Ten days ago we launched Communities on Tumblr to the whole world. It’s been in open beta for awhile, and in October we added some additional entry points to all users. But Dec 12 marked the official public debut of Communities!

We got some press right away, including from TechCrunch, who had this particularly nice quote:

The idea is to refocus Tumblr around what it does best: connecting users with their interests. That’s something the company is already well-known for, particularly in areas like its fan communities around TV shows, movies, video games, actors, musicians, and artists, among other things. The Communities feature capitalizes on that built-in demand, letting users organize themselves into groups as broad as liking Taylor Swift or art or as niche as being fans of the “Wicked” book who have not seen the movie or musical.

– Sarah Perez in TechCrunch

How-to-Geek wrote a pretty comprehensive explainer as well. Our own how-to guide is here.

We built Communities because we did a lot of user research which told us that people — especially Gen Z folks — wanted their own spaces on the internet. People want both cozy and control, access to intimate spaces that they are able to moderate themselves. We also knew that folks wanted to be able to hyperfixate in bigger groups as well — and the Arcane community has validated that, with already more than 11,000 members posting fan art, shitposts, fan fic, writing prompts, and more. And it is growing larger by the day!

A great place to get started is Browse; a curated entry point for Communities. If you already know what you’re after, simply use the search. Maybe Frogblr puts some pep in your step? Or if you’re looking to celebrate a win (big or small) join the Happy Smilers. Perhaps you’ve always secretly believed that Superman and Batman should put us all out of our misery and just kiss already; if so, the Superbat community is for you. Around 700 communities are being created each day since launch — so there is almost certainly something for you! And if nothing is quite right, or if you just want a private space to share posts with your closest friends, then create your own.

I’m very proud of the entire Tumblr team, who pulled together to build Communities, listen to user feedback, tweak, and finally launch! It was a huge task, and our users are definitely at the fore of the feature, helping us build by trusting us to try out first an alpha and then beta feature, and by giving us extensive feedback. And indicators show us that users love the feature — our r7 (the percent of people who return to Communities at least once in the first week since joining it) is 75%. That’s crazy high. [R7 is a really common way to measure the stickiness of a feature or product — also commonly used metrics are d1 (users who return the day after joining), d3 (users joining the third day after joining), and d7 (users who return the seventh day after joining) – our “day” metrics are also very high.] When we were in open beta, we knew that most of our Communities users were our power users on Tumblr, so we expected those metrics to be pretty high — they were already using Tumblr a lot. We expected that post-launch to everyone, that those metrics would dip to more “normal” levels. But they haven’t; they’re at or above where they were pre-launch.

We’re still actively building out the Communities feature, adding more capabilities and user-facing moderation tooling. We’re still listening to users who take the time to give us feedback and make feature requests. If there’s a piece of Tumblr that has been co-built by users and staff, it’s really Communities. We’d love for you to try it.