Despite delays, the plan to connect Tumblr's blogging site to the wider world of decentralized social media, also known as the "fediverse," is still on,
This is something that should take time so that it is done correctly. It would be much harder to get people on board if you had to fix things after launching.
I assume it's even harder to move an existing product to the Fediverse than it is to create a new platform from scratch
But they're not moving people to the fediverse, they're basically rolling out the same plugin integration that is available for WordPress already and the only reason they're even attempting that is because they've not given up on monetizing Tumblr and in order to do that, they have to garner more traffic of which they feel that Tumblr can get with the rising tide of primarily Mastodon.
I've said it before, I'll say it again, people should move their Tumblr accounts to FireFish.
I have big sympathies for FireFish, but I feel like the target audiences so far are very different. Maybe call it the network effect, but it's difficult for me to imagine a tumblr user who maybe is used to blogging about their SuperWhoLock fandoms moving to FireFish where there probably is no big audience for that. At the same time I would want to see these users and their niches in the Fediverse.
There is a very particular culture that is unique to tumblr which I don't see moving somewhere else.
That's fair, but the reality is that Tumblr has been dancing on a knife's edge for a long long time. A community lead and funded effort like FireFish would provide the platform security needed for it to survive. But there's no two ways about it, it won't just happen magically. That said, TumblFish.social could truly be huge and propel FireFish to even surpass Lemmy in terms of users.
I have a really out of the loop question that will probably make me sound like a troll, but really I'm just old and out of the loop:
What exactly are the unique features of Tumblr? as far as I recall it was just a blogging site with support for specific post formats, right? Did it get more complicated than that?
Basically, the main feature that's missing is that reblogging works the same way as replying does on lemmy except it's expanded by default. So a lot of Tumblr culture is basically 'Yes And' improv.