I’ve been seeing it happen to a handful of people, but apparently if you try to delete your sideblog you will end up deleting your MAIN tumblr account entirely as well
I don’t know if this is a bug or something, but I’ve seen it happen to ~4 people now, so until this possible bug gets worked out do NOT delete any of your sideblogs unless you want to risk deleting your account entirely
As far as I know, this is not a programming bug. This is bad design resulting in user error. It is safe to delete sideblogs if you do it the correct (non-intuitive) way.
Source: I have successfully deleted multiple sideblogs over the years. And I have unfortunately heard of many people accidentally deleting their whole accounts over the years too. This Tumblr help page corroborates my experience and outlines the proper way to delete a sideblog. (Note the difference between the headers: “Deleting Your Account” vs. “Deleting a Secondary Blog or Leaving a Group Blog”)
The mistake people make:
When you go into the settings of a sideblog, there’s a button at the bottom that says “Delete [sideblog url]”
Of course, people think this button will delete only the sideblog they want to delete. But the thing is, this button shows up at the bottom of every blog in the settings page, and the url displayed will match whatever sideblog you’re looking at. It will still delete your entire account, as intended by staff.
What you need to actually do:
When you want to delete a sideblog, you must go to the members tab of that blog and hit “Delete this blog”
Sideblogs are meant to have the potential to be shared by multiple users. So the thinking is, if you are one of 5 members of a blog and you want to leave, you go into the members tab and leave. The 4 other people still share the blog without you.
That same line of thought applies when you are the only user. When you are the only owner of a sideblog, you must ‘leave’ the ‘group’ from the members page to delete it. Deleting any blog from the settings page will delete your entire account.
If you’re still unsure, you can follow these steps:
Create a throwaway account. Not another sideblog, but an entirely new account from scratch with a new email.
Add this throwaway account as a member to the sideblog (done on the same members page, can be seen in the screenshot above as “Invite to this blog”)
Once your throwaway is a member of the sideblog, you can leave the sideblog from your main. The throwaway should become admin of that sideblog by default once you leave.
Now you can test out what it’s like to properly delete a sideblog from a throwaway account. IIRC, you will be prompted to type the url of the sideblog along with your login info (email and password) to confirm.
in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses(verge article).they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.
for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.
so how can you help?
boycott the publishing companies involved in this. they’re absolute ghouls, frankly, and don’t deserve a penny. the companies involved are harpercollins (imprints), wiley (imprints), penguin random house llc (imprints), and hachette book group (imprints). make sure the websites are set to your location as it may differ worldwide.
learn to torrent. download a torrent client (i recommend transmission), a vpn (i recommend protonvpn - sign up and choose the area that’s closest to your continent/country), and hit up /r/piracy on reddit for websites. with torrenting, you can get (almost) any media you want for free in high quality, with add-ons such as subtitles, and with no risks of loss. i would also recommend getting into the habit of watching stuff online for free. the less you can pay to a giant corporation, the better.
get into the habit of downloading and archiving materials. find a TB external hard drive, ideally the higher the better. it’ll probably cost around $60 for 1TB and continue to go up, but they’re so so useful. if you can’t afford a drive, look for any GB harddrives or memory sticks you have lying around and just fill them up. videos, pdfs, magazines, songs, movies, games - anything you can rip and download and fit on there, do it, because nothing is permanent.
donate to the internet archive. this is the most important option on the list. the IA relies entirely on funding, and it’s going to need more to fight this case. whatever you can donate, do it. i promise it’s helpful.
and finally…
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cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can’t lend, and we absolutely don’t have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it’s difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.
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