fxtumblr

Like TwitFix, but for Tumblr

Why?

Because Tumblr embeds suck, that's why. If you're a Tumblr user and you keep sending funny posts to your non-Tumblr friends on places like Discord, you probably know. If you're the non-Tumblr friend in question (like me) then you doubly so know.

I got so annoyed at the status quo that I made this to fix it. The initial version was quickly written in one day, and improvements are still being made.

This is heavily inspired by fxtwitter.com, vxtwitter.com, twxtter/s/i/x and so on, but it works with Tumblr instead.

How to use it

Simply replace www.tumblr.com in your URL with the URL of the fxtumblr instance you want to use.

You can also try out the official instance at tpmblr.com (or fx.dissonant.dev). For Discord users - you can post a tumblr.com link, then in the next message type s/u/p; this will automatically replace tumblr.com in the previous message with tpmblr.com.

Setting up for self-hosting

• Install Python 3
• Create a venv for the packages:
  • The preferred way to do this is to use Poetry - install Poetry, and run the later shell scripts through poetry run ./run-xxx.sh
  • If you don't want to use Poetry, run python3 -m venv venv, then . venv/bin/activate; then get all the dependencies with pip3 install -r requirements.txt
• Copy config.yml.sample to config.yml
• Modify config according to your needs
• Install nginx and Hypercorn, copy nginx config (fxtumblr.nginx) into your sites-available, modify it to use your domainn name, ln -s it into sites-enabled
• Install Redis, set it up via /etc/redis.conf, apply the settings to the config file
• Run ./run.sh (and simultaneously ./run-renderer.sh if you want rendering support - see next section).

Enabling thread rendering support

Unfortunately, standard embeds are too limited to fully display an entire Tumblr thread. Thus, there's optional support for rendering threads using a headless version of Chrome/Chromium using the pyppeteer package.

In order to make use of it, set renders_enable in your config. Then, run ./run-renderer.sh to start the renderer process. A copy of Chrome will be downloaded automatically on first launch; you'll probably want to replace it with your own system-wide installation of Chromium. To do so, take the path it printed ( $HOME/.local/share/pyppeteer/local-chromium/xxxxxxx), from that folder remove chrome-linux/chrome and replace it with a symlink to /usr/bin/chromium: ln -s /usr/bin/chromium HOME/.local/share/pyppeteer/local-chromium/xxxxxxx/chrome-linux/chrome.

You will also have to download Tumblr's web fonts for the best experience - see fonts/README.md. You should also get a system font that has emoji suport (like Noto Emoji).