[Photo of the real me, my face as of November 2018.]

tumblr is owned by Oath, Inc., which is a subsidiary of Verizon. tumblr was originally a fantastic platform but as corporate influence has crept in like a metastasizing malignancy, it has consumed it. We just got the prognosis that we are in Stage 4 and have three weeks to live. There is no cure. This body is about to die.

I’ve been blogging about this since Verizon took over Yahoo. I’ve also been taking measures to preserve my own self-generated content and learned to back up my blog weekly.

If you are a creator, be it prose, poetry, art, video or anything at all—and if your work is “adult” in nature, as it has every god damned right to be, Save it now. 

Tumblr is not really a public forum. It is a commercial forum disguised as public. Since this is not a genuine public forum, we have no First Amendment rights here. Like Facebook and Twitter, you may think you have a right to free speech but you don’t. I don’t and you don’t. We have served to provide marketing data and eyeballs for ads in return for our illusion of a “safe space” to celebrate sexuality.

The Internet is a powerful tool and the powerful have known it for a long time. They have used their resources to corral it into a place that is friendly—first and foremost and above all other considerations—to commerce, business, commercial interests and shareholder value.

If you have only ever regurgitated existing content, shared what you found that others created, you don’t really have anything to save, do you? Other than the experience of sharing and aggregating and amplifying those voices. It is the power of social networks… but it was never yours to begin with.

We who create all you share have a lot to lose if we labored under the illusion that tumblr housed our creative output for us. For this and every corporate controlled social network, we are and will always be vulnerable.

You will find this blog still alive and still pretty much what it always has been when you go to jackdaddy.me in the future. I switched over to my personal domain name years ago knowing this day would come.

What I will miss is all of the social connections, the easy chatting, cross-posting, re-blogging and networking. I will miss “us.”

I am moving to a WordPress blog. WP is harder, more prone to hacking, more work to maintain, but it is open source. Advertisers aren’t paying for it, so I will need to pay for my own hosting fees, bandwidth, SEO and all the web services that made life easy as a tumblr user. And I am not under any illusions that my work will be maintained forever there. Nothing is permanent.

You won’t see the difference right away, and my new blog link is jackdaddy.blog, but I’ll set it up so that jackdaddy.me redirects there. I hope you will continue to seek out my voice. I will do all I can to stay in your feed… even if that feed is no longer in tumblr.

Stay tuned. I’ll be back. Very, very soon.