work in progress — Speaking of embeds, it's nice getting to embed...

Answer: Hello, @otwol!

We are currently working on how we detect trending topics and tags, as it happens! And we hope to have this work wrapped up in the next few months. 

As part of other work, we have also discussed the possibility of changing how we source posts from Trending. These are currently posts that might have nothing to do with the trending topics. We have a different source that surfaces popular posts in trending topics, doing a round-robin to cover all of them. This should not be too tricky to look at, but we haven’t prioritized this yet.

There was also a Hackday project some years ago on localized trending, and we even ran several A/B tests. They didn’t show much impact, so this feature was disabled.

But as you say, it would be interesting to iterate on the trending page, and A/B test it against logged-out traffic to see if we can improve registrations. Thanks for your question here. We will look into it and get back to you with news.

Answer: Hi there, @aconitum-nerium!

So, we must assume here that you are referring to being subscribed for notifications when new reblogs and replies come in. This would be nice, for sure, but it's very unlikely at present. It's not clear where we’d put it, for one thing, or indeed when we would have a chance to build it. 

We're sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but keep your questions coming folks. 

Answer: Hey, @fourcheesecalzone!

First, a long story short. We didn’t start recording this timestamp in reblog trails until ~3 years ago, so any reblogs from before that time may not have the information in the trail. We do our best to “backfill” the timestamp, but in cases where the post or blog was deleted, we don’t have anything to look up, so we can’t backfill it.

And now a little longer version. Reblogs store copies of the previous items in the reblog trail. So if I make a post, and then you reblog it, your reblog has a copy of my post content. This leads to some fun things: like if I edit my post, your reblog of it won’t be updated, and if someone clicks the original post in your reblog, they’ll see a new post. Fun! We did this to increase the performance of the whole platform. It means we don’t have to look up every post in the reblog trail, which can be dozens to hundreds of posts long.

Unfortunately, it also means things like what you’re describing can happen. If we make a change to what we’re storing in the reblog trail (like we did with NPF in ~2017), it’s incredibly difficult for us to update the tens of billions of posts on Tumblr. Recording timestamps in reblog trails is a very similar problem. It would take us years to go through each reblog across Tumblr to update them, and we don’t feel like it’s that big of a deal for it to be sometimes missing.

Thanks for getting in touch, and we hope this clarifies things.

Answer: Hey there, @fourcheesecalzone!

This is a good question. Let us start by saying that it is very unlikely we’ll do this anytime soon. There simply isn’t the bandwidth on our side to be taking on such a project right now. We are sorry to be the bearers of bad news—but then that’s not quite all. 

As luck would have it, there is a public demo example way of using the API to do just what you ask here. We like to think this is a more than adequate workaround, and hope this helps. 

Thank you for your question. Keep ’em coming, folks!

Answer: Hey there, @razbb!

Good news! We already have a guide for keyboard shortcuts built into the dashboard, as luck would have it. You can access it by clicking the little floating keyboard icon in the bottom-right, as in these screenshots:

But as you point out, there is no keyboard shortcut for opening the keyboard shortcut guide. This seems like an oversight to us, so we will get to work on this as fast as we can. It should be easy enough to add!

We also have various mentions of other features and how to make use of them in the Help Center—we think this article, Lesser-Known Features, would be ideal for your question.  

We hope this all helps, and thanks for getting in touch! Keep ‘em coming, folks.

Answer: Hello, @kurt-dontcry!

We like this idea. We like this idea a lot, even.

We like it so much, in fact, we have already given ample consideration and would love to do it. First, though, we’re working on making replies "threadable,“ so you can respond to specific comments. After we get that rolled out, we may come back to the idea of being able to like or react to specific comments in the notes—and certainly hope to bring this one to fruition.

Thanks for your question, and fingers crossed here. Have a good day.

Answer: Hi there, @moitt!

Thank you for these. All great, fair questions!

And we are happy to answer them. Admittedly, we are fumbling in the dark a little, you might say—that is why it’s still an experiment. We have our own ideas for how Communities could work, but really, we want to build it based on what people actually do with it. This is why the current functionality is fairly simple and limited. We’ve wanted to see what feedback we get and to understand what people ask for and expect—rather than spending a long time building something that may be unappealing to the people we hope will use it (we’ve made that mistake many times in the past!) You can see a little bit of that dialogue in the Feedback community.

To your point about seeing communities—right now, we’re working on ways of integrating public communities into existing feeds, search, tagged pages, etc., so that they can be discovered by people who aren’t in any yet (which is most people on Tumblr!) We hope that by seeing other people use it, you’ll get a better explanation than anything we could try to provide—because every community is doing things in their own interestingly unique way right now. We don’t want to be prescriptive about how they should be used.

By the way, the same is true with how blogs work on Tumblr—we don’t tell you how to blog. Instead, we hope you try to figure out your own way of blogging by seeing how others behave on the platform.

We hope that helps address at least some of your queries. We would also advise that you have a little look at this handy Help Center explainer into Communities. Above all, we hope y’all like it.

Stay tuned!

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!

Answer: Hey there, @automaticllamacycle!

So you’re right. There is currently no community-facing way that you can get your account back in the event it is deleted.

However, we are not too far away from having this technically feasible on our backend, and we don’t think it would take too much work to make it a reality. You’re right on this one—such a feature would be really nice to have, and we’re grateful you drew this to our attention.

Leave this with us—we will see what we can do. In the meantime, you can catch up with updates here at @wip or at @changes, should we have them.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. Happy weekend!

Hello, @killjoygem.

Thanks for your question.

We’ve temporarily rolled back the emojis as they were causing a few issues for users on iOS. The good news is they are now back on Android and will be back on iOS if you’re using version 24.2 or above!

Thanks also to @pigmalionizam and @corruptedremnant for getting in touch with a very similar question 💖

Love,

Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)