"You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started.
It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous.
I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.
> I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.
I would also say that migration to WordPress is explicitly a marketing strategy for word press, their main product.
Migrating a product you bought to be part of your main product is a pretty common corporate move.
Migrating an acquired company's infra to a parent company's infra is common. But marketing it to the world, before starting it, and without a clear product strategy to justify it, is pretty uncommon. For me, it smells of messiness that translates into wasted eng time.
In this case it is not rewriting for the sake of rewriting, it’s moving content from one CMS to another which happens to be their main product.
There is no reason to think this would not work out. The only code being rewritten is front end theme code, and some Wordpress plugins to support any unique tumblr features.
Everything is guaranteed to be perfect when there is no deadline, or even timeframe estimate. Assurances without timelines are meaningless. It's more surprising they said much of anything at all this early in the process.
> "You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started.
Because likely it is not an internal migration with no user impact. Guess which part isn’t true, if they’re telling us.
“A longtime popular place to socialize, blog, participate in fandoms, and more, Tumblr originally exited to Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent) for north of $1 billion under then-CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership in 2013. The hope at the time was to transform Tumblr into another social media powerhouse and to grow its ads business. However, the subsequent years were rough on Tumblr, as sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit dominated the space.”
That last sentence just skips the whole story.
Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017, thinking the way to "grow the ad business" was to dump the "and more" part of Tumblr in 2018. It took less than a year for Verizon to look for a way to avoid being reminded of this miscalculation. Asking 0.3% of Yahoo's price did the trick in 2019.
This isn't so long ago. The omission is interesting.
To me, it wasn't just moderating adult content, it was the way they went about it. They used an AI to review every existing post, which resulted in many false positives, and deleted everything it deemed inappropriate.
I was drawing a lot at the time, and many of my portraits with no nudity at all were deleted. That was my sign to leave.
>It's also one of the main clearnet sites used to share CSAM links, unfortunately. [...] Even more so post Musk.
Even 4chan removes child sexual abuse material at lightening speed. There isn't any major social media site that allows this. If it's even more now, would you be able to name an account that shares such stuff? Or are we supposed to believe this without evidence?
And as far as porn goes sure. The thing about Twitter is you wouldn't see porn unless you specifically go and look for it. Which is why I always find it amusing when people complain about this "problem". There is no porn in people's feeds by default, one has to train the algo to show it by searching for it and interacting with porn accounts. It's especially funny since on Twitter itself there are always conservative or Christian accounts complaining to Musk that they see too much adult content and that he needs to ban it.
You want me to share CSAM accounts? You realise you're asking me to commit a crime, right?
I don't know any such accounts because I don't go looking for such things. It's just a well known fact that Twitter has a CSAM problem. A quick google search will show you plenty of media coverage on that fact. It's also well known that moderation on Twitter has suffered under Musk due to massive layoffs.
Of course, most of this porn stuff is never seen by most users because it's not favoured by The Algorithm. I'm just pointing out it's definitely all there. As far as legal porn I'm generally in favour of it being allowed on most platforms.
As for naming accounts, it's not just "naming criminals". It's effectively equivalent to sharing CSAM if I'm telling people specifically where to find it. Even if I knew where, which I don't, I'd prefer not broadcast that information. And I'm not sure why you're so eager to learn specific account names. It's a pretty weird thing to ask for on a public forum, honestly.
> You claimed the problem got worse but if you've never seen it yourself, what data are those "well known" facts based on?
Not everyone has solipsism at the core of their epistemological worldview. Even without knowing your jurisdiction, I would discourage you from seeking out CSAM; the laws do not have an exception for curiosity.
Hard to know why people downvote, but I just want to reiterate how ridiculous it is for someone to make a claim, provide no data or other evidence, admit they have never personally observed this and finish it off with "do your own research" when someone questions it. It seems like a completely indefensible position to me but if you have a rational argument why we should believe the claim I'm open to it. It just has to have substance. Nothing to do with solipsism, it's just common sense. It would be stupid to simply believe every random thing people write online, don't you think?
Twitter has more lax content moderation - boosting blue-checks resulted in a torrent of OnlyFans porn spam that took several months to resolve (P-U-S-S-Y--I-N--B-I-O)
If Twitter didn't have a handle on porn in general, what makes you confident they had CSAM under control?
That's because Twitter, in a weird twist of "that... makes sense?" doesn't algorithmically push sexual content out to the masses. It's a rare case of a feed algorithm actually keeping the right content away from you.
> Reddit still has a lot of adult content, but AFAIK you can't find it unless you know where it is.
When Reddit made its infamous API changes over a year ago that caused many third-party apps to shut down, a less-publicized part of the change was that NSFW content would no longer be available in the API at all, even for apps that paid for the API access.
