Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress

113 points by sogen 10 months ago | 122 comments
  • chambers 10 months ago
    "You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started.

    It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous.

    I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956

    • vineyardmike 10 months ago
      > I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.

      I would also say that migration to WordPress is explicitly a marketing strategy for word press, their main product.

      Migrating a product you bought to be part of your main product is a pretty common corporate move.

      • chambers 10 months ago
        Migrating an acquired company's infra to a parent company's infra is common. But marketing it to the world, before starting it, and without a clear product strategy to justify it, is pretty uncommon. For me, it smells of messiness that translates into wasted eng time.
        • 10 months ago
          • 10 months ago
            • 10 months ago
            • teruakohatu 10 months ago
              In this case it is not rewriting for the sake of rewriting, it’s moving content from one CMS to another which happens to be their main product.

              There is no reason to think this would not work out. The only code being rewritten is front end theme code, and some Wordpress plugins to support any unique tumblr features.

              • QuantumGood 10 months ago
                Everything is guaranteed to be perfect when there is no deadline, or even timeframe estimate. Assurances without timelines are meaningless. It's more surprising they said much of anything at all this early in the process.
                • nkrisc 10 months ago
                  > "You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started.

                  Because likely it is not an internal migration with no user impact. Guess which part isn’t true, if they’re telling us.

                • Terretta 10 months ago
                  FTA:

                  “A longtime popular place to socialize, blog, participate in fandoms, and more, Tumblr originally exited to Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent) for north of $1 billion under then-CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership in 2013. The hope at the time was to transform Tumblr into another social media powerhouse and to grow its ads business. However, the subsequent years were rough on Tumblr, as sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit dominated the space.”

                  That last sentence just skips the whole story.

                  Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017, thinking the way to "grow the ad business" was to dump the "and more" part of Tumblr in 2018. It took less than a year for Verizon to look for a way to avoid being reminded of this miscalculation. Asking 0.3% of Yahoo's price did the trick in 2019.

                  This isn't so long ago. The omission is interesting.

                  • deepsun 10 months ago
                    Didn't get what you're saying. What is "and more" part of Tumblr?
                    • avandekleut 10 months ago
                      Namely adult content. They began heavily moderating this kind of stuff, leading to a mass exodus, in particular to twitter which was amenable to it.
                      • mdbauman 10 months ago
                        To me, it wasn't just moderating adult content, it was the way they went about it. They used an AI to review every existing post, which resulted in many false positives, and deleted everything it deemed inappropriate.

                        I was drawing a lot at the time, and many of my portraits with no nudity at all were deleted. That was my sign to leave.

                        • bhaak 10 months ago
                          Not to Reddit?

                          I hardly ever saw adult content on Twitter.

                          • qingcharles 10 months ago
                            And now they've reversed track and allow adult content again if you self-tag it NSFW.
                        • 10 months ago
                        • ss64 10 months ago
                          Migrating to to the "WordPress back end" is not the same as migrating to WordPress.

                          The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple so migrating it to whatever database running on whatever OS is probably not too hard. The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.

                          • evanelias 10 months ago
                            > The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple

                            I'm not sure what your source is for this, but it's not correct. The combination of scale, age, and number of product features makes it quite challenging.

                            My knowledge of Tumblr's db infra is about 6 years out of date, but by my math they hit the milestone of 1 trillion distinct relational rows (on primary databases alone, i.e. excluding copies on replicas) a few years back already.

                            During Tumblr's peak popularity (~2012 to early 2013), the daily posting rate at times exceeded 100 million posts/day. For sake of comparison, Twitter reportedly received about 5x that at the time, but Tumblr posts are larger and far more media-heavy on average. So it's accurate to say the total volume was almost comparable.

                            That all said, the scope of this migration pre-announcement isn't totally clear. My assumption is they just plan to move the public blog network front-end to WordPress, possibly using some sort of shim layer. But an important point here is the blog network is a minority of Tumblr's traffic, and always has been. Most HN users who have never actually created a Tumblr account fail to understand this: the popular part of Tumblr is the social network / logged-in dashboard experience, not the public-facing blog network.

                            If they plan to move the entire site/backend over to WP, that's a much more challenging migration. The ID mappings and differing sharding schemes alone make this an absolutely massive effort.

                            source: long ago I was personally responsible for Tumblr's database and cache scalability during its original period of hockey-stick growth.

                            • ss64 10 months ago
                              Here's the claim that I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418165

                              Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense. I think they will leave all the tables exactly the same and just move them onto back-end hardware that is shared with WP. i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm. If would be nice if the press release were a bit less vague on this.

