For me tumblr does best in that you have chains of responses (reblogs) in images/gifs and text form, that then are reposted on one's own blog for their own followers to experience broadly in a singular dashboard whose ordering isn't really manipulated (like twitter and instagram are, to my extreme vexation).

Also, because tumblr makes it easy to create side-blogs, you can follow a favorite person for their specific stuff. For example, if my artist friend has an "inspiration" blog I can follow that blog instead of their "personal/vent" blog. Similarly if I'm looking for some kind of tea-specific blog I can follow a stranger's side blog without needing to also be exposed to the stranger ranting about a political opinion I am uncomfortable with.

Furthermore, it's one of the large social media sites for which there is a significant and semi-permanent resource and groupings for a variety of LGBTQ/diversity/political/fandom interests in a way that is more flexible than a subreddit or an interest forum. You can follow the individual blogs that you're interested in instead of needing to follow a whole community. So if you don't want to be exposed to some aspect of a community it's relatively trivial to just not follow the people involved.

Twitter has a lot of this, but the lack of easy threading posts and out-of-order feed really ruin it for me. Several of my favorite artists left tumblr for twitter and I've had very little success following them from there.

Twitter is the key. Twitter has failed to deliver a sane way to read threads. after all these years I still don't know how to read a conversation. And the whole platform is about conversation ! If Tumblr can get it it right with WP, I won't miss Twitter.

> And the whole platform is about conversation!

I always understood Twitter to be a personal text broadcasting service, i.e. single direction communication, not conversation.

Tumblr already has conversations that you can read, but only everything up to the specific post you found up to a point (you can look in the notes for the reply but it can get messy). Unlike a forum which consists of all the posts, each reblog chain contains each post previously. It also means if you follow both parties in an ongoing chain, each reply will occur in your feed in the reverse order of their posting.

i'm not a huge fan of the way twitter presents threads and conversations, but the few times i've tried to follow a conversation on tumblr i've only found it to be even worse than twitter. i'm not sure tumblr is the saviour we're looking for here.

You're right, but that these millions dollars startups aren't able to do better than phpBB from an UX point of view is dazzling.

I enjoy tumblr for posting gifs made with code: https://dontcode.tumblr.com/

For me it's just a nice/easy place to post stuff & get quick feedback/appreciation. It's also nice to scroll through nice/funny/cute things & sometimes get info on issues that the tumblr community cares about.

I post gifs made of code too. https://testme.tumblr.com

I feel the core audience and aesthetic of tumblr, in its prime, was a beautiful thing. There's a chance to recapture that essence. Twitter, Medium, and Instagram are watered down commercialized pos. Not saying Tumblr will be better than that, but they have an opportunity to do so. There is still a nostalgia in people's mind about Tumblr.