nuclearspaceheater:

With Tumblr occasionally deciding to ghost-unfollow you from people, and the on-going roll-out of “‘Best’ Stuff First”, you mite want a means of following tumblr blogs that does not involve your own tumblr dashboard. In fact, there is a convenient means of doing so provided by tumblr, presumably by accident, which is the good old-fashioned web feed. (aka RSS, altho that is just one of two major feed protocols.)

I myself am using QuiteRSS. By adding every tumblr blog I follow as a feed, which they all support by default, I have a list of blogs that will survive deletion by tumblr bugs. By putting them all in the same folder, I can browse the folder as a whole, making it basically the tumblr dashboard, but better, because I can make it reverse-chronological or chronological order, and it tracks which posts I’ve seen so there’s no problem with losing my place, or having to scroll back thru everything if I accidentally reload or leave the page.

A disadvantage I can think of is that a feed would not survive a url change, so you’d have to also be following someone in tumblr. (In the case of QuiteRSS, it does not alert on a lost feed, except that the favicon will be replaced with tumblr’s.) Also, I’m not sure how far back a feed goes, so I’m not sure how often you’d have to check, or have the reader check, to not miss anything of someone. It seems based on posts rather than age, since some feeds have posts from years ago. Also, be mindful of your feed reader’s automatic clean-up settings.

Hopefully nobody working at Tumblr knows where the feed generating code even is and won’t be able to get rid of it even if they decide to.

This also works with YouTube, another service where “Subscribe” is taken as a suggestion. User feeds can be extracted automatically, but channel feeds take some minor effort.

oh is RSS still a thing?

tumblr’s honestly a decent platform for text, both for having the length to develop coherent structure (as vs twitter) and allowing/forcing you to repost the whole text when you share it on (unlike the facebook meta-ecology where you’re really just sharing the title and headline and an option on the text)

I legitimately think there’s a tenureworthy journal article tracing the shifting norms around the “read more” cut across livejournal, tumblr, and other blogging platforms

what was I saying - oh, maybe we should give RSS another look, the “pull content” paradigm from an archipelago of selected independent sources could be awkward and homely and deliver on unpredictable schedule, but as its old late-’90s rivals go Facebook finally perfected the “portal” form and phone app notifications perfected the “push content” forms and they’re both kinda shit