DeviantArt is a good alternative.

+1 for DeviantArt. Many artists and models already use it, the community is generally tolerant of unconventional modes of expression, and the platform is designed to be able to handle "explicit" (by U.S. standards) content in a fairly straightforward way.

I started using tumblr for a photoblog several years ago for the simple fact that it wasn't blocked by the Great Firewall of China. All the FB properties, and most other western platforms, were / are blocked. It meant I could post and view while on either side.

Perhaps Verizon is gearing up to market it there?

I'd say instagram is the other big one for artists, not twitter. Instagram has all the functionality of tumblr with even more accessibility.

I've known several photographers who have lost 25k, 100k+ followings by being banned from instagram for posts that did not break the ToS. This has been devastating to their careers as freelance artists. I wouldn't recommend leaving a more tolerant platform (tumblr) to put all your eggs in a FB owned basket. With instagram, it all seems to depend on who the mod is who got assigned the reported photo to look at. Many of these artists now run a backup instagram and promote it on their primary account about once every 2 weeks to keep a solid follower count on it in case their main gets the hammer.

Same with all sorts of legal cannabis business related pages. I see a lot of seed companies, dispensaries, culture/meme accounts with fallback accounts and bios saying ‘deleted at 25k...’, etcetera. It’s the same situation as consumers have long faced with Facebook, Twitter, Etsy and so forth - they don’t seem to care that other people invest time and money in their accounts, which the company tosses aside so easily.

Class-action lawsuit grounds?

Except for some very fundamental things (AKA "link in bio").

But yes, most artists I know moved away from Tumblr years ago (with great success).

I hope not... Instagram has terrible usability if you don't have a Facebook account and/or don't want to install the app on mobile. Tumblr was at least tolerable in that scenario.

But none of the permissiveness that old Tumblr had. I believe the new TOS for tumblr are still more liberal than the ones for current Instagram.

There were artists showcasing their work, but there were also a lot of accounts simply distributing someone else's explicit pictures without the copyright holder's permission. They didn't even have their own .com because they obviously benefited from being served under a subdomain of tumblr. I won't miss them at all.

Reddit has user pages now. It's a bit rough, but it can pretty much fill tumblr's functionality.

I'm already seeing posts on various NSFW Subreddits like "Tumblr banned me so here I am".

The trifecta I saw many people post was Twitter/Discord/Reddit moreso than DeviantArt.

I assume DeviantArt is only focussed on images themselves, and doesn't allow mixing media as trivially as the others, but would love to be corrected.

I'm pretty sure that the issue with DA is that they fell behind the times, the social features are pretty bad and so on.

As a photographer who does not care much for using nudity in my photos, this is no problem to me. But yeah, I think you’re right.

Can you elaborate? Are you doing it for a living? How did tumblr help you marked your local business (if any)? Thank you