Tumblr Declares War On The Internet's Identity Crisis

I'm somewhat fascinated by this Verge article on Tumblr's war on the Internet's identity crisis. The gist is that Tumblr sees your Facebook, your Instagram and your other locked in social networks as an assault on your ability to express your personality. How this is coming from Tumblr that has a strict mobile view for all tumblogs (unless explicitly turned off) and a Dashboard that homogenizes all posts into one single stream is a little beyond me but the point is still fair - your Facebook "profile" really doesn't differentiate you from the other millions of people. This point about self expression on the web is pretty spot on:

Karp thinks that we’re not just the sum of the friends we’ve made, and of the pictures we’ve taken. We’re the frames we’ve chosen to put them in.

However, can't you make the argument that the content of the picture is what is really key? Even if my Instagram profile or Flickr profile is structured like everyone else's, it's still my actual photos.

Maybe it's a heady conversation for a subject that really isn't that heady but I think the notion of self expression on the web, particularly through the lens of tools built by strangers, is worth a second or two of contemplation.