Callidus

Welcome back true believers.

When Tumblr decided to begin purging their service of adult content, a little part of me quietly panicked. In just a couple years, the site had become an indispensable asset in discovering excellent photos, videos, and GIFs that parked themselves in my “manip ideas” folder. It was also a terrific place to bump into like-minded smut enthusiasts.

I, and many others, miss that brief, golden age. But, there’s no rewinding time and so we’re, all of us, moving on and moving forward. But to where? As Madam Kistulot and I discussed in the last episode of The Black Room podcast, there are a handful of really viable places for Tumblr expats to hang their harnesses.

A terrific option I mentioned on the show is Sharesome.com They are an adult-content-focused (as opposed to adult-content-friendly) site that, for my money, has the best user interface of any social media service I’ve used to date. They also have some features designed to help content creators connect with fans, get paid, and maintain credit for their work. All excellent, and much needed, developments in my opinion.

Their service, I’ve read recently, isn’t just a website but rather something called a progressive web app. I don’t fully understand the implications of that but, among other things, it allows the site to run on mobile devices in a manner similar to native apps. If you’re in the iOS sphere, that’s a big deal as there is likely never going to be an app that makes it to Apple’s store that promotes itself as a hub for adult content.

It’s fast too. Sharesome, running in a dedicated browser on my phone feels damn close to the speed and responsiveness of the Tumblr app. It also has a terrific ‘Topics’ function where you can quickly create or subscribe to a tag. Rather than searching for blogs that feature content you’re hot for, let’s say erotic mind control as an example, you can simply search for that topic and add it to your feed. When folks post to their blogs and tag their posts to the erotic mind control topic, everyone who’s subscribed will see their post, even if they don’t follow that person’s individual blog.

It’s a slick feature and the thing that made me fall in love with the service.

Sharesome would be absolutely phenomenal… if it weren’t sitting empty like one of those shiny, new Chinese cities waiting on people to inhabit it. There’s plenty of mainstream and niche-mainstream content to be found but very slim pickings for the kinds of blogs I avidly followed on Tumblr. Where did all those folks go?

bdsmlr.com, it turns out.

The little Tumblr-clone-that-could stepped in almost immediately after it was announced that adult content would soon be purged from Tumblr’s service. I checked it out at the time and wasn’t too impressed. Their interface felt like a cheap, less responsive, knock-off of Tumblr that was grasping beyond its reach to duplicate the features Tumblr users had become accustomed to.

It still feels that way to me. However, the devs behind the site have been plodding forward, adding requested features and fixing bugs. The service is growing noticeably better each day. And moreover, the community there is thriving. I’ve found dozens of Tumblr refugees who have moved their content there, and several totally new blogs as well.

I don’t find myself missing Tumblr as much as I was just a few weeks ago. The people who made that adult community such a fun place to be are doing it all over again.

Sure, I wish everyone had collectively migrated to Sharesome. I love using their mobile site and I think almost everyone would be as impressed as I am with their innovative and forward-looking feature set. Rather than just settling for cloning Tumblr’s look and functionality which, let’s face it, could’ve withstood some improvement.

But if bdsmlr continues to innovate at the rate they’ve been going; If they can gain enough financial stability to keep delivering new features and refining their service… who knows where they might be this time next year? Content is king. The community on bdsmlr already has a checkmark in that column as far as I’m concerned. bdsmlr also has a dev team that is actively engaged with their community right now and working hard to make them happy and draw in new users.

If that continues like it has, I can imagine some great things ahead for this site and it’s users. I’m very happy to count myself among them. So, if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by my blogs:

Callidus.bdsmlr.com is where I repost smexy pics & gifs
CallidusCreates.bdsmlr.com is where I post my own creations

And, if you’d like, you can check out my Sharesome page here.

See you next time!