On July 1, my Tumblr dashboard, the social-media site’s equivalent of the Facebook or Twitter timeline, approached peak Bernie Sanders: every other post on my dash was #feelingtheBern.

Two of the day’s posts were long, extended ones discussing not only millennials as a voting bloc, but detailed instructions on how to register to vote in the general election and in the primaries, along with the dates for each state’s primary. “Those in power want you to react,” explained the author of those posts, theliberaltony, who maintains a blog on politics and progressive views among millennials. “The are banking on us acting this way,” the 29-year-old retail supervisor said, when asked about the popularity of his posts.

He has prominently placed FAQs on both Bernie Sanders and the 2016 election on Tumblr, answering questions about why he’s voting for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, about Sanders’s viewpoints on foreign policy, and how young people can vote in the primaries. His most reblogged posts are the aforementioned ones on voting in the primaries, and they’ve led to his being viewed as an authority on the subject among Tumblr users. “This is information that so many people were never taught, and they thirst to participate in electoral politics, they just do not know how.” He believes people turn to Tumblr for this kind of simple information, when it seems forgotten in mainstream media. “You oftentimes do not even have to look for it [on Tumblr],” he points out. “It just shows up on your dashboard because someone else you follow thinks it is important.”

This makes sense to Liba Rubenstein, Tumblr’s director of social impact and public policy. Unlike Reddit, where toxicity can seem par for the course in Reddit’s largest, most mainstream sections, and the better, actually helpful subreddits are mainly found in niche communities, and Twitter, which only last year added new harassment policies to combat the lethal amounts of bullying on its platform, Tumblr sees itself as a place where “folks are quick to help out when someone is asking for help, or give information when someone asks,” says Rubenstein, noting that information can be everything from politics to fandom to personal crises. According to Rubenstein, the three types of Bernie Sanders posts with the most engagement are the dedicated fan blogs, mainstream-media pieces with a lot of traction, and ones by individuals like theliberaltony. (An example of a fan blog might be Sanders4Prez, which has found 6,500 followers in the space of three months.)

“I will say it doesn’t surprise me that much that Bernie’s getting a lot of early traction in communities like Tumblr,” says Rubenstein. “I think that with the Internet and young people, [both] tend to be drawn to those outside the establishment.”

She’s wary to directly connect the online excitement with political reality just yet. Bernie isn’t the first of his kind: previous elections have had “clear front-runners” in independent-minded social-media spaces, like perennial loser Ron Paul. “Going back to 2008,” says Rubenstein, “[we’re] looking at a similar space and seeing that same engagement online among young people, around Internet natives, about Ron Paul that didn’t really translate into caucusing, and showing up at the primaries, and registering to vote.” Generations who’ve grown up relying on the Internet for everything else are also using it to discuss, suggest, and rally around outsider candidates alongside other like-minded users, finding it more satisfying than the already woven narratives of mainstream media such as cable news.

But, as Rubenstein notes, the four years between election cycles is a “long time in social media.” She doesn’t want to completely rely on previous trends. “The connections between social media between people with online lives and people with off-line lives have definitely evolved a lot since then. Among Tumblr people specifically, we see huge connections between people with online and off-line lives, particularly in activism and political engagement.”