Sad but not too surprising to see Tumblr has been stripped down to a skeleton crew after failing to meet growth goals: https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/111380745108104518
Automattic really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on this one. They could've corrected course from their predecessors (reversing the aggressively puritan policies that scared countless many off Tumblr) or leaned into the future (by actually implementing ActivityPub support and being a great platform for federated blogging) but did neither.
@silvereagle i don't think it was snatching defeat from victory as much as giving it a shot and realizing it was a lost cause all along.
They were facing intractable social problems contentwise, so they couldn't go back, but they were facing intractable technical problems should they try to expand into ActivityPub.
It sounds like they worked on both fronts for a good while but eventually had to admit that the platform had been without a future all along.
