Tumblr tests ‘Communities,’ semi-private groups with their own moderators and feeds

After scaling back operations and reassigning staff to other projects, Tumblr owner Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company would home in on the parts of Tumblr’s service that worked and kill those that didn’t — as it did with the subscription offering, Post+ last month. Now the company wants to focus on the former by launching a new feature that capitalizes on something Tumblr already does well: help people find communities. Today, the Tumblr Labs division announced the launch of “Communities,” an experimental feature that offers a new, dedicated space on the platform for people to network around topics of interest, separate from the main dashboard.Tumblr says these communities will be “semi-private” spaces that have their own moderators, rules, and privacy settings — similar, perhaps, to Reddit’s forums known as subreddits or X’s Communities, where posts are separate from the main timeline. In addition, the communities will have their own feeds that users can view, which are also separate from Tumblr’s algorithmic “For You” and chronological “Following” feeds. Meanwhile, the interactions that take place in a community will remain separated from Tumblr’s broader network. That is, you can reblog a post into a community, Tumblr says, but not
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