In its prime, Tumblr combined the customization of early Myspace with the cozy, community feeling of LiveJournal.

It made you feel like you were part of a community that cared! When you posted something, you knew someone – somewhere – would eventually find it. It made the internet feel both endless and communal at the same time.

Then, as the story so often goes, Tumblr fumbled and sold to Yahoo! in 2013. After massive design and community changes (including floating the idea of banning NSFW content and obliterating page customization, Myspace-style), people began leaving Tumblr.

I kept my account active until 2020-ish and then decided to delete it while going through a social media purge. Fortunately, before deleting it, I downloaded an account export that Tumblr provided (it appears that they still do this, but the process has changed a little bit – they even offer a direct-to-WordPress export now).

This archive sat on my NAS for years until I rediscovered it a few weeks ago when I was cleaning out backups.

A few weeks ago, out of curiosity, I extracted the archive and browsed through it. To my surprise it was all there: links, images, text, videos – my entire 6000+ post history had set perfectly preserved this whole time!

I wanted to see it all again! But each post was an individual file and stepping through them one-by-one wasn’t the kind of nostalgic fun I was looking for.

I started browsing the web and seeing if anyone had put a project together to view these old archives.

Spoiler-alert: no one had.

So, I dusted off my ancient web development knowledge, fired up Cursor, and went to town!

The result? Tumbl! A self-hosted viewer for Tumblr blog backup exports. Point it at an archive folder and browse your posts locally in a classic Tumblr-style theme. 

It also supports exporting your archive to a WordPress site, which I’ve done to restore the contents of my Tumblr blog here: https://blog.trevoedwards.com/

Go on, take a tumbl!
https://github.com/trevoedwards/tumbl