Inaugural Blog Post, or, A Rant about Tumblr?
29 August 2025
"Every blog must start with the first post" - An ancient proverb.
Recently I had been reflecting on (in)famous microblogging/social media platform Tumblr. I realized that, because I first started using Tumblr when I was a freshman in high school, that means I have been using it for ~15 years. I do recall quitting in protest sometime around the porn ban[1], but then once again I found myself sucked in to Tumblr's gravity and was there cooking my brain and my attention span once again.
Though, as the years progressed, I found that I was more and more choosy over what I decided to share on the platform. When I was younger, I posted frequent and regular life updates, selfies, journal entries, jokes, etc. on Tumblr and I found it easy to connect with new people all over the world, some of whom I am still pleased to call my friends to this day. Once in a while, I am able to find a new friend on Tumblr but it has become rarer and rarer and my own desire for privacy and control over what I share online has increased my prudence.
I can't decide if I feel like the culture of Tumblr has gotten worse with the broad conservative backlash we in the English-speaking world find ourselves swimming in, and the overall enshittification of social media in general. Tumblr has always had a strong Puritan streak. Maybe someday I will write about my experience, shared by many other transfeminized gender outlaws, of getting unpersoned with a vague, lurid and unsubstantiated callout post. Classic Tumblr. We can say for sure that the transmisogyny of the Tumblr moderation team has reached a fever pitch.
Now I can see Tumblr for what it is: A black hole where I can turn off my mind and just take in the words and colors and images. In my lonely early days as a closeted-transsexual possibly-autistic teenager, that escape brought me a great deal of solace and for that, I will probably always be grateful to thee, O Tumblr.
These days, I like to think I've grown and matured as a person and I desire a more enriching habit.
So then we come to answer the question that really begins this post: Why blogging? Why now? I'm obviously not the first person to observe that the state of social media is probably the worst it's ever been. I go back and forth on whether or not I think that social media itself is a mistake. (The one exception... my beloved Peach)[2]. I've found myself particularly inspired by my friend Sean's blog. It's just really great to check it and get an idea of what he's doing and what he's into. I like the more longform content, and it all feels more intentional and less toxic than social media. In particular, I love the "Monthly Zest" series and the way it creates regularly scheduled life updates. That's the power of blogging!
No, social media is not the internet. And social media is not the future. For me, social media is the past; social media is dying a slow and undignified death. And the future? The future is the past! The future is blogging! And personal websites! And building nests that interconnect on the new, old, underground internet of the pastfuture! Hail blogging! Hail HTML! Hail the World Wide Web!
[1]At the time, I thought Twitter was a more valuable avenue so I went all in on Twitter for a couple of years. Well, you see how that turned out since Twitter X is now an acidic and putrid haven for neofascists and their allies and misinformaton phantoms and the most clueless people on Earth. So it goes.↩
[2] May you never die. Long Live Peach. Truly if Peach goes down I don't know if I'm gonna wanna keep using a smartphone.↩