                              • evanelias 10 months ago
                                That commenter was referring to media files (images and video), not relational database infrastructure. Completely separate parts of the stack. Media files weren't my area at all, but AFAIK parts of that comment weren't factually accurate at the time it was made, and furthermore iirc that commenter was someone who was previously disgruntled about being laid off in one of the many Verizon-led rounds of staff reductions. (Being disgruntled about a layoff is totally understandable, but you then have to take their comments about the company with a huge heaping of salt...)

                                > Changing all the database structures to match WP when they will not actually be running WP would not make much sense.

                                No one suggested that exactly, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

                                > i.e. a separate database running on the same server farm

                                You keep describing Tumblr's database infrastructure as if it's a single server. It's not. It's multiple discrete tiers of sharded databases, serving different purposes. You don't put a trillion rows in a single database. They have hundreds of database servers, hundreds of cache servers, hundreds to a few thousand application/web servers, etc.

                                Again, Tumblr is not just a blogging/CMS platform. It's a full social network, with the primary user experience being a dashboard activity stream, similar to the logged-in experience of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

                                The proposed migration here is about migrating some portion of Tumblr's codebase and data to run off of the wordpress.com infrastructure, likely to reduce operating costs long-term. It's not clear whether that will consist of migrating the entire thing, or if it's just about shimming the public blog network (i.e. not the social network part). But in any case this isn't about just moving hardware.

                            • ericyd 10 months ago
                              > probably not too hard

                              > The chance... is absolutely zero

                              Unsolicited advice: practice more intellectual humility.

                              • CodeWriter23 10 months ago
                                You sound just like the guy from approx 20 years ago who stomped up and down on the Ars forums proclaiming "Cocoa was not going to replace Carbon".
                              • genter 10 months ago
                                > The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.

                                Dunno why you'd say that, that's the exact thing I'd expect them to do. I realize it's idiotic and will end in failure, but I still expect them to do that.

                                • evanelias 10 months ago
                                  No, that doesn't even make sense as a concept. Tumblr has its own templated theme functionality. Users can pick one of many thousands of existing themes, or fully customize one from scratch.

                                  So it sounds like Automattic would need to implement a conversion layer between Tumblr's template language and data model, and the corresponding ones in WP. Their functionality and data models also don't line up 1:1 conceptually, so this is no easy task.

                              • red_admiral 10 months ago

                                    > The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr _into_ WordPress; it will just run on WordPress.
    > ...
    > You won’t even notice a difference from the outside[.]
                                Less of a story than the headline suggests.
                                • dimal 10 months ago
                                  If they can pull of that migration, it seems interesting enough for HN. It’s “just” a blog, but this is a huge technical challenge.
                                  • red_admiral 10 months ago
                                    Oh, definitely. But the average tumblr user won't wake up one day and have their page look like a wordpress site. (There's a chance they'll wake up one day and everything is down for a while, but that's a different matter.)
                                • ChrisArchitect 10 months ago
                                  Surely they're not getting rid of Tumblr's streamlined 'tumblelog' post UI/UX right? So what are they talking about.... the functionality will just be using a WordPress posting API in the background? Which to all regular users won't look or feel like 'WordPress' really. Feel like WordPress means the experience of using that blogging UI. Which I guess is why the conclusion here is "you won't even notice a difference from the outside". Making this kind of a non-story.
                                  • codedokode 10 months ago
                                    By the way why does Tumblr now resembles Twittr so much? And they also lock the screen after viewing several posts.
                                    • pupppet 10 months ago
                                      How many of these half a billion blogs are zombie blogs that haven’t been updated in years?
                                      • pests 10 months ago
                                        Why is recent updates a sign of anything important? How many times do the books on your bookshelf receive updates?
                                        • philipov 10 months ago
                                          there are plenty of zombie blogs that get updated regularly
                                        • justinator 10 months ago
                                          Someone, somewhere just got a massive headache when they read the deadline for this.
                                          • raverbashing 10 months ago
                                            My question is how efficient this is.

                                            I suppose Automattic has a multi tenant version of WP, still, thinking on how traditional WP scales, having one instance per blog seems overkill.

                                            • throwgfdtr2024 10 months ago
                                              I don't know how different wordpress.com is to 'typical' WPMU (wordpress multi-user) as is deployed by e.g. some large universities, where tens of thousands of blogs can exist in one single database instance, served by one single front end which has a wildcard/domain mapper.

                                              But I imagine it is not exactly the same. They have tens of millions of tenants AFAIK.

                                            • crossroadsguy 10 months ago
                                              Automattic has quite a portfolio as of now: https://automattic.com. Among other things they now have Beeper, Simplenote + Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr which is moving.
                                              • throwgfdtr2024 10 months ago
                                                I am a fan of the way Matt thinks, and I absolutely adore what he did for Simplenote.

                                                I don't get the Beeper acquisition at all. But maybe it has some core technology value.

                                              • righthand 10 months ago
                                                I would be upset. Wordpress is such a terrible platform to develop on, footguns and limitations in every implemented magic function. why would you even open the door to Wordpress with so many better options?
                                                • Tomte 10 months ago
                                                  You‘re not seriously asking why Automattic would use WordPress?
                                                  • righthand 10 months ago
                                                    Ah missed that bit of history I guess. It’s still a bad idea, just the amount of effort it takes to translate from one system to another. I’m currently doing this at my company but we’re leaving Wordpress and it’s an astronomical effort.
                                                    • sigseg1v 10 months ago
                                                      I'm assuming that you are trying to keep your content, styling, and markup maintainable or even upgrade it as you move the pages though?

                                                      I'd imagine this is a different scenario. The content created by users will be put through some AI transformation and it will be completely and utterly unmaintainable slop (and a significant portion of it would have already been that anyway before they started since it's user submitted). They aren't going to care that much if some edge cases break. Users can go fix that themselves. It seems much different to me than trying to delicately move something you care about.

                                                  • frereubu 10 months ago
                                                    Because they'll be moving it to their own hosted version, wordpress.com, not allowing people to write their own code, or install different themes / plugins.
                                                    • dleink 10 months ago
                                                      I'm looking for a solution similar to wordpress but haven't really worked in this space. What's good out there?
                                                      • righthand 10 months ago
                                                        There’s a pretty rich landscape of FOSS+SaaS type WYSIWYG editors out there. Aimed at being a either the complete package like Wordpress and Ghost or even some that try to integrate with your current stack (a backend but you provide the frontend), like ContentStack and Sanity or Payload. Even some strange inbetween providers that have features like “generate React component from figma design and import it into your codebase via copy/paste”, like builder.io.
                                                        • throwgfdtr2024 10 months ago
                                                          All of them and none of them. Because really we're talking about serving pages from content fragments in a SQL database, with a style separation and dynamic content constructs.

                                                          It's not a radical idea; you can write your own thing that does only what you need it to, and that is an entirely appropriate way forward.

                                                          You will end up solving a bunch of problems quite like WordPress does.

                                                          All CMSes are at some level like WordPress, and yet there is nothing like WordPress. Because it's not about the application, it's about the tradition and ecosystem around the application.

                                                          • samtho 10 months ago
                                                            Ghost, but only if your primary focus is blogging (rather than a CMS or e-commerce platform).
                                                            • RobotToaster 10 months ago
                                                              IMO ghost's lack of plugins really holds it back.

                                                              If you want anything that isn't built in you have to either link to some third party SaaS or run another entire server program for it.

                                                            • ebcode 10 months ago
                                                              check out Craft CMS
                                                            • remexre 10 months ago
                                                              Automattic, the developers of Wordpress, currently own Tumblr.
                                                              • righthand 10 months ago
                                                                They should know how bad of an idea it is then. There is going to be so much broken from this migration.
                                                                • throwgfdtr2024 10 months ago
                                                                  Why?

                                                                  Wordpress.com, the hosted platform, has about 70-80 million new posts per month, in a massive, social-media-giant-type database, supporting a tightly locked-down, customised WP infrastructure (which even has a different admin UI AFAIK).

                                                                  They aren't going to migrate tumblr to 600 million separate WP instances, are they? They are just going to migrate the posts backend into that infrastructure.

                                                                  There are some challenges, sure, but it's churlish to suggest that Automattic don't know the intrinsic value of Tumblr and will just let it break. They rescued Tumblr from certain doom, and did so for love; they know what they are doing.

                                                                  Lots of people here don't seem to understand what wordpress.com is, and the scale at which it operates.

                                                                  • spondylosaurus 10 months ago
                                                                    The CEO of Automattic seems like he's been on an egomaniac kick lately, which makes me suspect that the (boneheaded) directive came from him and therefore no one with any sense has been able to shoot it down.
                                                                    • stephenr 10 months ago
                                                                      These people created Wordpress and continue to base their business around it.

