Answer: Hi there, @ryuseitaiz!

Thanks for your question. This is a tricky one!

This is a not-uncommon question that we receive at @wip. One of Tumblr’s oldest core principles is that we try not to reveal who owns what blogs—or the relationships between primary and secondary blogs.

So, blocking someone from all your blogs could easily reveal that the same person owns different blogs in some scenarios that can be easy to game. For the longest time, we haven’t wanted to change this principle—but we are rethinking it in some areas, like Communities. We may rethink it everywhere, based on feedback like this, but can’t say any more than that right now. If anything changes, you’ll find out here or at @changes.

But thank you—we appreciate your thoughts and consideration.

Answer: Hi, @charlie-theidiot!

Well, what are the chances?

It sounds like you’re describing a current project of ours: “Identities”! It’s something we’d like to do, and very much intend to do. Only we have to level with you folks: it’s a big, big project, and we don’t have the bandwidth for it right now, particularly with Communities taking so much time and resources.

Thanks for your question. Hopefully, it won’t be too long until we’ve got some news to share. We’ll keep you posted!

Answer: Hey there, @automaticllamacycle!

So you’re right. There is currently no community-facing way that you can get your account back in the event it is deleted.

However, we are not too far away from having this technically feasible on our backend, and we don’t think it would take too much work to make it a reality. You’re right on this one—such a feature would be really nice to have, and we’re grateful you drew this to our attention.

Leave this with us—we will see what we can do. In the meantime, you can catch up with updates here at @wip or at @changes, should we have them.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. Happy weekend!

Answer: Hey there, @letsgirit!

Password resets like this are very important for account safety here on Tumblr (and plenty of other sites!) and are often prompted for very important reasons.

However, if you’re ever not able to get that password reset working, we do have an account recovery process to help as noted here in this handy Help Center article. We hope this helps, and thanks for getting in touch.

Answer: Hey there @stesosongs!

We must start by saying that we are not entirely sure what you mean here, and so we have reached out to you directly to clarify.  

However, we wonder if this may be a bug with the custom theme you are using—it seems to stop after loading a certain number of posts. We can’t fix that, we are sorry to say, so you’d have to reach out to the theme developer, which you can find here. We hope this helps!

Answer: Hi, @puregrief!

Fun story: we tried this! A couple of times, actually. One of them is still up that you can see today: the @memories blog on Tumblr was an April Fools prank many years ago, and its posts are customized based on who’s viewing it (you!), and it has some fun things like this.

Another time, we had a thing that would show you a post of yours from long ago with a header like “Blast from the past!”—it was fun for only a handful of people… but most others who saw it really did not like it, and let us know, so we removed it.

There are no plans to bring it back at present. But thank you for getting in touch, and keep the questions coming y'all.

Answer: Hey there @gravelyorchid!

A little good news and bad news here. We will start with the good, just because.

We have actually been looking into solving this kind of problem already as it happens. So yes—we fully agree this would be great to have. There are no guarantees on when a solution may be provided though, unfortunately, at this time.

We will let you know as soon as we do. Have a good day, and thanks for your question!

Answer: Hey, @hattersgirlalice!

As luck would have it, you can already accomplish this via the Inside Tumblrs setting in Tumblr Labs, which follows all of your own blogs and puts them in your Following feed.

We hope this helps, and thanks for your question.

Answer: Hi, @dr-paine!

Snap! As it happens we have run into this issue ourselves, just a few weeks ago. However, a fix has since been rolled out, and we are glad to say that it works again now, just fine. 

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and have a lovely day.

Answer: Hello, @deithwen!

As it turns out, we’ve received this feature request a lot over the years. Usually, it comes in as wanting the ability to “mute” other blogs on Tumblr. While we would love to build it, we’ve balked at it a bit because of its technical and product complexity. Let us explain what that means:

In terms of technical complexity, our current blocking feature is closest to how “muting” would work. Our current blocking feature may seem simple, but it’s very complex because of how big Tumblr is. Every time we fetch a list of blogs for you or anyone on Tumblr, we have to also fetch the list of who you’re blocking, and who’s blocking you, and filter out anyone with that block relationship. This mapping of who’s-blocking-who is stored in a directional way right now, so the “cost” of loading that list gets higher the more people you’re blocking and the more people who are blocking you. If you’re blocking 1,000 blogs, we have to check that list a lot. If you’re being blocked by 1,000 blogs, that’s another big list to check against.

In technical terms, this is a “many-to-many” relationship, which is almost always incredibly difficult to manage while not degrading the experience of using a platform like Tumblr. The more people who are blocking, the harder it is to store those lists in a way that’s easy to check, but we’re working on making it smoother. The vast majority of people don’t block many others, if at all, so it’s never been a huge problem. But the outliers who block thousands of others (or are blocked by thousands of others) can degrade performance for everyone over enough time.

