bdsmlr

If you've never heard the name Mindgeek, please read this link instead of or as well as this post. It's a short article explaining the current state of the porn industry, and I recommend it without reservation to anyone who has opinions about mainstream pornography, FOSTA-SESTA, or sex workers' rights.

I really wanted to like bdsmlr.

It was supposed to be a mirror site of NSFW Tumblr, remaining when NSFW Tumblr was destroyed. And indeed, it does host an astonishing amount of exported NSFW Tumblr content. However, it fails at its goal of duplicating NSFW Tumblr by the simple expedient of having an interface so shoddy that it's outright unusable.

Let me back up. If what you liked about NSFW Tumblr was the image search, it's okay. A huge data hog, but so is Tumblr. Blessed with infinite pagination and no way of turning it off, but so is Tumblr. Slows your device way down and crashes your browser semi-frequently... still not much worse than Tumblr. And as a bonus, searching for a keyword (like "blowjob" or "spanking") will give you only image/GIF results. No radfems yelling about how it's impossible to make sexy videos without traumatizing the models. No debates about when it's okay to spank children. Just porn.

That said, if what you liked was the captions and text posts, "unusable" is pretty much on the mark. No text, however short, ever appears in search, except the large-font titles of text posts. No captions. No text post content. No metadata, like credits or image descriptions. Just images and GIFs as far as the eye can see.

The advantage of this site was supposed to be that it supported personalized relationships to sexuality, like tumblr, rather than a featureless grid of interchangeable pictures of genitalia. But the personalized relationships on tumblr were largely expressed through text, which bdsmlr fails to acknowledge and respect.

It's no coincidence that the most expressive popular porn site, tumblr before the ToS change, allowed users to alternate images of models with amateur words. One image would have a dozen people writing out different fantasies the image inspired in them, sometimes in the notes, sometimes by saving and reuploading to put it in the tags again. On bdsmlr, though, viewing the caption on an image that appears in a search result requires opening the result in a separate tab. This barrier to skimming results leads to an exhausting, disjointed experience for audience members who prefer to focus on text.

I'd like it if bdsmlr allowed text to appear in results by default, and gave users an option to turn it off, or at least the other way around. And while we're making wishes, I'd like bdsmlr to have a "reblog into tags" option so that people don't have to reupload an image in order to put it back in the tags. I'm far from the world's most vocal opponent of copyright violation, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with websites being structured to encourage separating credit from content, especially in the complex and bizarre world of porn copyrights.

This is not even to mention people with disabilities that preclude any direct access to images. Being honest, tumblr was never all that accessible to people with such disabilities, but immso,* bdsmlr seems significantly worse.

I don't, honestly, see much of a point in joining the website until and unless it allows previews in search results to include text. That it doesn't is a massive disability access failure as well as a text-preference access failure. I admire the data preservation efforts of the bdsmlr staff, but I refuse to accept the current restrictions on users sharing text, and I don't intend to post to any bdsmlr account, the same as I have committed to not posting to any tumblr account, until they are lifted.

* In my mostly-sighted opinion.