Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress

"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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956

FTA:

“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.

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 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[.]

Less of a story than the headline suggests.

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.

By the way why does Tumblr now resembles Twittr so much? And they also lock the screen after viewing several posts.

How many of these half a billion blogs are zombie blogs that haven’t been updated in years?

Someone, somewhere just got a massive headache when they read the deadline for this.

My question is how efficient this is.

I suppose Automattic has a multi tenant version of WP, still, thinking on how traditional WP scales, having one instance per blog seems overkill.

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?

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.

It's a takeover, not user choice.

Migrating Tumblr to WP effectively doubles WP's market share. Market share is often sighted by Automattic and the WP Community.

"Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress"

From: https://www.wpzoom.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/

Hopefully they can pull this off without a horrific accident turning most of them into crabs.

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.

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.

Never used tumblr by the way.

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.

Been there, done that in 2008, but it was only half a million blogs.

A very interesting undertaking anyway.

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.

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.

I assume they're migrating it to the proprietary wordpress.com SaaS, not the open source wordpress.org?

Next week's news: tumblr blogs all hacked

Next up: "oops we lost all the data due to migration. Sorry about that"

This is surprising news. I was surprised Tumblr was still around.

Hard to find a path to justify a $1B valuation. Cult content subscriber model? #meh

This is very cool.

oh wow, wordpress is still strong

Shouldn’t they just use a static site generator? /s

More @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391260