What are the odds that the random website it gave me was my physics study guide in high school? The Hyperphysics website

I think that if a platform wants to support long-form content, it needs to make design choices around long-form. It can’t be a short-form content UX with an arbitrary limit removed so that long posts can be created, if they’re going to be displayed and interacted with in the same way as 280 character tweets.

Some design choices that made Tumblr better for long-form posts and discussion: Being able to tag a post without writing the tag inside the main post body, so posts can be categorized without messing up the content. Text formatting support. Media can be inserted into any part of the text instead of forcing them to appear at the bottom of the post. Q&A. Post archives. Custom blog theming. One account can have multiple blogs to organize content. Replies show the context of what they’re replying to when shared. Support for commenting on posts. They combined these effectively with short-form design like the centralized feed of posts and interaction buttons.

Another reason I prefer Tumblr over Twitter is because Tumblr’s format makes discussion most visible, while Twitter makes soapboxing most visible. Tumblr’s design has flaws, but it’s the best example of platform design that balances long-form, short-form and discussion in my opinion.

It supports both, which is why I like Tumblr’s format the most. You can make short status updates like Twitter or long, informative articles on the same blog and it doesn’t look out of place.

I used to be interested in Tumblr joining the Fediverse, as someone who strongly prefers Tumblr’s long-form microblogging to Twitter’s format. Unfortunately, Tumblr has shown itself to be just like any money-hungry corporation at a smaller scale.

Tumblr is trying to push Tiktok-style short video Tumblr Live, which is filled with trackers, and they have plans to change their UX to be more like Twitter because Twitter is more profitable. Tumblr has the advantage of having a very low percentage of technical users, who accept these changes and don’t find workarounds because they don’t know what’s going on.

With the direction Tumblr is going in, I’d defederate it if it ever starts federating. I want a Fediverse software that mirrors Tumblr’s long-form microblogging, not Tumblr itself and definitely not its horrible community.

They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr’s own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.

Tumblr’s biggest roadblock to monetization isn’t their site structure or ideas, it’s their community.

This project has a lot of red flags for long-term sustainability. It needs to be forked and maintained by someone who cares about open-source and decentralization, not being a Discord competitor.

• The developers have no plans for financing the platform. In the FAQs, they claim that they managed to raise $2000 in donations, and that covers the costs for now, so they’ll think about financing “later”.
• For whatever reason, they chose to develop not just the messaging client but the messaging protocol, voice, file and media servers. That creates a lot of work for the small team to maintain.
• They don’t want to implement federation, partially because they would have to rewrite their entire backend, but also because…
• They want to force people to use the revolt.chat instance. While Revolt can be self-hosted, the documentation actively discourages this and tries to obfuscate the self-hosting process as much as possible.
• The open-source code is also several versions behind revolt.chat so that revolt.chat can keep an advantage over self-hosted instances.
• The developers are university students who have never developed software professionally or managed a social media platform before.
• Combine all of this with the lack of financing plans and you will have a service that is bound to implode or become enshittified when the operating costs and platform administration become too taxing.

Revolt is a very impressive full-stack project for the developers’ experience level, but it’s not a good FLOSS Discord alternative.

On another note, why are there so many children in the article’s comment section? Is that really the quality of the average Revolt user?