You're absolutely right, if someone could figure that out it'd be huge for DW. I think it'd be the first non-LJ codebase site that could be imported, and in the parts of Tumblr I hang out in there's a huge audience overlap with DW. I actually came up with a manual method to import from Tumblr to LJ, but it relies on LJ's repost function.
On the technical side the importer wouldn't have to worry about followers/followed, because on Tumblr those relationships hold no special privileges anyway. And Tumblr lets people rename freely, with the caveat that links inside of posts can break at any time, so the importer wouldn't need to worry about re-writing username references. I think the only difficulty might be in tags - the way they're used on Tumblr, some people might hit a few thousand tags inside of a week, and there's no way all those tags could be imported to DW.
On the other hand, many of those tags aren't used as search-metadata but as content-metadata, and those are often the accounts with thousands of them. Perhaps a checkbox, on import, for "yes try to map the tags as tags" or "no, include all tags as text footers to the entry content" with the caveat that after a certain processing limit, all tags will become text footers, and/or the opportunity to add a unique tag to the import so the entries can be found again easily.
Hmm, if it was me I'd make it so that any tags the user created on their account BEFORE the import would end up tagging the entries containing that tag, and then do the "include all tags as text footers to entry content" option too. That would make it so that if there were some tags that would be useful to have as tags as opposed to just context, it would be automatic to have them.
Oh, good thought! And DW has the handy tag renaming, in case anyone wants to adjust their DW tags to match their Tumblr versions before they import. Perhaps a note to that effect, reminding people of the possibility when they go to the import page, would be useful.
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dreamwidth_meta2013-05-19 10:08 pm
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On the technical side the importer wouldn't have to worry about followers/followed, because on Tumblr those relationships hold no special privileges anyway. And Tumblr lets people rename freely, with the caveat that links inside of posts can break at any time, so the importer wouldn't need to worry about re-writing username references. I think the only difficulty might be in tags - the way they're used on Tumblr, some people might hit a few thousand tags inside of a week, and there's no way all those tags could be imported to DW.
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