I do not want to sound like… You should have known better/I told you so/etc, but as… not that, as I can sound, I really hope artists take stock of what’s going on at twitter. Things that have happened to artists in recent years:
tumblr banned porn to appease bigger companies
webtoon called your passion a side hustle all while laughing that to the bank
deviantart scrubs your art to sell AI art
patreon is constantly finding new and exciting ways to make people who use it nervous
twitter has been collapsing for the past year
there are other sites with their own problems Im not familiar with
There is no single platform that won’t throw you under the bus if the people running it think they can make more money elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if they’ll find out they’re wrong later. They’ll gamble with your livelihood, and when their platform collapses, they’ll sell it off afterwards and move onto the next thing to ruin for a buck.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Tumblr allows nudity again, but it’s run by clowns, and it won’t be but a few years before they find some new parent company or investors that want to ruin it again. No platform is safe because this is how this game is supposed to be played. Growth, growth, growth, tear it down for scrap, and sell it.
I don’t pretend to know the answer to this problem, but at least diversify, make your own website, and make back ups.
Worth reblogging in light of twitter announcing it’s going to scrape it’s own site for AI training and now artists are feeling forced to jump ship.
Extrapolate everything you’ve seen in the past year and take an educated guess if twitter is going to get better or worse moving forward. That site is only going to get worse, and it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. This website is only going to get worse. Every website is only going to get worse. You don’t need'em!
Move, network, make a website, a youtube channel, a blog, make friends, build relationships, diversify, grow. You won’t get serotonin, notifications, and good boy points for good posts™ on the terf website, but the people who matter will follow you.
Alternatives to Twitter, Tumblr, etc. for posting in more social spaces (great for promoting your own shit to people who might actually care about it):
Mastodon (finding a good instance is hard, admittedly, but mastodon.art is great for artists)
Or if you’re capable of installing applications on your own website, there’s several self-hostable feed readers. I use Feed-on-Feeds, and I hear really good things about FreshRSS.
I’m surprised that it hasn’t been recommended yet but Inkblot is pretty much run by a couple of people and I’ve watched them build up their site and it’s come such a long way.
I haven’t spent too much time on it cause I’ve been busy trying to figure out where to put my art that wont get scraped by AI, but I feel like it’s worth noting that they work with other artists and non artists!
i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i’ve seen people saying things like “well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it” and it’s like, that’s not the point. it’s that companies /shouldn’t/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i’m still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn’t have to begin with though?
adding this to the post because, 100%, just there’s a fire doesn’t mean you should pour gasoline on it
I have like ten different ad and/or tracking blockers on my PC and phone… just out of pure spite
Is there any benefit to using multiple ad blockers at once? I honestly don’t know, but I haven’t seen a single ad on the internet in ages and I get to use this image:
