I have been having thoughts lately about my time on tumblr, a website that I've loved for a long time, but have become more and more jaded and upset with as time has passed, and as I've become more mature (and also more outspoken about issues important to me).

As a kid, I used tumblr mostly for fandom stuff. I was huge into Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which was my favourite show for a very long time, and it was often the gifs, memes and fanart about the clones (which had been my favourite characters) that brought me to the website. I'd say I was lurking on tumblr for a year before I made my account in July of 2012. I would've been 14, then. I unironically was reblogging superwholock posts and had an obsession with Tom Hiddleston. I got into a lot of new fandoms because of tumblr. Most people call these the dark times of tumblr...personally I was having more fun back then than what I am now.

Nowadays, I post about my art, my website, my favourite game World of Warcraft, stuff like that. I have a variety of sideblogs dedicated to other topics, like Spore or Elite: Dangerous. I've had to e-beg a few times due to my pretty shit financial circumstances, with some actual success, surprisingly. I reblog a lot of fundraisers for others too, since it seems my followers are better at showing up for those sort of things than I'd previously realised.

A lot has changed with tumblr, both with the way it looks, to the way the culture has changed, things like that. I've changed as well. Both in the way I use tumblr, and also how I feel about it.

One of the (somewhat) newer things I do now is post a lot more about Australian Aboriginal issues. It's not really "new"- I've been doing it for a few years now- but there was definitely a time where I didn't post about being Aboriginal that often, if ever at all.

I'm more loud about being Aboriginal. I have a decent amount of Aboriginal followers and mutuals who I talk to in the notes of our posts. It's been great getting to see that actually, there are quite a few Aboriginal people on tumblr, you just have to open your eyes to see them. You kinda gotta be Aboriginal yourself to know who else on tumblr is Aboriginal. But once you get the ball rolling, you see that there's way more of us on there than what you previously thought. It's been great to make new friends and have proper support from other Aboriginal people who are gonna back me up no matter what. I even saw someone from my own mob! And wasn't that a fucking wonderful surprise!

The downside, of course (because there must always be a downside) is the severe and unfiltered racism that exists on the website. The sheer amount of racist dogshit I have had to see with my own two eyes whenever I've dared to make a post about Aboriginal issues has been fucking insane. I'll make one singular post about Landback, and it attracts some of the most racist White Americans that have ever existed on planet earth (who call themselves queer and promise they care about minorities), fully being unable to understand the core concepts of Landback. Said White Americans who go on to say "What do you as a non-white person think is gonna happen if we give land back to indigenous people?" and then go on to insinuate that giving the land back would end up being reverse-colonialism in the sense that all white people would be forced off the land (that's not what Landback is about, by the way. And if you do think that, might I suggest this tumblr post I made for further reading).

As a small side tangent, I would say that it's quite funny how it's always the White Americans who spew the most racist bullshit my way, as opposed to White Australians, but based upon the many different polls that tumblr users have made on what people's nationality and race are, White Americans are by far the majority of the users on tumblr. *procees to throw up in my own mouth*

I could talk about all of the Black American bloggers that were chased off of the site back in 2016 and also 2018, causing the space to become a blindingly White echo chamber as a result, but that's a whole other can of worms that I'm not particularly well versed in to be able to talk about in-depth. But it certainly is relevant. For every 1 POC, Indigenous or Black person that's got my back, there's 500 racist White Americans on the so-called "left" who have something fucked up to say to me. The odds are stacked against me and every other non-white person on tumblr in a way that Whitefella could not possible imagine.

Continuing the bullshit I've unfortunately had to witness as an Aboriginal person on tumblr...I've seen AI generated images of Aboriginal people in the #australian aboriginal tag on tumblr, specifically to look similar to old black and white photographs of currently deceased Aboriginal people who were in chains or injured or in distress. I've asked people to stop using racial slurs used for Aboriginal people, or to stop using outdated terms for us, and been talked down to as if I wasn't even Aboriginal!

I've been asked "Who is this helping? Do you think this is helping Aboriginal people or are you just policing people's words?" when I told people to stop using the A/B/* acronym for the Omegaverse fanfic trope because 1. it's a racial slur that Aboriginal people do not want to fucking see when they're looking at posts on the internet and 2. there is already a second name for it so why is it such a big deal to not use the acronym? I was spoken to as if I wasn't literally saying what other Aboriginal people in fandom spaces have been saying ever since the stupid trope and acronym was invented in the first place. Other Aboriginal people on tumblr have been driven off the site by popular white tumblr users for being too loud about it.

Aboriginal people, specifically, have been spoken about on tumblr as if we weren't literally there to defend ourselves or speak about or own experiences. As if we do not have an internet connection. As if Aboriginal people don't look at fanart or fanfic or MAKE fanfic or DRAW fanart or participate in fandom culture on the internet (Hello?!?! look at my fucking website you dumb cunt!) Like we just live in the fucking outback and don't know what a movie is and can't be interested in the same media as Whitefella. Like we're outsiders who have no place in fandom. It's certainly how we're treated, at the very least. Some of us just don't care to say outright we're Aboriginal when we're on the internet (usually for our own safety), or if we DO outright say that we're Aboriginal, that information is overlooked until people decide to be racist to us.

