Tumblr is Working on Communities
Posted on August 22, 2024 by Aywren
For the past few months, the new Communities feature has been the big push at Tumblr. I got involved with testing this feature pretty early on as I established the first Final Fantasy XIV community there.
While I think Communities is a great idea, as it feels a bit like a callback to the oldskool forums, I’m not fully sure that Tumblr users have embraced or wrapped their heads around what all possibilities can be found with them. I say this because a number of folks using Tumblr are less about posting up their own content and more about setting up a string of reblogs of stuff other people make.
This is nothing new or limited to just Tumblr. Twitter is full of retweeters who keep their timeline full by reposting everything that catches their eye. That’s just the nature of social media.
I mention that because Communities in Tumblr – while you can reblog other people’s posts to them – feel as if they’re targeting those who make and post their own content. There’s no hard rule about this at all, but reblogging someone else’s post to your own Tumblr vs. reblogging it to a Community just feels different.
For this reason, I wonder if Communities are going to continue to be slow in the uptake. I’m a member of several FFXIV-related Communities, including my own. I’m also a member of the admin and user testing Communities. A common thread I’m seeing and hearing is that the adoption rate for Communities by users is somewhat low.
Even in my FFXIV Community, which is free to join for everyone in that fandom, we have just a little over 160 members at this moment of writing – which is amazing! You’d think with that many folks, the Community would be hard to moderate or would be noisy, but that’s not so. There’s a moderate amount of posts we get each day – which is good… and bad.
Maybe I’m just used to the golden age of forums where folks would just pop off with excitement about community-focused tools like this. Or maybe the Internet has changed that much that even when given community-focused tools, individuals prefer to stay within their own safer nooks and circles.
Granted, Tumblr Communities are very much in beta format. There’s still no way to search and join Communities unless you happen upon them in a tag search. Popularity could all very well change once the feature has been built out more.
I have a lot of hopes for Communities and I support the concept readily. I do want to see them be a success, which is why I’ve beta tested them as an admin, and I continue to work to encourage content and participation in my own Communities.
We’ll have to see where this goes in the long run!