june 7th known issues, roadmap, etc
the previous post from may 24th is here.
also, a reminder: this space is for feedback/questions/etc about the communities feature. off-topic posts will be deleted, and repeat offenders banned from this space.
the previous post from may 24th is here.
also, a reminder: this space is for feedback/questions/etc about the communities feature. off-topic posts will be deleted, and repeat offenders banned from this space.
the report i issued led nowhere...despite ALL the proof i put, tumblr said they found "nothing wrong", which makes me think someone lost their 3 inch thick glasses that day. please make this a feature soon, i feel really gross being in a community actively (they posted like 2 days ago) led by someone who's done disgusting things
As you might have already noticed :D there's been a little update to the Community headers: - You can now see the public/private status of the community (yay, no more confusion!). - There's an online member count, which tallies community members that have been recently active anywhere on Tumblr.
This is only in True Blue - any other color palette works fine and shows the names of the communities.
(Browser version, Firefox, Windows 10, using XKit I think to avoid the left-side nav bar that I find horrifically disorienting.)
first: thank you to everyone who keeps asking questions about this, we know it's really important and a common wishlist item. we hear you! we want to make this work, but we also need to be really careful about it, so it's probably going to take some time. i wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain a bit on why this is challenging, and welcome you to provide feedback about these problems, so that we can potentially solve them together.
one of the tough things about secondary blogs on Tumblr is that we've made it a core privacy principle of the platform to not reveal primary <=> secondary blog relationships. we do not show how blogs are related in that way, we consider it private knowledge that only the owner of the blogs should know. we don't list all of your blogs to anyone else, in any way.
and at a core architectural level of how the platform is built, primary blogs (your main blog) is treated differently than any of your secondary blogs. this is something we want to change, but it's a huge undertaking, and requires updating 15+ years of code decisions. it certainly can be done (we've scoped it all out), but it's a ton of work, with questionable return-on-investment.
this makes plenty of things about tumblr kind of odd/confusing: you can't follow blogs using your secondary blog, for example. you can't like posts from your secondary blog. up until recently, you couldn't reply with your secondary blog. we've known that these are confusing annoyances for a long time, and we've been slowly chipping away at them in the product when we can, but let's focus purely on Communities here.
right now, only primary blogs can create and join communities. we made this decision simply because it was the easiest, and saved us a lot of time. we know it's not perfect. even if we could solve the technical hurdles, which aren't that bad just within Communities, here are some scenarios that become very confusing, very fast, if we start allowing secondary blogs. to improve these scenarios, we're going to have to make some potentially difficult decisions.
in the first scenario, let's say you, as a community admin, can invite any blog on tumblr, primary or secondary blog. to you, you don't know what's a primary or secondary blog anyway. you're just sending invites. so you send an invite to someone's primary blog, and they want to join as their secondary... do we:
my belief is that we can mostly solve for that 2nd case when invite links, "free to join", and "request to join" becomes available. in those cases, if the admin sends the wrong blog of yours an invite, you can decline it, and then join as the "correct" blog of yours. it's your choice whether you're revealing that you control both blogs, if the admin is clever enough to notice that they sent an invite, it was declined, and then a different blog joined.
but the problem this doesn't solve, and still raises if we allow secondary blogs to join communities, is what happens if we let you join as any/all of your blogs.
theoretically, you could join as two or more of your secondary blogs, and nobody inside the community would know that they're all one person. this obviously presents an easy abuse vector; and we'd need to create ways, for each interaction, for you to tell us which blog you want to "act as". we could prevent it by only letting one of your blogs join a community at a time, but then someone could potentially jump in and out as different blogs. (and theoretically today someone could have multiple full accounts and join the community via all of them, but we wouldn't be actively supporting that, and potentially watching out for it as "spammy" behavior.)
and when an admin wants to kick someone from the community... do we then kick all of their blogs? and prevent any of that person's other blogs from ever joining? this gets very messy, as messy as it can already be today with how blocking works between primary and secondary blogs.
i don't have a great solution for that problem, but i'd love to hear if people have opinions on what they think would be acceptable. in the near term, for joining as a secondary blog, i think we can let that happen when invite links, free-to-join, and request-to-join become available. because then a step in those processes can be "choose what blog you're joining as"... and you can only join as one of your blogs to start. and if you're kicked, none of your blogs can try to rejoin, or be invited. i think this'll still create confusion in certain cases, but it may be "good enough".
Not sure if anyone has suggested these, I was recently added but making replies to the post replies nestle under the comment they’re replying to would make discussion flow and also moderation a lot easier!! Also are multiple administrators for a community being considered? Or will it stick with just the one? Thanks!
I think sideblogs should be allowed to join communities. I feel like Tumblr Communities will be particularly popular for fandoms, and I know some people like to keep their fandom content in a sideblog separate from their main blog.
I've issued invites for my community without a problem--except for one user.
@emphasisonthehomo did not receive the invite. I had them:
*follow my main blog
*remove restriction on messages (they were only accepting messages from mutuals)
*check they hadn't blocked the Tumblrbot
I then deleted their invite and reissued it. They still have not received the invite. Is this a big or is there something else I need to have them do?
Edit: workaround - copy the link to the community from another invite, send to user. as long as they have an active invite, they will be able to join.
There seems to be a problem with embedded links on the app. When I embedded a link to a Twitch account or a YouTube video, it gives me a big empty space; it will also randomly open the embed whenever I go into my community. I double checked on desktop and the mobile browser, and embedded links work fine on both. I had previously brought up how I thought it was Twitch embeds that weren't working on the app, but I deleted my original post after discovering that it's just embeds in general. Plus, I don't think I articulated my initial issue report well and wanted to elaborate it more clearly, especially now that I have more info on what I'm dealing with.
