this post will be updated as I find more websites to add! please check with the original before reblogging to see if there’s an updated version, and message me with corrections or more suggestions if you have them!!
websites in red have explicitly forbidden the posting of NSFW content.websites in orange allow certain types of NSFW content or have questionable / unclear guidelines.
instagram.com – photo and video posts, excellent tag search
newgrounds.com – an oldie but a goodie, allows a ton of media types
piczel.tv – allows both streaming and posting art / photosets to a gallery
pixiv.net – huge anime art community, allows livestreaming
poizen.me – gorgeous website designed for artists to post art AND track comms
this one’s still in alpha but looks incredibly promising as a platform and super pretty to look at!! go snap up a username before all the good ones are taken! favouritism what’s that
vero.co – app only, similar to insta but with MUCH more privacy control
chat or forum based
aminoapps.com – community-based, has blogs + chat, custom themes
discordapp.com – great chat app, text + voice, can join infinite servers
reddit.com – literally a community for everything, SO MANY CAT PHOTOS
18+ only
bdsmlr.com – microblogging + social media for people into kink
blogr.xxx – a tumblr clone created specifically for sharing porn
fetlife.com – considered one of the biggest kink communities online
libertine.center – beautiful + modern site for posting irl nsfw and kink stuff
thefetlibrary.com – for posting of erotic stories, replaces bdsmlibrary
paid platforms
patreon.com – subscription-based access to many diff types of content
pillowfort.io – still in beta, but should function almost identically to tumblr
typepad.com – similar to wordpress but with reblogging and a dash
defunct platforms
(so people will stop telling me i forgot them)
jux.com – shut down in 2014 due to lack of funds
shoandtell.me – now redirects to someone’s personal blog
soup.io – more or less closed down this year due to GDPR issues
ways to save your current tumblr posts
use the wayback machine! you do have to archive each page of your blog individually but once you do all the content, including media, will be saved exactly as it was at the moment you archived it.
wordpress allows you to directly import whole tumblr blogs, and if i recall correctly it’s something both dreamwidth and pillowfort have said they are working on.
if you have some knowledge of computers you can try this github solution which uses a python script to download your whole blog to your computer. even if you don’t know anything about programming or the command line they give a very good beginners tutorial on how to use it so you should still give it a shot!
if that’s still a little daunting you can try soarcodes’ tumblr post that also has a decent tutorial!
some notes
please note that every site on this list will have pros and cons, and i haven’t listed them here since this post would be a mile long otherwise. please do your research before moving completely over to another site in case they have policies you disagree with.
also, because I see a lot of misinformed people ranting about this: deviantart does not own the art you post. some years ago hot topic stole a ton of art from DA and sold it on merchandise and people assumed that DA gave them permission to do it despite there being literally zero evidence for that claim. DA explictly states in their TOS that you retain copyright and sole license of the art you post.
The current kerfuffle led to me looking through all of my fanart, and I decided to do a redraw of this old piece from 2015 for funsies and to see how I’ve improved.
REMEMBER HOW THE SHERLOCK FANDOM GOT BORED AND STARTED MAKING TAPESTRIES #ye olde sherlock
REMEMBER HOW THE SHERLOCK FANDOM GOT BORED AND STARTED WATCHING SHERLOCK ALL OVER WITH YOUTUBE SUBTITLES TURNED ON #Sherlock Subtitles
REMEMBER HOW THE SHERLOCK FANDOM GOT BORED AND STARTED SCREEN CAPING DERP FACES #derplock
REMEMBER HOW THE SHERLOCK FANDOM GOT BORED AND STARTED MAKING REALLY SILLY GIFS
I love this fandom sooooo much!
The John Watson kitty just woke up my housemate I’m laughing so hard.
this is so iconic i love this fandom
What a treat! I’ve never seen Sherlock baring his bosom to a startled John before or John kitty getting his tummy tickled. I laughed so loud, the fish jumped!
Anyway the last point I have to make here is that even if tumblr breaks under the algorithm (almost certain if they don’t back out of using it) and/or everybody leaves… I don’t have anywhere else to go or post things
people like to joke about it being bad, but I legitimately really like Tumblr. it actually feels like a blogging platform in a world where facebook and twitter are active political weapons that manipulate us elections. i don’t feel like i’m baring myself to content i don’t want to see here, or having to engage with a popularity-focused culture. the content isn’t sorted to influence you or trick you. it’s a bunch of people being themselves on their own terms. it’s oldnet.
yes, i do use other websites, but i’m not interested in posting personal things to any of them. this was a place i had control over and i’ll stay with it until i can’t. and when that happens there’ll be nothing left.
^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I hate how every other site shows everyone your likes and follows. Seems invasive.
I absolutely feel this. I feel like my blog wouldn’t really fit in on any other website, live porn in posts and ads are frankly a major deterrent for me, I want to see skeletons not real people, and I know I’m going to lose basically my entire fanbase to this thing.
Like I literally only just hit 300 followers and you’re all gunna be gone within two weeks.
Needless to say, I’m pretty bummed out about that. I know my pace is slow but now it’s all just going to get taken away, so what’s the point.
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) – deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
All this and I didn’t see one mention about the reason being deleting NAZI or White Supremacy content!?!! Priorities anyone???? I’m fuming. Censor nipples but leave racists and homophobes intact. Welcome to 21st century. Or is it 18th again?
Bootsrcool 