With tumblr dead, the destination of choice for a lot of kinky blogs seems to be bdsmlr. A big part of me really wants the site to succeed. I was a fan of all the interesting erotic imagery on tumblr and would love to see somewhere that could migrate to. Unfortunately, right now I think that the jury is still out on bdsmlr.
At the moment they’re still struggling to deal with the influx of ex-tumblr folks and all the extra traffic involved. The site UI is a little clunky and lacks the polish of tumblr. It’s relatively easy to get some sort of service off the ground, but it’s tough to make it scalable, manageable and usable. There’s an old saying in software development that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and I think the site developers aren’t even into that part of the problem space yet.
Also, as Ferns pointed out via a comment, we don’t really know anything about the owners of the site. There’s no background on the company or the people. The original TOS they had was terrible, giving them rights to anything shared via their site. They did change that – making me think it was simply something they copy/pasted from elsewhere – but it does indicate a lack of diligence around a pretty critical area.
Probably the thing that most pisses me off about it is actually no fault of the bdsmlr team at all. It’s down to the clusterfuck that is SESTA/FOSTA. As it stands their TOS completely bars usage of the site that mentions sex work. Any kind of paid service mention gets you banned. So we’re in a situation where 95% or more of the site’s content will be created by various types of sex workers, yet they will derive zero benefit from it. In fact they’ll be barred from the site should they try and extract some tiny benefit. Most social media sites have generally been very negative on sex to date, but it takes some special type of legal fuckery to create a site that’s positive about kinky sex imagery but entirely negative about the people who create it.
All that said, and having spent an entire post picking at its flaws, I would still encourage you to check out bdsmlr. The SESTA/FOSTA bullshit is not their fault, and it’s entirely possible they’ll shake off their growing pains and deliver a solid service. The basic idea is a good one. You have to register to browse it, but it’s an easy process, and only takes a minute or two. I like the idea, and should they become big and successful, maybe they’ll be in a position to help out in the ongoing legal battle over sex work.
Here’s another image from a now defunct tumblr that I archived for reference purposes – Continuous State of Desire. I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the photograph.
I don’t really care about my original content, since I just steal pictures and write some captions on them. Hell, I rarely even do that anymore; now it’s more like writing smarmy notes underneath pictures I’ve reblogged from elsewhere.
The whole Tumblr thing is sad, but more of an inconvenience as several sites vie to be the next repository of visual erotica. I wish the bdsmlr.com team well, but they seem so focused on *replacing* Tumblr, that they’re not thinking outside the box. Franly, as a user, I wasn’t crazy about Tumblr in the first place. The messaging was horrible, and instead of fixing it, they added on another messaging layer. You couldn’t sort your following/follower list. You often couldn’t find the source or original poster. The list goes on…
Anyhow, I don’t care. I’ll use whatever most people happen to be using. For the last week I’ve been playing with one called Boombler.com, which is more like an antique Facebook, but which seems to be more put together than bdsmlr (so far). MeWe is a bad MySpace, and the others I’ve looked into just aren’t handing the traffic very well.
I’m on bdsmlr, too, but I’m seeing a lot, and I mean, a lot of graphic porn, and not enough erotica. :-\
I personally liked tumblr a lot. It I wanted a quick hit of eye candy it was trivial to find some, and if I wanted to find a shot for a particular post, that was normally straightforward as well. There was a lot of sites focused on very specific kinks.
I’m less confident we’ll have good replacements for both those functions. For all its issues, tumblr was pretty fast, solid and bug free. Plus, it has a massive user base. I suspect we’ll see a lot of sites that come and go, a lot that don’t work well, a lot that have bugs, and a lot of fragmented users. But I guess we’ll see if one particular one steps up and becomes the common standard.
-paltego