Tumblr always suited me better than micro-blogging as there is no word count restriction (I can find brevity a problem) and you could have any number of blogs/channels for whatever topic was tickling your fancy at the time.

So I’ve been keeping an eye out for Fediverse alternatives, jotting down notes and now I’d like throw this open to the Hivemind. And yes, Tumblr is now on ActivityPub, but I am not putting my time into corporate platforms again.

Added bonuses: markdown (or something similar), adding links to posts, quoting other posts and perhaps being able to login from another Fediverse service.

Here’s a few I found:

  • Goblin - It’s a FireFish fork from a former Tumblr employee. Allows multiple accounts but they have to have a different email address, some markdown but not links. I’ve heard it suggested that most *key forks could be set-up as a Tumblr alternative
  • Loforo: “Another surprise is that Loforo is the second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress.” Easy multiple blog creation, formatting in HTML. Unfortunately you can’t create your own instance, last time I checked.
  • micro.blog - not free, not open source
  • Wafrn

Not listed as Tumblr equivalents but some of the general services are flexible enough to do this:

  • Hubzilla - has channels but seems more a CMS. Nomadic identities is a great feature.
  • Friendica - the BlueSky integration seems increasingly important and, with Meta’s enshittification, it feels like a general social media service is a good idea. The way you can have the equivalent of Google+'s circles seems a good feature (while I am no fan of Facebook, Google+ worked well for me while it lasted). The main issue I see is you can only replicate channels with different accounts.

Any suggestions? Have I missed any key features from the above?

  • caos@feddit.org
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    13 hours ago

    The Channels in Friendica are similar to the “antennas” / “newspickers” in Misskey / Sharkey. Both are very good ways to receive content sorted by self-defined topics.

    If you are looking for a way to *send *to different topics, Friendica’s (connected) “accounts” would be suitable for this, But Hubzilla offers more options for this

    “Friendica - the BlueSky integration…”

    Friendica offers a connector for Tumblr as well as for Bluesky. Ad hoc I can only find a German-language manual for it: https://friendica-hilfe.gitbook.io/friendica-hilfe/basics/bluesky-tumblr-und-weitere-social-media-dienste

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPA
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      8 hours ago

      The Channels in Friendica are similar to the “antennas” / “newspickers” in Misskey / Sharkey. Both are very good ways to receive content sorted by self-defined topics.

      That’s good to hear. I have a test account on a *key fork and the Antennas are a great feature.

      The naming of things is so tricky when comparing different services. I stumbled across one Friendica request to rename “forums” to “groups” and “groups” to “circles”.

      If you are looking for a way to *send *to different topics, Friendica’s (connected) “accounts” would be suitable for this, But Hubzilla offers more options for this

      Yeah, that was my understanding - Hubzilla has that feature working as I’d like it but there’s a way to make it work in Friendica.

      Friendica offers a connector for Tumblr as well as for Bluesky. Ad hoc I can only find a German-language manual for it: https://friendica-hilfe.gitbook.io/friendica-hilfe/basics/bluesky-tumblr-und-weitere-social-media-dienste

      Thanks for digging that out, it being in German might explain why I didn’t find it.

      That all sounds ideal and working through Bluesky’s API. I now wonder why we need bridges if that works so well.