Figuring Out How To Preserve Tumblr Meta

[grayestofghosts]

So because of soc_puppet's comment that Tumblr may be in its death knell (again), I'm looking into preserving meta commentary that I've done on it. I was thinking of posting it to my essays and analysis (that I want to give a snappier name tbh) on my website, but I've found that a lot of the stuff I want to save has a lot of back and forth with other users. So it seems like it might be weird putting it on a personal site. But I still want to preserve it, and if Tumblr is truly dying this time, then I would like to preserve it somehow.

So... what do I do? Link back to the original post, the original user as well as long as Tumblr still exists? Would I be better off doing screenshots even though it's more difficult to code? Other ideas? Hrrm.

Comments

[soc_puppet]

Thank you for the reminder! I'll be sharing this elsewhere in a bit, but in the mean time, here's a post with some options for how to make a backup of your Tumblr blog.

If it's something really long that I want to be able to check back on my Dreamwidth account from time to time, I might personally do the following:

- Put a link to the final post(s) in whatever reblog chains you want to preserve at the top of the preservation post
- Back those links up at the Internet Archive
- Copy-paste all text you want to preserve; attribute text that isn't yours to the correct Tumblr users, possibly by labeling it "by Tumblr user so-and-so", possibly by using Dreamwidth's built-in username text
- Possibly put everything under a cut
- Possibly post privately and/or locked

(Just in case you don't know, to turn a Dreamwidth user name into a Tumblr user name, just add a space and site=tumblr between the end of the name and the closing bracket. So like, [username=example site=tumblr]. If Tumblr comes crashing down or sinks into the bog, the link may not lead anywhere, but it'll be a record of a good faith effort to properly preserve credit.)

[grayestofghosts]

Hey, I'm not sure if this is because you plan on making it later or something, but your link doesn't work.

Things might be a little different considering the place I would back up wouldn't be on DW at all. I'm not really sure it would be "wrong" per se for the words of the other people to be public considering these were public discussions in the first place reblogged many times, but... it still feels a bit weird? I don't know.

[soc_puppet]

*facepalm* I think I may not have included the link at all there, whoops. Here you go: https://bisexualbaker.tumblr.com/post/780857086941839360

And that's fair; the post above includes a link to a Python script to download your Tumblr account, so you should be covered on that count either way. Best of luck!

[fred_mouse]

That is a really good thought. I've been posting Tumblr links over at meta_warehouse for some time, and not thinking about link rot. I guess I'm going to have to do the internet archive thing.

[axolotls]

Good idea! Make sure if possible that it's in the [blogname].tumblr.com/post/[id] format, not sure how well it works for tumblr.com/[blogname]/[id] posts but I can confirm that for the vast majority of blogs, the former works well.

[axolotls]

Definitely not (just) screenshots, they're not screen reader accessible and can be hard to read depending on the circumstances. One thing to do now as soc_puppet suggested is to archive the post on the Wayback Machine (in the [blogname].tumblr.com/post/[id] format, not sure if it works for tumblr.com/[blogname]/[id] posts), then it can be linked to later as a source if you decide to repost the text.

[milo_r]

I'd definitely go with web archive + downloading a local copy for personal archival purposes. As for making it available to others, it might be doable to paraphrase/partially share other people's comments with attribution and only directly copy-paste your own additions? Maybe something similar to how they do it on Falore, with different blockquotes for different users.

I'd still directly link to the tumblr version even if it ends up going down, people can always look it up on the wayback machine and having the direct link makes everything neater imo.

[tozka]

I agree with the other comments about getting an Internet Archive Wayback Machine link for the different conversations; they have a browser extension that makes doing it/grabbing the archive link easy. But maybe you could do some kind of text style that shows the discussion, if it's important to your post. Like, your comments are in plain text and the ones you're responding to are italicized?