There was a analysis done a while back which showed the impact that this had on overall posting behavior, because of how Reddit's algorithm works (a drop in visibility across the board will effectively downrank large NSFW subreddits more than small NSFW subreddits, because Reddit artificially boosts lower-volume subreddits in your frontpage so they don't get drowned out). You can also compare total vote counts from August 2023 to June 2023 to gauge the difference too.
At least on old.reddit.com, underneath the searchbar is an expandable help section that, among others, explains the nsfw: search parameter. I'd hardly call that hidden.
As an added "bonus", old.reddit.com bypasses the age verification too. You have to click a button, but you don't need to sign in or make an account or verify anything.
Plenty of folk won't want adult content to show up in their search results. I'd wager that those that do are capable enough to check their settings, given that they should know concepts like safe search from google.
Migrating to to the "WordPress back end" is not the same as migrating to WordPress.
The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple so migrating it to whatever database running on whatever OS is probably not too hard. The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.
> The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple
I'm not sure what your source is for this, but it's not correct. The combination of scale, age, and number of product features makes it quite challenging.
My knowledge of Tumblr's db infra is about 6 years out of date, but by my math they hit the milestone of 1 trillion distinct relational rows (on primary databases alone, i.e. excluding copies on replicas) a few years back already.
During Tumblr's peak popularity (~2012 to early 2013), the daily posting rate at times exceeded 100 million posts/day. For sake of comparison, Twitter reportedly received about 5x that at the time, but Tumblr posts are larger and far more media-heavy on average. So it's accurate to say the total volume was almost comparable.
That all said, the scope of this migration pre-announcement isn't totally clear. My assumption is they just plan to move the public blog network front-end to WordPress, possibly using some sort of shim layer. But an important point here is the blog network is a minority of Tumblr's traffic, and always has been. Most HN users who have never actually created a Tumblr account fail to understand this: the popular part of Tumblr is the social network / logged-in dashboard experience, not the public-facing blog network.
If they plan to move the entire site/backend over to WP, that's a much more challenging migration. The ID mappings and differing sharding schemes alone make this an absolutely massive effort.
source: long ago I was personally responsible for Tumblr's database and cache scalability during its original period of hockey-stick growth.
Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense. I think they will leave all the tables exactly the same and just move them onto back-end hardware that is shared with WP. i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm.
If would be nice if the press release were a bit less vague on this.
That commenter was referring to media files (images and video), not relational database infrastructure. Completely separate parts of the stack. Media files weren't my area at all, but AFAIK parts of that comment weren't factually accurate at the time it was made, and furthermore iirc that commenter was someone who was previously disgruntled about being laid off in one of the many Verizon-led rounds of staff reductions. (Being disgruntled about a layoff is totally understandable, but you then have to take their comments about the company with a huge heaping of salt...)
> Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense.
No one suggested that exactly, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
> i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm
You keep describing Tumblr's database infrastructure as if it's a single server. It's not. It's multiple discrete tiers of sharded databases, serving different purposes. You don't put a trillion rows in a single database. They have hundreds of database servers, hundreds of cache servers, hundreds to a few thousand application/web servers, etc.
Again, Tumblr is not just a blogging/CMS platform. It's a full social network, with the primary user experience being a dashboard activity stream, similar to the logged-in experience of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
The proposed migration here is about migrating some portion of Tumblr's codebase and data to run off of the wordpress.com infrastructure, likely to reduce operating costs long-term. It's not clear whether that will consist of migrating the entire thing, or if it's just about shimming the public blog network (i.e. not the social network part). But in any case this isn't about just moving hardware.
> The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.
Dunno why you'd say that, that's the exact thing I'd expect them to do. I realize it's idiotic and will end in failure, but I still expect them to do that.
No, that doesn't even make sense as a concept. Tumblr has its own templated theme functionality. Users can pick one of many thousands of existing themes, or fully customize one from scratch.
So it sounds like Automattic would need to implement a conversion layer between Tumblr's template language and data model, and the corresponding ones in WP. Their functionality and data models also don't line up 1:1 conceptually, so this is no easy task.
> The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr _into_ WordPress; it will just run on WordPress.
> ...
> You won’t even notice a difference from the outside[.]
Oh, definitely. But the average tumblr user won't wake up one day and have their page look like a wordpress site. (There's a chance they'll wake up one day and everything is down for a while, but that's a different matter.)
Surely they're not getting rid of Tumblr's streamlined 'tumblelog' post UI/UX right? So what are they talking about.... the functionality will just be using a WordPress posting API in the background? Which to all regular users won't look or feel like 'WordPress' really. Feel like WordPress means the experience of using that blogging UI. Which I guess is why the conclusion here is "you won't even notice a difference from the outside". Making this kind of a non-story.
