(no subject)

So it seems the Yahoo-buying-Tumblr thing is a done deal. I haven't been on Tumblr yet today, but I can just imagine what's going on there - complete apocalypse.

Those of us who've been around fandom awhile have seen this kind of thing before, of course. Geocities was a great place to host your anime fan site - until it was bought by (yep) Yahoo, who promptly banned adult content and ran it into the ground. Fanfiction.net was THE place to put all your stories - until they decided to ban all NC-17 fics and real person fanfiction. LiveJournal was the go-to place for roleplaying games - well, we all know what happened there.

The pattern seems to be that fandom swarms around something and claims it as its own - until that thing decides to become mainstream, or sells out to the mainstream for money, and starts jettisoning all the things that made it fandom-friendly. Fandom then leaves the service it once loved for The Next Big Thing, and the thing they abandoned either becomes a joke (Fanfiction.net becoming the Pit of Voles) or disappears entirely (Geocities again).

What do I think is going to happen with Tumblr? Even though Yahoo said they're "not going to screw it up," it's guaranteed the first two things they're going to do are boot out the porn and slap ads everywhere. (And then they'll probably offer LJ-like paid accounts to get rid of the ads). They'll probably start cracking down on copyrighted content, too - song postings will be a no-no.

The question now is, are there any Tumblr alternatives - smaller, independent Tumblr-like services - to absorb the people who are going to immediately start threatening to jump ship, the way DreamWidth was there to welcome all those roleplaying games that fled LJ? If there isn't any, I expect there will be very soon.