EARTH NOW HAS A QUASI-MOON

Astronomers have detected a small asteroid that doesn’t seem to want to go away. Called a quasi-satellite, this new companion circles around the Earth as it orbits the sun—and it’s going to stay that way for the next few hundred years.

Your replies are on the way, Tumblr

Just wanted to let you know that we’re putting the finishing touches on replies, and making sure they play nicely with everything else on this platform.

“Why did they go away? Why, staff, whyyyy?” Fair question. We had a gaggle of overlapping message-like systems—namely, asks, fan mail, reblogging with commentary, question posts (rare!), and, yes, replies. When we finally introduced actual instant messaging a couple months ago, we had a lot of untangling to do.

In order to make all these systems work together, we had to do some back-end retooling, which meant taking down replies for a bit. For longer than we expected. Sorry about that.

And we get it—replies fill a very particular need (and you were very clear about expressing that need). They’re a kind of super like. A way to fully express your feelings about a thing without expecting anything in response. A gift.

When they come back, they’ll be even better. People will be able to reply to your posts multiple times, and you’ll even be able to reply to your own posts. Simple changes, yes, but ones that open up lots of possibilities.

Best of all, we’ve laid the down the engineering and design groundwork for even more substantial improvements down the road. Replies will be able to develop side-by-side with messaging.

More to come, soon enough. We know you all miss replies. We hope you enjoy their imminent return.