                                                                      Realising something is a bad idea technically isn't really in their bag of tricks.

                                                                • markx2 10 months ago
                                                                  Automattic has said for years that they (Wordpress) power X% of the internet.

                                                                  Before wordpress.com users had to actively choose WP.

                                                                  With the advent of wordpress.com and it's 'freemium' tier that arguably started to distort numbers. After all, stale, dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats.

                                                                  Now, with Tumblr, Automattic will say they power X+% of the internet

                                                                  When Automattic buys Blogger, that boast about powering % of the net will increase even further.

                                                                  It's a takeover, not user choice.

                                                                  • donohoe 10 months ago

                                                                      dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats
                                                                    By the same argument, those same dead blogs on other platforms also count in the other direction too.

                                                                    The "WP powering X% of the internet" is just a nice PR/marketing blurb. It never had anything to do with user choice so I would bot conflate the two.

                                                                  • chiefalchemist 10 months ago
                                                                    Migrating Tumblr to WP effectively doubles WP's market share. Market share is often sighted by Automattic and the WP Community.

                                                                    "Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress"

                                                                    From: https://www.wpzoom.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/

                                                                    • cabbageicefruit 10 months ago
                                                                      Tumblr is one website. Not 500,000. Even though 500,000 people have a blog there, it is still tumblr.com. Even if you do set up a subdomain such as my-blog.tumblr.com it still just redirects to tumblr.com/my-blog. Counting tumblr as 500,000 websites is like counting everyone’s Facebook profile as its own website.
                                                                      • evanelias 10 months ago
                                                                        The relevant number is 500,000,000, which is 1000x larger than the number you're citing. But also your comment about subdomains is wrong: redirecting to tumblr.com/my-blog is an optional setting, with the default being to use a subdomain. You can also use custom domains rather than a tumblr.com subdomain. Tumblr has had this functionality for almost its entire existence.
                                                                      • chiefalchemist 10 months ago
                                                                        I'm fairly confident that's not how WP.com does it. On WP.com - via WP multisite - each site has it's own instance of WP and therefore each counts as a site running WP.

                                                                        Tumblr's injection would result in a significant increase in the number of websites running WP.

                                                                    • extraduder_ire 10 months ago
                                                                      Hopefully they can pull this off without a horrific accident turning most of them into crabs.
                                                                      • 10 months ago
                                                                        • stephenr 10 months ago
                                                                          .... I need to know what this is a reference to?
                                                                          • extraduder_ire 10 months ago
                                                                            In general, Carcinisation (convergent evolution turning everything into crabs). In specifics, that's a running joke on the website, the staff even warned users when they added user verification badges to the site that they cannot guarantee the badges will not turn into crabs one day.
                                                                        • winddude 10 months ago
                                                                          Interesting, I wonder will it be "1 wordpress instance" with each tumblr blog as an author, or something like wordpress.com / WPMU where each tumblr blog is a wordpress blog.
                                                                        • h_tbob 10 months ago
                                                                          I don’t understand why you would migrate anything to Wordpress.

                                                                          Wordpress, to me, seems like the platform you start on. Easy to get up and running.

                                                                          But when you get a mature product, you need something with better performance. I hate to say it, but anything with a plug-in architecture is always going to be slower than a custom stack.

                                                                          I wonder how performance will be affected after the move.

                                                                          Never used tumblr by the way.

                                                                          • evanelias 10 months ago
                                                                            Infrastructure-wise, the FOSS wordpress.org that you self-host isn't quite the same as the massively multi-tenant wordpress.com service run by Automattic. Your comment seems to be about the former, but this announcement is about the latter.

                                                                            In other words, they're proposing a migration of some unspecified portion of Tumblr to re-use existing infrastructure/code/services that power the wordpress.com hosted service. They're not proposing somehow moving 600 million Tumblr blogs to individual FOSS wordpress.org instances; that indeed would make no sense whatsoever.

                                                                          • ernesth 10 months ago
                                                                            Is this move the reason for the random 403 errors I get from the tumblr rss feeds I follow? Since a few weeks ago, some feeds are disappearing then reappearing, sometimes they are unavailable for a few days, sometimes it's back the moment I refresh. If the move is in the future, I guess that means they have neglected the current platform.
                                                                            • rbanffy 10 months ago
                                                                              Been there, done that in 2008, but it was only half a million blogs.

                                                                              A very interesting undertaking anyway.

