{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Tumblr Dashboard W/o Tumblr", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/167752822383/", "html": "

nuclearspaceheater:

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With Tumblr occasionally deciding to ghost-unfollow you from people, and the on-going roll-out of \u201c\u2018Best\u2019 Stuff First\u201d, 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.)

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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\u2019ve seen so there\u2019s no problem with losing my place, or having to scroll back thru everything if I accidentally reload or leave the page.

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A disadvantage I can think of is that a feed would not survive a url change, so you\u2019d 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\u2019s.) Also, I\u2019m not sure how far back a feed goes, so I\u2019m not sure how often you\u2019d 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\u2019s automatic clean-up settings.

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Hopefully nobody working at Tumblr knows where the feed generating code even is and won\u2019t be able to get rid of it even if they decide to.

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This also works with YouTube, another service where \u201cSubscribe\u201d is taken as a suggestion. User feeds can be extracted automatically, but channel feeds take some minor effort.

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oh is RSS still a thing?

tumblr\u2019s 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\u2019re really just sharing the title and headline and an option on the text)

I legitimately think there\u2019s a tenureworthy journal article tracing the shifting norms around the \u201cread more\u201d cut across livejournal, tumblr, and other blogging platforms

what was I saying - oh, maybe we should give RSS another look, the \u201cpull content\u201d paradigm from an archipelago of selected independent sources could be awkward and homely and deliver on unpredictable schedule, but as its old late-\u201990s rivals go Facebook finally perfected the \u201cportal\u201d form and phone app notifications perfected the \u201cpush content\u201d forms and they\u2019re both kinda shit

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