A Tumblr post that reblogs an ask misattributes the answer to the reblogging user

[sirilyan]

Original Tumblr post: https://www.tumblr.com/seananmcguire/745936525494190080/hi-there-ive-been-working-my-way-through-all goblin copy: https://goblin.band/notes/9rasab84lablveb7

The post is a reblog of one of Neil Gaiman's posts, but in goblin the attribution to neil-gaiman is lost.

And here's some great news, the RSS feed is the problem:

    <item>
      <title>Hi there! I’ve been working my way through all your
      old comics and comics adjacent to you (reading thru dead boy
      detectives now) and I’m absolutely loving it! Anyways, my
      questions come to your word choice in the old comics. As
      someone who was not alive in the 90s, I’m curious if the
      wording chosen for certain things was deliberately
      provocative or just used wording popular at the time (ie the
      use of slurs or other racially charged language that is not
      used as often anymore). I’m not trying to “cancel” you or
      anything, I’m just curious as a reader from the 2020s having
      a view of old media!</title>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;I could only answer that a word at a
      time. For example you'll find "dyke" used by a lesbian in A
      Game of You. It was used because every lesbian I knew at the
      time (1991) (and I knew a lot of London lesbians) used the
      word "dyke" as their descriptor of choice. The editors at DC
      were concerned it might be a slur, so sent the assistant
      editor of Sandman (Alisa Kwitney) down to a local NYC Lesbian
      bar to talk to NYC Lesbians, who pointed her at the flyers in
      the bar and the copies of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out
      For, and told her that it definitely wasn't offensive. So we
      used it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't ever recall trying to be
      deliberately provocative, if that helps.
      &lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <link>
      https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/745936525494190080</link>
      <guid>
      https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/745936525494190080</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2024 08:28:26 -0700</pubDate>
    </item>

This isn't just a feature parity thing, it's incorrect.

[sirilyan]

After a little bit of reading, I'm pretty sure that:

1. The Tumblr API /user/dashboard or /posts endpoints would solve these problems. The RSS feeds are all sorts of comically incomplete, but NPF correctly maintains both attribution and post formatting.

2. Using these endpoints might count as "substantially replicat[ing] products or services offered by Tumblr" - https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api_agreement

[sirilyan]

Okay, the more I look at Tumblr's RSS feeds the more I think NPF and the API is the way to go, and maybe later there are consequences.

1. There's a ton of other formatting issues that the RSS feed produces.
2. It simplifies any future work with reblog trails significantly (by turning them into plain old regular posts and replies).
3. My psychic powers of guessing tell me that NPF is actually maintained and RSS is just something that hasn't been turned off.