@polymerwitch

That would be a bold move on their part -- some fediverse admins will ignore it, some will fediblock right away. The more blocked tumblr gets, the less metadata they can collect from this fedi excursion.

Yes, injecting ads is standard practice for social media -- but injecting ads that masquerade as real posts has traditionally been done via "hiring an influencer" rather than by simply inserting rows into a database somewhere.

I think centralized social media is a very carefully orchestrated frog boiling operation, and tumblr probably can't afford to do something this drastic.