Okay. From now on, it all starts on my own site.
Here's the thing: Tumblr has kicked us kinksters out, and BDSMlr might be the new place to be, but who knows what next year holds? I can divide my presence on the kinksterweb into two parts:
- Creating and sharing content
- Sharing and communicating with other people
Tumblr was a nice, convenient place to do both. In fact, it made easy a particular style of content: the caption story, where you find a sexy, evocative image on someone's blog, hopefully with attribution for where it came from, and you reblog it with a caption, where you write a little short piece of erotica (even just a sentence) inspired by the pic. If you did this the right way, there was now a post on your tumblog featuring both the pic and your story (and the tags you added to it, which were a storytelling device in their own right), and there was a chain connecting what you did back to the source of the image.
And it was easy for people who'd already enjoyed the image to also see what you'd done, and for people to share your post by simply reblogging it on their own blogs, and there was much rejoicing.
Well.
The problem is, if you make creative work on the web, and its canonical URL was https://anything.tumblr.com/post/2395239542358, well, Verizon can make your work go away with a snap of their fingers. And a couple weeks ago, they did. Sort of. It's complicated.
From now on, whatever I make has a canonical URL that starts https://mlz.blk.blue/... And even if I have to move this site or rebuild it, that URL never changes. The question, then, is how to do the second part: how to share the work. And how to share others' work and tell them how sexy I think it (and they) is (are. Whatever).
So I reckon I will cross-post work to Tumblr and BDSMlr, for now. I post it here, and then I post it there with a link back to the version on my platform. The sharing and commentating can go on on those sites, but at least I know my stuff is safe. Reblogs that are simple "oh, nice picture" will probably just stay on the given platform, but anything where I contribute content I will pull back onto my own site.
I'm ending that paragraph, because it gets very hand-wavy to talk about. It'll make sense once demonstrated.
Bottom line is, I'm going to, well, basically restart my tumblr blog, but it'll just be an adjunct to this site. And if BDSMlr starts to become my preferred platform, I might jettison tumblr entirely.
A final piece of administration: My tumblr blogs (mindlevelzero and soyouwannabebrainwashed) are, of course, currently flagged as adult. SYWBB is dormant anyway, and I will probably nuke the existing content on MLZ so I can get it unflagged (hopefully). But don't despair! Check my site, and you'll see links in the header to self-hosted archives. I managed to exfiltrate my tumblrs into Jekyll (the static-site generator I'm using to publish this) before the apocalypse.
It is interesting to note that the archived posts show you whatever images they reblogged (for the most part), despite the status of my blog or the linked-to blogs: it appears direct links to images on tumblr still work fine, it's just our blogs that have been censored.
That said, there's no telling what might happen to those files themselves, or if they'll find some way to interrupt hotlinking (linking directly to a file on one site from another site has never really been good web etiquette, anyway). I happen to have backups of those images locally, but whether I'll be able to upload them to my site and serve them, well, I haven't decided yet. Frankly, it doesn't seem right, since none of the images are mine to propagate. This is an ongoing conversation.