newTumbl was launched as a microblogging platform in the beginning of 2019 as a replacement for Tumblr refugees who wanted to continue sharing sexually-explict material on a platform that had a similar look and feel as Tumblr, after Tumblr changed their community guidelines on December 18, 2018. newTumbl described itself on its social media account as “a new social media site that provides a natural and intuitive experience for posting, sharing, curating, and exploring all sorts of content.” newTumbl was quickly formed as a worthy Tumblr replacement, marketing themselves as being open-minded and an adult-friendly place where users could post and share adult material.
Tumblr was once a popular social media platform for sharing sexually-explicit material, but things started to change after the platform was taken over by other companies. In 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo!, with Yahoo! then acquired by Verizon in 2017, with Tumblr then becoming part of the company’s Oath media division. It was in 2018 when Oath made the announcement they would no longer be allowing sexually-explicit material under their amended community guidelines. On November 1, 2022, Tumblr had a change of heart by announcing they were now allowing a “broader range of expression, creativity and art” by allowing nudity, mature sexual matter and sexual themes, although visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remained off-limits.
On June 7, 2023, newTumbl posted a message on their main and other pages that read “It’s been a blast. Thanks for your patronage. We hope you enjoyed your time at newTumbl.” This message was also posted on newTumbl’s Twitter account, with no further details provided to explain the sudden shut down. The fact that the service appears to have shut down without warning came as a shock to many, but it’s also disappointing, as users were unable to save or backup any of their blogs or posts, which now appear to have been lost, in addition to social contacts that would have been built up over time. Some users had built up a significant number of posts and material there, which will be sadly missed, as the service was considered to be reliable and did not subject users to a significant amount of advertising.
newTumbl was popular with many people, although not a huge number compared to similar platforms and the service also allowed users to post and share poz-friendly content, with hashtags such as “bug chaser”, “bug chasing”, “pozzing”, “neg4poz”, “poz4neg”, “toxic”, “viral” and other keywords that would lead users to posts containing text, pictures or videos that you could favourite or reblog on your own account. This allowed bloggers to curate content based on themes of their liking and there were a number of bloggers who had barebacking and/or bug chasing accounts you could follow via the hashtags, so their content would show up in your feed, so it could be enjoyed and shared with others. It was reported by some users in more recent times that the service was nuking or purging accounts without explanation, with some of these including pro barebacking and bug chasing accounts, which may have been done as a way to clean up the content to help attract new advertisers.
newTumbl started with 0 members in December 2018 and by March 2019, the service had signed up their 100,000th member, then by June 2019, there were over 250,000 members and by November 19, there were over 500,000 members according to one of their social media posts. In April 2019, newTumbl became a top 10,000 site in the United States and by August 2019, the serviced exceeded 10 million posts. It’s unknown what the membership base grew to after these dates, but the number of users would likely have continued to climb, with the service reporting 5.7 trillion bytes of image and video data in 2020 and 2.3 billion bits per second of data transfers. The infrastructure needed to cope with supporting large amounts of data would have involved high costs and due to limited advertising, this may have been the reason why the service was shut down. It will be interesting to see whether any future developments will result in the return on newTumbl, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for providing this service, which was welcoming to the gay, barebacking and bug chasing communities.
There are some alternative microblogging platforms you might want to try, but they do not look and feel exactly like newTumbl. Here’s a few alternatives you might want to consider:
- BDSMLR – https://bdsmlr.com
- MeWe – https://mewe.com
- Pillowfort – https://www.pillowfort.social
- ReblogMe – https://reblogme.com
- Sharesome – https://sharesome.com
Featured Photo: newTumbl. This image was the default background image appearing in user blogs.
Article ID: CC065
Version Control: 1.0 – June 11, 2023: Original article published.
