Tumblr Will Ban Adult Content This Month

Another FOSTA/SESTA story thread:

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I am sympathetic and really dislike the stupid laws and what not, but I can’t help thinking why they didn’t have local copies?

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“Always keep a backup copy” is a wise piece of advice seldom followed.

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There are lots of reasons. A major (and common) one is that either they didn’t have a locally-installed office suite and used Google Drive apps as their software, or else they were on multiple devices and needed a common place to save everything. There are a lot of people running things off their phones and the occasional rental of a computer from a public library or internet café.

During NaNoWriMo I do what I call a “reverse cloud backup”, working off Google office apps and Drive and then backing up to my local drive at the end of each working session. I’ve had more than one person question that because they believe the hype about the cloud being safe.

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And people may not recognize what their backup software is or isn’t backing up.

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That’s sensible, but it seems so weird to me to work off what I would consider the back-up drive…

Well, just copy and paste from one directory to another…hey, get off my lawn! Kids today, grumble cough grumble

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That’s basically what I did when I did NaNo… except, as I’ve seen firsthand how often hard drives fail, I went past “cautious” and into “paranoid”: my novel is on my laptop hard drive, my desktop hard drive, my Google Drive, and my Dropbox. Heck, there might even be a copy on whatever phone I was using at the time.

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Remember I’m working with spreadsheets and documents off my phone in the middle of the day though (no laptop for personal stuff at work). So if I need office apps, Google is an obvious choice for the phone, especially when I’ll be switching to my home laptop at night.

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“the cloud” or as I like to call it “somebody else’s computer”

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Hey, “somebody else’s computer” is a great place to store an off-site backup. It’s incredibly unlikely that something will physically destroy both your hard drive and the hard drive of somebody else’s computer at the same time.

That said, having your only copy on “somebody else’s computer” is a problem.

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Oh yes, I agree; it’s just so different from what I’ve been used to for nearly 40 years— everything on my local PC — yet weirdly similar to the old mainframe/dumb terminals days.

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True that. It’s basically “internet appliances part 2”.

Ironically, one of the reasons it’s convenient for me is because I run Ubuntu with LibreOffice on it at home, and Drive converts smoothly between its own format and LO.

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Oh, cool! I use LO at home (well, that’s all I have now :grin:) and I love not having a stupid ribbon to deal with.

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An interesting turn of events:

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Do it!

Less than two years after buying Tumblr as part of its Yahoo acquisition, Verizon is reportedly trying to sell the blogging platform.

Surprise surprise

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Good luck to them, but the damage has been done.

It occurred to me when the sale first got press that Critique My Dick Pic must have got deleted in the Tumblr purge, and of course it was. The author is on the record for saying she doubts she’d start it again if she found a venue.

People lost years of content in the ban, including lots of absolutely non-pornographic stuff. That’s difficult to come back from.

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Yeah. It’s like Verizon took an antique urn and dashed it against the floor, and Pornhub is offering to buy the pieces and superglue it back together: it’s still an improvement, but it’ll never be what it was.

Still, it does sound likely to be an improvement, not that that’s saying much.

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I’m funding this turn of events interesting.

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Better than the imitators though. They’re like someone passed off a clay pot that a little kid made as the antique urn.

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