago, I abruptly quit playing Doom. After years and years of playing it, complaining about playing it, modding it to try and pretend like I wasn't playing it, and trying fruitlessly to cut it out of my life; I got some news from friend of mine, someone whose name is inextricably linked in my mind to Doom, that shook me to my core. When I went to start up Doom again, I felt sick, so I quit immediately; I kept the icon around on my desktop for a couple of days before I realised that I was never, ever going to be able to play it again without thinking about the news I got. If I'd had the option, I probably would have preferred to part from that game in a different way—perhaps one that would have allowed me to play it again after a few years—but I finally got my wish. This person managed to irreconcilably taint Doom so badly that I can't ever look at it again.
I was thinking about Tumblr earlier, and about how I and several other people decided to move off that site after trustfunder and TERF tycoon, Matt Mullenweg, personally nuked Rita @predstrogen and any transfem who called him out on it; I started accounts on Cohost and Bluesky, along with Neocities (which I actually started quite a bit before then). Basically, the only account I log into regularly is Neocities. If you're not familiar with it, Neocities users have a sort of microblog they can post to without having to make any new webpage. You have to be around for a week and have at least 2 webpages (I think) before you can use it, but Neocities is sort of a minor social-networking site in this way. I haven't written anything in my microblog, preferring to update my macroblog (the section where you currently are), because I can write more at one time. But, Bluesky, I don't think I've logged in there more than twice. It's too much like Twitter for my tastes, and I never particularly cared for it even before Melon Husk took it over. Cohost, while being more Tumblr-like and defaulting to HTML in posts, is desolate. It feels like I'm the only one online there sometimes. It don't know what everyone else who left tumblr is doing, but, if they're anything like me, they set up accounts and then kind of shunted them off onto a siding. I can safely say that I'm more active on Neocities than anywhere else online right now. I know that most of gen-alpha and gen-z doesn't use computers, so I hope they didn't just take up Tiktok full time.
But, for those of us who do use computers, I feel like Tumblr was the motivating factor to finally kick social media for good. I'm starting to see more people talking about Gopher than I've ever seen, and HTML adoption with gen-alpha who have computer access is picking up. Perhaps, like Doom, Tumblr has finally destroyed the image of online social networking. It's sort of ironic in a way that we would finally leave social media this year; seeing as how Google Groups has finally discontinued Usenet support. The original social network, established back in 1980, buoyed by a giant, multinational corporation, and finally shut down by the same corporation on the same year, in the same month as we all started leaving Tumblr for other pursuits.
Doom was stymying me—I wouldn't play any other games, I wouldn't spend the time writing music, I wouldn't draw, I would barely write, and all of my new ideas had to do with it in some way. It was more than just a game to me; it was a toxic relationship. A goes-nowhere/does-nothing boyfriend who never mistreated me, but who never gave me anything back either, and would never give me the space I needed. He was handsome, and he looked good in suits, but ultimately that was all that he ever brought to the table. I can imagine that Tumblr plays much the same role in many people's lives, being the only place for a grand long while that queer people from all over the world could congregate without being immediately ostracised. But, if, at the end of the day, that's all it offered—which has now also been taken away—other outlets need to be found. One of the big things that Tumblr was being used for was visual art and fanfiction, after other outlets for that same work were overtaken by CSA apologists and bigots. And then, an official business relationship between generative AI companies and Tumblr was announced, ensuring that all future artistic works posted there would be upended into the weighted-averages machine. Just as I came to realise after quitting Doom, there are other places one can go to post their work online, and all it takes is learning a little bit of computer code. It's a little more of an involved process, certainly (for which I would really like to be able to write a guide sometime), but some people who left Tumblr have even started Gopher servers with a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop, with the intent of posting their original works there. Personally, I think the world would be a better place if every Tumblr user; past and present; dug a Gopherhole. I know my life would certainly improve if I could post my own stuff in a place where OpenAI couldn't touch it.
--24 March 2024--