I personally wouldn’t worry very much about Tumblr shutting down because I’ve been playing Neopets since 2005 and in a lot of ways it’s story mirrors Tumblr’s pretty much to a T: it was sold by its creators to Viacom for 160 million, then Viacom sold it to JumpStart, JumpStart was acquired by NetDragon and then, finally, it was sold to an independent company via management buyout of NetDragon of for a whooping 4 million. It’s a relic of a different time full of spaghetti code that has been chronically unprofitable ever since its original owners sold it. This brings me to two points:
1. Neopets was ran by a skeleton crew from its acquisition by JumpStart in 2014 to literally five months ago when it was acquired by the independent company. This time period was, for the lack of a better description, pretty annoying. Some features shut down, the updates slowed down to a crawl, very few new features were announced and when something broke it took ages for it to get fixed. There was a time the Neoboards filters stopped working and people said shit and fuck on it for a full day. It had a grand total of TWO programmers working on it last time I’ve heard about it. And with that being said! It was still overall usable and had a small but pretty active player base that had been playing since they were kids, like me. My point is, until someone shuts a website’s servers down for good, it’ll will still be there and there will still be people using it.
2. As I said earlier, Neopets was recently bought again (and is getting a lot of quality of life improvements!) and there is a reason websites like Neopets and Tumblr never actually get shut down and always have some sucker trying to buy it and make it stop being a money sucking machine: brand recognition. Every kid who was alive in the 00s played Neopets. There’s literally a new fashion trend called “Tumblr girl”. Nostalgia sells and sells well nowadays and as long as people look at something and go “Oh, I used to have so much fun in this website!” there’ll be someone with a few millions in their pocket who’ll think they’ll be able make a quick buck out of that. Which they won’t, but they won’t learn.
So, to sum it up. Updates on Tumblr will slow down, and some stuff will break and take a good while to get fixed. Maybe we’ll see some unusually racy ads or have some minor security scares. This might last for years, until someone buys it and fruitlessly tries to revitalize it again! But Tumblr itself isn’t going anywhere and will still work decently well until then, unless someone trips over the server’s power cord.