Answer: Hi there, @richardmurrayhumblr!
All important questions, so we are taking them one at a time.
With communities are group tumblrs finished?
Absolutely not. In fact, the code behind group blogs is what is powering communities right now! But they have very different purposes and only overlap in some ways. We have no plans to remove group blogs.
can group tumblrs be turned into communities?
Because group blogs and communities do share a lot of code right now, this is something we’ve been thinking about doing. Some of the inspiration for communities has come from group blogs that are run as a way for people to get together in one space and share content—that is exactly what we hope for communities, too. We can’t say when we’ll get to this, but it’s an interesting idea.
also will tumblr notify a user if their community idea is rejected?
This waitlist is temporary, so we’re not sending out notices for the communities we don’t approve. We may not even get through all of them before we open up creation for everyone, in which case, the ones we didn’t approve can be created then!
what about communities that have multiple purposes, can communities join together if they have the same goal? or will Tumblr make the communities decide on who can survive?
That’s an interesting idea! We’re not really sure yet. The way we’ve envisioned it so far is not to try to enforce the notion that there is “one community” about a given subject. Instead, there can be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of communities about a given subject, and each of them will probably be a little different in their own way. That’s how communities of people on Tumblr already behave, most of the time. We’re just building an easier way to structure them.
That said, we are very interested in adding ways for communities to link to each other. So if there are a bunch of communities about the same subject, they can form some kind of ring or cluster together.
All great questions—thank you for getting in touch. Keep ‘em coming, folks!