Adding muting would throw on top of that yet another list of blogs to check, increasing the complexity of something that’s already pretty complex. It helps that muting would be one-directional and not bi-directional (as in, it doesn’t matter who’s muting you), but, as that list of muted blogs grows, your experience may degrade further. So we’d need to solve for that, which is definitely doable. It would just take time—and lots of it.

And, as a product, Tumblr is already pretty confusing to people trying to figure out what “blocking” means already, as well as our other filtering options. Up until fairly recently, blocking was almost entirely one-directional, the opposite way you’d expect: blocking made it so the blocked person couldn’t see you, not that you couldn’t see them. We’ve been updating blocking to work both ways instead, which is more common on social media these days. Similarly, the options to filter tags versus content cause a lot of confusion because they don’t work the same way as each other.

So if we wanted to add another filtering option to that mix, “muting” blogs, we’d need to be conscious of how all of those options work together—and are confusing in context with each other. We should really clean up that experience to be more streamlined and simple, not more complex. And I didn’t even mention the oddity of how different settings apply to your primary blog versus your sideblogs if you have more than one blog!

Taken together, it is a great idea for us to clean all of this up, improve our existing options here, and add “muting” for even more control and granularity. Sadly, however, it just isn’t high enough on our list of priorities to tackle anytime soon. We don’t want to simply tack on muting for the sake of doing it—we want to do a better job than that. I hope that makes sense!

Thanks for your question. It was an important one to address. If anything should change here, you will get news through the usual channels: here at WIP, or at @changes. 

Answer: Hey there, @fourcheesecalzone!

So, this is something of a tricky one. Albeit a good one, too.

The general idea of adding more customization options for your identity on Tumblr, like showing your age or your registration date or links to About pages and the like, is certainly something we want to work on someday. We can say this for sure.

However, just your age, on its own, is not something we would want to expose. It would have to come with bigger changes to how we display information about people on the platform. How exactly we tackle these questions is still ongoing, but it’s a good question, and we hope to have updates for you before too long. You will catch these here or over at @changes.

Thanks for your question, and we hope this helps for now. 

Answer: Hey there, @tgcarahart.

We would love to build more bulk-action tools on Tumblr as a core platform improvement! Gardening your following and followers are one of the areas where that would make a lot of sense. However, we’re not sure yet where it fits on our priority list, but it may be a part of our plans next year. Stay tuned to @changes blog for updates on that.

In the meantime, if you want to do this kind of thing yourself and dip your toes into some programming, you can leverage the public Tumblr API to do exactly what you want. In fact, we just published an example of how to get a list of who you’re following based on activeness and mutual status here. You could probably tune that to do what you want with a little work! We’d love to have more examples in that repository.

Thanks for your question, and we hope this helps!

Answer: Hello, @cyphyree!

So, we’ve been testing this vigorously and have been unable to reproduce the issue. We have persisted, just in case this is an edge case we haven’t found yet, but we have reached out to you directly for further clarification.

Relatedly, we should note that we have recently made some updates to clarify that deleting the main blog will delete your entire account. The "Delete account" button is now only in Settings, at the bottom, and no longer in your main blog’s settings. You can find out more here in this post from @changes.

Thanks for your question!

Answer: Hello there, @birdy-bird27!

As much as we like this idea, we’re afraid this one won’t be happening. A long story short: it’s simply too much of a possible abuse vector and a space for bad intent, like with flashing images.

We appreciate the question. Keep ’em coming!

Answer: Hello, @coffeecasualty11!

We have an answer here, and we think you are going to like it. You can actually do this now!

That’s right, you can now do exactly that. You can finally, after much waiting, reply from secondary blogs. Next to the reply input field, you can click or tap on the avatar to change what blog you’re replying as.

You can find out more at our @staff post, which you can find right here, and may have caught in this recent update over at @changes!

We hope you enjoy it. Happy posting!

Answer: Hey, @winged-mammal!

That would indeed be pretty cool! Though we must be straight with you here—as things stand, it's very unlikely we’d ever get around to doing it, sadly. 

If that ever were to change, you can of course find out here or over at @changes. 

Thanks for getting in touch, and have a good day.

Love,

—Cyle

Answer: Hey there, @comIc!

This is a fun one! So, our policy is to "free up" blog names when the account has been inactive for over a year. And you can see how we define "inactive" right here, at the Help Center. 

However, we should mention that there’s no way for you, on Tumblr, to see how long a blog has been inactive. It’s perfectly possible a blog hasn’t posted in a decade but still logs in every day, for example.

Best,

—Jon