I don't know how different wordpress.com is to 'typical' WPMU (wordpress multi-user) as is deployed by e.g. some large universities, where tens of thousands of blogs can exist in one single database instance, served by one single front end which has a wildcard/domain mapper.
But I imagine it is not exactly the same. They have tens of millions of tenants AFAIK.
Automattic has quite a portfolio as of now: https://automattic.com. Among other things they now have Beeper, Simplenote + Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr which is moving.
I would be upset. Wordpress is such a terrible platform to develop on, footguns and limitations in every implemented magic function. why would you even open the door to Wordpress with so many better options?
Ah missed that bit of history I guess. It’s still a bad idea, just the amount of effort it takes to translate from one system to another. I’m currently doing this at my company but we’re leaving Wordpress and it’s an astronomical effort.
I'm assuming that you are trying to keep your content, styling, and markup maintainable or even upgrade it as you move the pages though?
I'd imagine this is a different scenario. The content created by users will be put through some AI transformation and it will be completely and utterly unmaintainable slop (and a significant portion of it would have already been that anyway before they started since it's user submitted). They aren't going to care that much if some edge cases break. Users can go fix that themselves. It seems much different to me than trying to delicately move something you care about.
Because they'll be moving it to their own hosted version, wordpress.com, not allowing people to write their own code, or install different themes / plugins.
There’s a pretty rich landscape of FOSS+SaaS type WYSIWYG editors out there. Aimed at being a either the complete package like Wordpress and Ghost or even some that try to integrate with your current stack (a backend but you provide the frontend), like ContentStack and Sanity or Payload. Even some strange inbetween providers that have features like “generate React component from figma design and import it into your codebase via copy/paste”, like builder.io.
All of them and none of them. Because really we're talking about serving pages from content fragments in a SQL database, with a style separation and dynamic content constructs.
It's not a radical idea; you can write your own thing that does only what you need it to, and that is an entirely appropriate way forward.
You will end up solving a bunch of problems quite like WordPress does.
All CMSes are at some level like WordPress, and yet there is nothing like WordPress. Because it's not about the application, it's about the tradition and ecosystem around the application.
Wordpress.com, the hosted platform, has about 70-80 million new posts per month, in a massive, social-media-giant-type database, supporting a tightly locked-down, customised WP infrastructure (which even has a different admin UI AFAIK).
They aren't going to migrate tumblr to 600 million separate WP instances, are they? They are just going to migrate the posts backend into that infrastructure.
There are some challenges, sure, but it's churlish to suggest that Automattic don't know the intrinsic value of Tumblr and will just let it break. They rescued Tumblr from certain doom, and did so for love; they know what they are doing.
Lots of people here don't seem to understand what wordpress.com is, and the scale at which it operates.
It is unclear from the article what exactly they are doing but the dialogue makes me think they are piping tumblr sites into some sort of Wordpress database. Which means Tumblr will use some sort of similar schema. Though it could be a move to kill off Tumblr entirely, seeing as they are reducing headcount at Tumblr. Especially according to this last bit:
> Given the blogging site’s continued financial woes, Mullenweg shifted the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at Automattic late last year and laid off others. At the time, he suggested that moving Tumblr to WordPress would be “tricky” but added that new technology like AI would make it easier.
It certainly seems possible it is more than a stack shift. It is definitely going to be a change for end users no matter how much AI he applies.
The CEO of Automattic seems like he's been on an egomaniac kick lately, which makes me suspect that the (boneheaded) directive came from him and therefore no one with any sense has been able to shoot it down.
Tumblr blogs are totally unlike WordPress blogs, though. Tumblr as a platform is a totally self-contained social media platform, with the addition of public-facing "blog"-style profiles. There's no way it'll be a straightforward conversion.
Agreed they didn’t even try to keep their promise and be better custodians of Tumblr than Yahoo was. Now it’s all about content acquisition as they drain the database.
Automattic has said for years that they (Wordpress) power X% of the internet.
Before wordpress.com users had to actively choose WP.
With the advent of wordpress.com and it's 'freemium' tier that arguably started to distort numbers. After all, stale, dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats.
Now, with Tumblr, Automattic will say they power X+% of the internet
When Automattic buys Blogger, that boast about powering % of the net will increase even further.
Tumblr is one website. Not 500,000. Even though 500,000 people have a blog there, it is still tumblr.com. Even if you do set up a subdomain such as my-blog.tumblr.com it still just redirects to tumblr.com/my-blog. Counting tumblr as 500,000 websites is like counting everyone’s Facebook profile as its own website.
