TLDR: You Only Have To Worry About NPF If You’re A Strictly Mobile Blog, And If You Write Really, Really

wait wait can you explain more the new thing in tumblr that makes it harder to post long fics, i barely heard of it rn

Okay SO i did some digging into the topic. Mind you, this isn’t super extensive, just ~20 mins of scouring around on tumblr.

The format for text posts has changed on tumblr to NPF (Neue Post Format). It’s the thing that allows us to give use colors and tiny text on mobile. It has benefits, but it also has some drawbacks...

The above was taken from this article all about NPF. You can also find the link to the article through Tumblr’s official blog, @changes , which posts updates to the sites pretty regularly. There’s a post from Feb 19 that indicates they’re still rolling out the new format. The big scare around the situation is in the first two points in the NPF limits. Authors that primarily use tumblr are concerned that this new format will limit the amount of content we can squeeze into one post. This was my initial concern as well!

250 content blocks or less in a single post — This is basically saying we can fit 250 paragraphs into one post

4,096 characters or less per content block in a single post— This is saying that each paragraph needs to be less than 4,097 characters. Since a post can have 250 paragraphs, that’s a total of 1,024,000 characters.

TO BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS MEANS, an 11.3k fic of mine has about 200 paragraphs (not necessarily 5+ sentences, merely new paragraphs that sometimes contain only one line of text). AND that fic has ~63,800 characters— meaning, if i’m understanding this right, we have no need to be this concerned... unless you write really long fics like me and enjoy splitting paragraphs to that amount.

EVEN SO, this feature is only mandatory on mobile (through the app)!! If you make a post on pc tumblr, it will not automatically use this NPF feature— you actually have to toggle it (meaning you have to make a conscious decision to use it) on the post in order for these limits to apply.

TLDR: You only have to worry about NPF if you’re a strictly mobile blog, and if you write really, really long fics in singular posts.