Tumblr tests ‘communities,’ semi-private groups with their own moderators and feeds. Following the reduction of operations and the reassignment of workers to other projects, the Chief Executive Officer of Automattic, the company that owns Tumblr, stated that the firm would focus on the aspects of Tumblr’s service that were successful and eliminate those that were not successful, similar to what it did with the subscription option Post+ precisely one month ago.
At this time, the firm intends to concentrate on the former by introducing a new tool that will capitalize on something Tumblr currently excels at: assisting users in locating communities. Today, the Tumblr Labs division announced the launch of a new experimental feature called “Communities.” This feature provides a new, dedicated place on the platform for users to network around subjects of interest, separate from the main dashboard.
According to Tumblr, these communities would be “semi-private” areas that have their own administrators, rules, and privacy settings. Perhaps they will be comparable to the subreddits on Reddit or X’s Communities, forums where postings are kept separate from the main timeline. Additionally, the communities will have their own feeds that users can access. These feeds will differ from the algorithmic “For You” and the chronological “Following” feeds on Tumblr.
While this is happening, the community interactions will remain distinct from the more extensive network that Tumblr provides. According to Tumblr, you can reblog a post within a community, but you cannot do so outside of the group. In addition, it is mentioned that the responses in the community will function similarly to a more conventional comment area.
These communities might be developed for a specific group of individuals, such as people who attend the same school, a board game group, a group of friends, and more. The business believes communities could be formed for several purposes, including fan groups centered around a favorite television show, movie, artist, or video game.
This feature might provide Tumblr users with an additional means of interacting with the material they find most interesting, eliminating the need to search for hashtags to locate blogs focused on a specific subject. Additionally, they provide yet another social networking component to the blogging platform by enabling groups of individuals to establish their very own communities. This will make it possible for Tumblr to compete with X, which was once known as Twitter, as a new platform for social networking that is not limited to online publication.
Recently, Mullenweg made a passing reference to Tumblr’s capacity to draw communities from other social networks. He stated that although there was no significant migration from X to Tumblr, the website saw certain benefits when entire communities switched from one platform to the next. For instance, he mentioned how Tumblr was able to attract individuals from a Lego community that had previously been using Instagram as a group.
Like bootstrapping the community on the new item, you should get everyone to come over simultaneously, educate each other on how it works, and follow each other. It is also essential that you provide us with comments,” Mullenweg stated, detailing the procedure. In addition, he expressed his desire for Tumblr to be more receptive to future feature requests made by communities.
On the other hand, the business indicated in a blog post that the community function is still in the evaluation phase.
According to the post on Tumblr Labs, “What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there are still plenty of questions that need to be answered.” We will reach out to individuals around Tumblr and the internet, in general, to get their feedback on our prototype over the next few weeks. We will iterate on the idea based on the feedback that we receive to determine what resonates most strongly with each of you on Tumblr,” it stated.