                                                                              • sogen 10 months ago
                                                                                Can you tell more
                                                                              • oaththrowaway 10 months ago
                                                                                At one time Tumblr had all the assets from each blog in one giant S3 bucket. Wonder what that migration looks like for this or if they'll just keep them there.
                                                                                • mannyv 10 months ago
                                                                                  There's no technical reason not to do that.

                                                                                  The only reason to move it to some other storage provider would be to save on egress fees, but I'm sure that 95% of the content is never touched by humans after it's posted.

                                                                                  It may be crawled, though.

                                                                                • dvh 10 months ago
                                                                                  What always bugged me about WordPress is that default installation which has only 7 tables uses 3 different column naming conventions (table.ID, table.table_id, table.table_ID) plus sometimes it uses full table prefix and sometimes shortened prefix. Are you not bothered by it? This is the first thing new user sees. This was years ago I had to check again as I'm not using it and default installation is now 12 tables but the random column naming is still there.
                                                                                  • jorams 10 months ago
                                                                                    > This is the first thing new user sees.

                                                                                    The vast majority of WordPress users, and even many people who call themselves "WordPress developers" never look inside the database. WordPress is, in almost every way, a terrible platform to develop on. What saves it is backwards compatibility, an enormous ecosystem, and being relatively easy to use for everybody who needs to use it.

                                                                                    • dangrossman 10 months ago
                                                                                      Backwards compatibility is more important than consistent naming conventions. 43.5% of all sites on the web run on WordPress (as of August 2024), and they have 20+ years of plugins and themes installed, many of which talk directly to the database.
                                                                                      • lioeters 10 months ago
                                                                                        Inconsistent naming is one of a million things that will drive you crazy about WordPress if you are a detail-oriented person. It's a living demonstration of "Worse is better."
                                                                                        • egypturnash 10 months ago
                                                                                          When does a new user look at Wordpress’ tables? I’ve been using it for my site for like a decade and I only ever have to look in the database when I’m doing really complicated hacks, or something broke.
                                                                                        • RobotToaster 10 months ago
                                                                                          I assume they're migrating it to the proprietary wordpress.com SaaS, not the open source wordpress.org?
                                                                                          • batuhanicoz 10 months ago
                                                                                            Disclaimer: I work at Automattic but not on WordPress.com or Tumblr. This is all based on my impressions and personal opinion.

                                                                                            From the perspective of the user it’s just another blogging platform. Tumblr blogs are not self hosted and isn’t based on open source code at all. Tumblr code seems too specific and part of a bigger machine, so it also doesn’t make sense to make it open source. AFAIK goal is to make this mostly invisible to the users and their blogs will be powered by open source.

                                                                                            Any improvements to Tumblr blogs will have a chance to make it into the core of WordPress.

                                                                                            I’d imagine it’s also going to be way easier to move your blog to any other hosting provider, giving the user a wider choice.

                                                                                            • michaelbuckbee 10 months ago
                                                                                              It's described in the article that they're going to use Wordpress as a sort of "backend" platform for the existing Tumblr front end interface and that this is to mesh with their existing hosted architecture.
                                                                                            • snapplebobapple 10 months ago
                                                                                              Next week's news: tumblr blogs all hacked
                                                                                              • doublerabbit 10 months ago
                                                                                                Next up: "oops we lost all the data due to migration. Sorry about that"
                                                                                                • pfdietz 10 months ago
                                                                                                  This is surprising news. I was surprised Tumblr was still around.
                                                                                                  • incognito124 10 months ago
                                                                                                    In my circle, tumblr is pretty much around. It had a bit of a renaissance after musk bought twitter and reddit broke 3rd party apps, when both userbases fled to tumblr
                                                                                                  • achillesheels 10 months ago
                                                                                                    Hard to find a path to justify a $1B valuation. Cult content subscriber model? #meh
                                                                                                    • debacle 10 months ago
                                                                                                      This is very cool.
                                                                                                      • adriamaker 10 months ago
                                                                                                        oh wow, wordpress is still strong
                                                                                                        • mrweasel 10 months ago
                                                                                                          Wordpress is huge, but practically invisible to most of us.
                                                                                                        • scosman 10 months ago
                                                                                                          Shouldn’t they just use a static site generator? /s
                                                                                                          • speckx 10 months ago
                                                                                                            More @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391260
                                                                                                            • djbusby 10 months ago
                                                                                                              No, this thread is larger. That link has three small comments.
                                                                                                              • cabbageicefruit 10 months ago
                                                                                                                Not to nitpick your nitpick, but “more” has more than one definition.