..that we MUST switch to the RIGHT kind of personal clouds NOW.

“The Death of Tumblr” reports that:

• [in 2017] Tumblr started “filtering” “adult” blogs, meaning anyone without a Tumblr account could not see those blogs, even if they were NOT about pornography
• Tumblr posts flagged as “adult” include women in underwear, “male presenting nipples, and even images of alcohol and smoking. Clearly some of these were a mistake like an image of my friend eating ice cream”
• Tumblr will ban ‘female-presenting nipples’ and other content beginning December 17, 2018
• for many people “Tumblr was the only place that all [they wanted to share, work or not] could be displayed side by side”

Platforms? Why?

I have been proposing for about six years now truly “personal clouds as a service”, that is bundles of Free/Open Source software that:

• are automatically associated, at time of creation, with a personal, permanent web domain name chosen by their user
• create a personal, permanent blog, email, commenting system, news and social media aggregator… for THAT user, and for everything that that user “wants to share”
• can run on the servers of any cloud hosting provider
• can be moved in any moment, without any interruption of service, from any provider of cloud hosting to any others
• do not require the user to own or manage herself any physical or virtual server
• are as easy to acquire as getting a Gmail or Facebook account

Permanent personal clouds like those:

• would make “death of Tumblr” or any other similarly centralized “service” half impossible, half irrelevant. See the death of Google Reader for more
• require nothing as unnecessary, ineffective or counterproducing as “breaking up or regulating Facebook”
• do not need their users to set up, or even join, any “platform cooperative” which would NOT be any better, as far as long term “survival” is concerned, than any corporation
• guarantee real data portability, that is real user freedom, and real opportunities for every organization, for- or not-for-profit, to provide the hosting services
• would cost a lot, but way less, and above all in a much more distributed, resilient and scalable way, than it would cost to develop and deploy any “platform”, no matter who owned and ruled it
• are immensely easier to regulate in the right way, in today’s world

This “death of Tumblr” just proves all this, once more. Please go for portable, permanent, personal clouds now. Do not pay the cost of 5 (now almost 6) more years without perclouds. AND…

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking “why don’t you just DO this yourself, or use X?":

1. This cannot be a one-person project anyway. If paid, I could write a detailed white paper and specification, but not more, really
2. In any case, I simply cannot afford to do for free anything more than intermittent advocacy on this, period. Donations to do (much) more advocacy would be very welcome, of course. See bottom of post for details
3. On one hand, that is no reason to not say that permanent, personal clouds are NOT the final solution, but should be the unavoidable first step towards it
4. On the other hand, I really do not care who does it, as long it is done quickly, and credit is given where due. If you can implement this proposal yourself, thanks in advance for doing it. Seriously
5. I have repeatedly explained the four points above for years now, as you can see here and here. Ditto for any variation of “What is the difference between percloud and X” or other Percloud FAQs. So please let’s not repeat those parts, thanks