There was something that I didn’t anticipate when I moved my archives back to Tumblr

Tumblr seems focused on making the experience actively worse.

What they’re actually trying to do, of course, is make money. But in doing so they’re designing a site that is much harder to run an actual blog from. They disable custom themes by default, and by default the urls they give you now redirect you to a dashboard view, rather than your website.

They’ve made it so that you can no longer use a domain you actually own - and you can’t pay to use your own domain, either, you have to buy it through them.

They now force you to see “Tumblr Live”, a feature I have no interest in, within their app.

The ads they run are constant, which I understand and could forgive if the overall experience was better; but it isn’t.

In short, Tumblr isn’t what it used to be. So yesterday I started experimenting with running my own site off of Neocities, a web host that attempts to embrace the spirit of the old internet. To generate entries I’m using Publii, which is a very nice piece of software which allows you to write and create blog entries which are static html pages. It takes care of things like pagination, so that the entries are still easy to navigate. [Edit - in the end I moved back to Blot.im, because it’s cheaper. And I’m drafting using Bear, the best note taking experience on Mac.]

I’m still working on how to move my archives over - there’s a few ways I’m considering, one of which is just leaving them at my Tumblr url. Either way, I won’t be deleting the Tumblr - getting the archives over there was a lot of work, and I think it makes sense to keep it as a backup. I may cross-post there from time to time, we’ll see.

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