Thread by @textfiles

It's time for the ARCHIVE TEAM ARCHIVES TUMBLR THREAD

So, Tumblr is huge and massive and really sensitive and by almost every meaningful measure a critical part of the social fabric of the contemporary internet.

I've already got three arrows in my back from this tweet so far but why let that stop me

Tumblr has always had issues with content management and the usual headaches of web hosting/blog hosting and since at least 2013 has been dealing with it in ways best defined as "random". Most recently, however, Apple delisted Tumblr, now owed by Oath/Verizon, and that was...

So Oath/Verizon/Tumblr then said that an entire class of blogs/hosts, which have been on the site for years and years, are going to be dropped to private (and deleted) in a whopping 14 days. That's two weeks. That's... not a lot of time. Oh, and during the holidays.

I'm with @archiveteam, which is an activist archiving group that has been around since 2009. (Ten years coming up!) What we do, is when a site is announced as going down, and it's huge and contains a pile of user-generated content, we go in and mirror it for a critical step.

That critical step is the ability to maintain history, maintain user-created data, and provide a set of options (keep, remove, scream) that otherwise would be 100% taken away by the total shutdown of the website/service. Many don't even provide an export function when they do.

Challenge level on Tumblr is HELLA BAD. We have a half-dozen people doing code work, an infrastructure of intake that is being pushed, and hundreds of nice volunteers contributing space/bandwidth to get "something" of Tumblr's web space in a safe location (Internet Archive).

We have napkin calculations that there's about 12 million blogs on tumblr, something like 700,000 to a million are definitely the "NSFW" that they appear to have claimed they're going to take down/delete, and it's hundreds of terabytes of data.

So, we're trying very hard. Trackable here: tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr - you can see how it's going in real time, and you can see how to join up with a virtual archive team warrior box to contribute your own space and bandwidth.

OKAY NOW THE DRAMA PART

Look, nobody likes how any of this is going down. Tumblr found a way to do this the worst way in the worst timetable during the worst timeline and provide the worst options. It's all a big insane soup of hot garbage served on a tray of garbage with garbage garnish. We get it.

Please remember: 14 days. Of that, we spent days testing the downloading, which is still a hellscape of code because Tumblr is a hellscape of code. We really only have seven days to do this. It is not going to be complete and it might not even be a significant percentage.

When Oath/Verizon/Tumblr slams the lid down starting December 17th, that's it. We can't do anything more on our end. We can only see what's public on the internet, anyway. That means we're moving at EMT speed during a flaming fire of the worse kind of internet shutdown.

We knew, as we loaded tumblr refugees into our helicopters made of duct tape and refurb Segways that people were going to want a whole range of regard, opt-in, consideration, you name it. We're really going to offer to do the best we can in that regard. So, to wit:

DMing me with your blog that you do not want in the archive will get it not in the archive. E-mailing the Internet Archive about your tumblr blog will get it taken out. [e-mail]. These are, frankly, not new policies, but I get it, you didn't give us a thought before.

I expect screaming about all aspects of how this goes on. I wish a tiny bit of that ire could be aimed towards the fact that this entire crisis is completely made up and the result of a truly random decision. I wouldn't trust those organizations with any personal data.

But let me say this. This is something like 12 million blogs, a random selection of which are going to be dropped to private and then deleted. Based on the previous jobs by Archive Team, there are people who will stumble into the news their blog is gone YEARS from now. YEARS.

Not everybody is hitting F5 on the internet, is what I'm saying. We'll be dealing with the people who were archived, positive, negative and in between, years after the Outrage Cloud moves to a new part of the meadow to rain. We'll still listen and we'll still respond.

Believe me - if we had a significant amount of warning, if this was an orderly transition, we'd be talking this great opt-in form you could go to and how to back up your site and how to do all sorts of great things. We try to list lots of options at archiveteam.org.

But this is a warehouse fire and we are going as fast as we can and we're going to load all this stuff out into the truck and then, among the smoke and haze and screaming, figure out what to do next.

All questions answered in this thread. Bring it. And thanks to the hundreds of people who've supported Archive Team over the last decade.