Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr’s active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups

Don't call it a comeback.

User numbers spiked in January during the near-ban of TikTok and jumped again last year when Brazil temporarily banned X.

To keep up with the momentum, Tumblr introduced Reddit-style Communities in December, letting users connect over shared interests like photography and video games. In January, it debuted Tumblr TV—a TikTok-like feature that serves as both a GIF search engine and a short-form video platform.

But perhaps Tumblr’s greatest strength is that it isn’t TikTok or Facebook.

For its users...that’s part of the appeal.

Tumblr's been through a rough ride, but at the core there's a lot of nice things to like about it. In previous posts, I talked about some opportunities for Tumblr as a result of replatforming on top of WordPress and its expressed intent for ActivityPub integration. In doing so, not only would it enable an intuitive front-end for publishing different kinds of posts, but it would also provide opportunities for self-hosting and a more federated and decentralized social platform.

I'm excited to see where this goes.

Related post from Business Insider's Amanda Hoover on the topic.