it's also at blog settings > visibility on desktop

They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.

It wasn't on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn't even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.

They must've updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn't do it through the app.

Wouldn't that be illegal in Europe with GDPR and other consumer protection laws?

If they hadn't given people the option, I don't think the site would be up today. I already saw one artist who wiped their account and left the site within a couple of hours of the announcement.

And they couldn't have picked a worse time to do this after the drama with the CEO banning a popular trans woman permanently off the site last week and threatening to sic the FBI on her for a "threat" of cartoon violence she made after the year-long harassment campaign she suffered had been ignored leading up to her being banned over a transition timeline picture of her face. The CEO then went on to spend hours going into trans women's dms to insist how he's not a transphobe after writing a post about how she had been banned for the "threat," not the picture, even though it had been known for a while by that point that she had been banned for that photo being "nsfw/sexual content," while he eventually started calling her "it." He then topped it off by chasing her and harassing her on Twitter, still insisting that her wishing cartoon violence was a tangible threat and posting the names of accounts she had had at various times on Tumblr. All while he was supposed to be on a 3-month vacation.

Between that and the rumors of this AI deal happening that popped up last week as well, people were already looking for alternative platforms. Allowing people to opt out is the least that they can do if they don't want to run off the users who keep the site running. I don't think many of them are happy that they even have to do that.

Then they got bought automattic, the owners of wordpress.com

Ah ok its the .com forgot that existed.

Fuxake! Now I've gotta move my blog?

Correct, AFAIU.

You must be kidding. You surely haven't heard about Fediverse.

You pay for WordPress.com though. That’s crazy to offer a paid service and use that data in AI training.

Yeah I've seen almost no movement against Tumblr while everyone got very riled up about Meta federation ie fedipact, probably a blindspot bc users have positive associations with tumblr, but it's still an ad/data company all the same.

I wouldn't really trust that promise, frankly. I just checked their terms of service and it has the usual clause:

You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services. ASSC requires licenses from you for that User Content to operate the Services. By posting User Content on the Services, you grant ASSC a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your User Content.

Which isn't really surprising, it's standard boilerplate for a reason. They don't want to be caught in a situation where they can't function legally any more. They say they won't sell the company or your data, and they might even believe that right now, but who knows what the future might bring? They have the ability to do so if the circumstances arise.

i do know cohost, but id prefer fediversed and foss stuff ideally cuz like walled gardens n stuff >w<

At least this way they'll have to work to scrape it instead of getting it for "free"