The relevant number is 500,000,000, which is 1000x larger than the number you're citing. But also your comment about subdomains is wrong: redirecting to tumblr.com/my-blog is an optional setting, with the default being to use a subdomain. You can also use custom domains rather than a tumblr.com subdomain. Tumblr has had this functionality for almost its entire existence.
Yes, and the user I directly replied to above incorrectly said "500,000" three times, which is only 500 thousand. Tumblr exceeded that blog count well over 15 years ago.
Your original comment, about how a Tumblr migration would double the WP site count, was correct. That isn't what I replied to above.
I'm fairly confident that's not how WP.com does it. On WP.com - via WP multisite - each site has it's own instance of WP and therefore each counts as a site running WP.
Tumblr's injection would result in a significant increase in the number of websites running WP.
In general, Carcinisation (convergent evolution turning everything into crabs). In specifics, that's a running joke on the website, the staff even warned users when they added user verification badges to the site that they cannot guarantee the badges will not turn into crabs one day.
Interesting, I wonder will it be "1 wordpress instance" with each tumblr blog as an author, or something like wordpress.com / WPMU where each tumblr blog is a wordpress blog.
From Wordpress own post about it, they're going to run it on the wordpress.com infrastructure. The solution is whatever is already running their hosted offering. It does not however seems like Automattic themselves completely know how this will work.
I don’t understand why you would migrate anything to Wordpress.
Wordpress, to me, seems like the platform you start on. Easy to get up and running.
But when you get a mature product, you need something with better performance. I hate to say it, but anything with a plug-in architecture is always going to be slower than a custom stack.
I wonder how performance will be affected after the move.
Infrastructure-wise, the FOSS wordpress.org that you self-host isn't quite the same as the massively multi-tenant wordpress.com service run by Automattic. Your comment seems to be about the former, but this announcement is about the latter.
In other words, they're proposing a migration of some unspecified portion of Tumblr to re-use existing infrastructure/code/services that power the wordpress.com hosted service. They're not proposing somehow moving 600 million Tumblr blogs to individual FOSS wordpress.org instances; that indeed would make no sense whatsoever.
Is this move the reason for the random 403 errors I get from the tumblr rss feeds I follow? Since a few weeks ago, some feeds are disappearing then reappearing, sometimes they are unavailable for a few days, sometimes it's back the moment I refresh. If the move is in the future, I guess that means they have neglected the current platform.
At one time Tumblr had all the assets from each blog in one giant S3 bucket. Wonder what that migration looks like for this or if they'll just keep them there.
The only reason to move it to some other storage provider would be to save on egress fees, but I'm sure that 95% of the content is never touched by humans after it's posted.
What always bugged me about WordPress is that default installation which has only 7 tables uses 3 different column naming conventions (table.ID, table.table_id, table.table_ID) plus sometimes it uses full table prefix and sometimes shortened prefix. Are you not bothered by it? This is the first thing new user sees. This was years ago I had to check again as I'm not using it and default installation is now 12 tables but the random column naming is still there.
The vast majority of WordPress users, and even many people who call themselves "WordPress developers" never look inside the database. WordPress is, in almost every way, a terrible platform to develop on. What saves it is backwards compatibility, an enormous ecosystem, and being relatively easy to use for everybody who needs to use it.
Backwards compatibility is more important than consistent naming conventions. 43.5% of all sites on the web run on WordPress (as of August 2024), and they have 20+ years of plugins and themes installed, many of which talk directly to the database.
Inconsistent naming is one of a million things that will drive you crazy about WordPress if you are a detail-oriented person. It's a living demonstration of "Worse is better."
When does a new user look at Wordpress’ tables? I’ve been using it for my site for like a decade and I only ever have to look in the database when I’m doing really complicated hacks, or something broke.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic but not on WordPress.com or Tumblr. This is all based on my impressions and personal opinion.
From the perspective of the user it’s just another blogging platform. Tumblr blogs are not self hosted and isn’t based on open source code at all. Tumblr code seems too specific and part of a bigger machine, so it also doesn’t make sense to make it open source. AFAIK goal is to make this mostly invisible to the users and their blogs will be powered by open source.
Any improvements to Tumblr blogs will have a chance to make it into the core of WordPress.
I’d imagine it’s also going to be way easier to move your blog to any other hosting provider, giving the user a wider choice.
It's described in the article that they're going to use Wordpress as a sort of "backend" platform for the existing Tumblr front end interface and that this is to mesh with their existing hosted architecture.
In my circle, tumblr is pretty much around. It had a bit of a renaissance after musk bought twitter and reddit broke 3rd party apps, when both userbases fled to tumblr
It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous.
I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956