We've been talked about like we're literally not even human beings.

Being outwardly and loudly Aboriginal on tumblr, as I've learned, is a fucking harrowing experience. I only proceed to be on tumblr, despite how many racist White people invade my personal space constantly, because of my Aboriginal mutuals on there who I have no way to contact outside of tumblr. People who I really don't want to stop talking to. Friends who I care about. And also the other few White American mutuals who are thankfully not dogshit and who like to talk to me about World of Warcraft. If I had neither of these groups of people, I would probably not use tumblr nearly as often as I do.

More and more, nowadays, I think about the idea of going back to the forum format, where we as Aboriginal people could have our own little website that was out of the way, and had an obscure name so the Whitefella couldn't easily search it up to harrass us, where we could talk about our own shit without having to deal with Whitefella. But every time I think of doing something like that, like making a community on tumblr or a discord server for Aboriginal people or something like that, I always get scared. Scared of white infiltrators. Scared of it getting taken away or being targetted by a harrassment campaign. I only feel comfortable to post this long arse article because it's my own website and I have 1 singular guestbook which is less of a comment section for anything in particular and more like...a way to say "hey your website is cool."

What I can most certainly say now, is that I fully understand the Black bloggers on tumblr who say in their bio "whites dni" (dni meaning "do not interact") and say they'll block anyone who is White that follows them or interacts with their posts. Before, while I understood on a surface level the reasoning for doing so- duh, white people are racist as fuck- it always kind of came across as a bit...extreme, in my opinion. But I respected those bloggers decisions regardless, since I knew that one less White person to deal with online was one less headache. Now, though? I know it to be a fucking necessity. I've considered doing it myself lately, and the only reason I haven't was the fear that my blog would get reported for "hate speech" and I'd get my blog taken down.

Because as much as White people on tumblr like to say "you can say whatever on tumblr and you won't get in trouble! you can tell elon musk to kill himself and you won't get reported cuz no one gives a shit!", the key part is that if you're WHITE and say that, then you're fine. I've had a post of mine that was basically me saying "racism against white people isn't real" and had it taken down for hate speech.

You cannot, actually, say whatever you want on tumblr as an Indigenous person, as a Black person, as a POC, or even as a Transfem (again, can of worms that I'm not an expert in), without having to watch your fucking back. I've had to bite my fucking tongue on tumblr ever since- something I don't think most Whitefella on there have ever felt before, given that they can, in fact, say whatever the hell they want and get away with it.

Nowdays, on tumblr, for my own safety as an Aboriginal person, I cannot have my askbox be open. Not even just open and anonymous asks turned off, it cannot be open AT ALL. I cannot allow people to DM me. My replies are turned off for everyone except mutuals (sometimes I let my followers reply too, if I'm feeling happy and not like I'm a deer being hunted down by pack of attack dogs). My blog is so locked down to outsiders that the only way to talk to me is either in the notes of somebody else's post, or by reblogging one of my posts and saying what you need to say there. Or just figuring out what my discord is and talking to me there. People cannot @ me, either. Well, they can try, but I won't get a notification about it. It makes it so much harder to do commissions because most of my commissioners come from tumblr, and if they can't message me or DM me, how are they supposed to tell me that they want to commission art from me? How am I supposed to make any fucking money?

But I CAN'T deal with the sheer amount of harrassment that I'd get on my posts or in my inbox when I had my blog open for anyone to talk to me or reply to my posts. It genuinely feels so isolating and lonely now, on tumblr, being unable to have my askbox open for people to say hi to me when doing so means I risk having to deal with White people's insane racist bullshit. There was once a time where I could have my askbox be open, and I'd get people talking to me about the batblobs I'd drawn, and they would give me prompts, and I would just kinda roll with it. It was fun, for once, being able to engage in the tumblr fandom space in the way it was meant to be engaged with. But shit like that never lasts long if you're not white.

I don't have a nice, well thought out, positive conclusion. There isn't one. All I have are the feelings of sadness and like I have to be careful about everything I say and everything I do on that website. There are no answers to this conundrum. Being someone who is Aboriginal on tumblr, or just not White in general, means that the website is hostile towards your existence. It is a bad fucking experience. And anyone who dares to tell me "well, if it's so bad then why don't you just leave?" has clearly missed the point. The point is, is the majority of tumblr users are White Americans, and to ask someone who isn't White to leave the website will further create an even more blindingly White echo chamber which will never be questioned or torn down in any way, furthering the insane racism of the website. Which, in turn, makes the experience for any non-White person on the website more lonely and more hostile for them.

Leaving should not be the fucking answer. But I also greatly hesitate to recommend tumblr to other POC not already using it. When your boy is out here having blocked well over 15,000+ tumblr accounts and is still seeing racist bullshit, I really do wonder what the fucking point is. Tumblr is White As Fuck in the bad way and I don't know that there's a way to fix that without blowing that shit up and starting again. If it is even worth starting again at all.