Last week I wrote about Tumblr’s shelved plans to add interoperability to their network. There is a tension between the short term demands, of having your social network that is bleeding money survive, versus the longer term demands of participating in the shift in the digital landscape.

Yesterday, a memo by Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg was leaked that the team is significantly downsizing. Matt went on Tumblr and posted the rest of the memo as well, with some comments and answering questions.

On profitability: “Out of the 11.5M monthly active users of Tumblr, only about 27k have subscribed, or about 0.2%. If that were 10% or 20% we could run the site forever.”

On interoperability, Matt was supportive, but significantly more vague than earlier promises to add ActivityPub support, stating: “Every future for Tumblr that I’m involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, API’s, and open source.”