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Uhhh.... maybe I should start using this more?
3 years ago
Well... huh. I've been on this site for a long time but it after I started taking my tentative steps into using Twitter back in early 2020 I kinda drifted away from using FA. It felt like Twitter had a bigger audience and the immediate feedback from the things I shared there was really pleasant. Seeing things I offered up being shared and appreciated on Twitter was pretty awesome and even though the site was an awful way of preserving work as opposed to a dedicated *gallery* like FA I still found myself using Twitter at the expense of FA more and more. I'm not the sort of person who stays glued to a site and regularly updating and interacting with people. I remember way back in my first AOL chat room experiences getting overwhelmed by the amount of simultaneous conversations happening. The urge to interact with people one on one is strong and the sheer *noise* of all the activity on Twitter and social media sites is deafening. I like to post things intermittently and then step back and do something else. I fear this may seem anti-social but it's more like I need to keep things slow so I can devote my attention to it all at a pace I can manage. Even now I have a collection of notes in my FA inbox and Telegram that I cringe in embarassment over because I haven't read them. I want to happily turn to everyone who messages me and share my personal time in abundance just as I do at conventions, but I would never get anything done. I want to click on everything that other people share whether it's artwork, essays, stories, jokes, or questions and let them know I'm interested and enjoy what they're offering. And yet I don't. And I feel weird and awkward about it. I feel extraordinarily grateful for the attention people give to me and I don't want to let anyone down... and I want to keep doing things that get more attention. There's a balance there I should try to find.
It's a strange situation to find myself in while looking at Twitter. I've often gone days or sometimes weeks without sharing anything there. I'll take a look often and enjoy the deluge of things people share however and feel like I'm *rubbing elbows* with friends and peers, but at the end of the day I'm still left feeling like I am much more at home and comfortable talking with all the people I see and visit with while traveling and attending conventions. If Twitter collapses I guess I won't be too bothered by it because I expect *something* will rise up to take its place... but I hope the replacement will be better and ideally as large of an audience. The thing that was so great about Twitter vs. Fur Affinity is that the artwork I shared would reliably reach people who never knew I existed previously. FA is a lot more insular and that's part of what lead me to not spend as much time sharing here. It's odd to think that FA might be the site with the most stability for posting and sharing?
Other people on Twitter have posted notes with extensive lists of where they can be found if the site goes under. I don't have very much to share. I have an account here, and that's just about it. I have started to make some random posts back on my old Live Journal account and that may be something I'll use from time to time since that's more of a place where I'm totally me and not necessarily trying to talk to an audience. I never had an account with Tumblr, Instagram, or DeviantArt. I still have an account on Facebook but I've pretty much exiled myself from there because that was the place where I only established connections with family and friends who I knew personally, and after the turmoil of the past few years it all became too much for me to bear, -constantly reading about the things people were angry with and the devastating amount of cynicism and rancor within people who I thought I knew better than that.
Soo... here I am. Wondering what to do with myself. I keep hoping that Twitter will stay around and still be useful, but if it gets broken in the process of making it all new then maybe FA will become the widest audience I have to talk to and share with.
To everyone who reads this, let me just say I'm terribly glad to know you find my output interesting enough to watch and to sit and read through all this. At heart I'm deeply interested in the people behind the text and pictures and I hope that comes through in all the communication I offer whether it's in person, the images I upload, the work I do for people, or the messages I send out on the internet. You guys keep me motivated and glad to be sharing.
It's a strange situation to find myself in while looking at Twitter. I've often gone days or sometimes weeks without sharing anything there. I'll take a look often and enjoy the deluge of things people share however and feel like I'm *rubbing elbows* with friends and peers, but at the end of the day I'm still left feeling like I am much more at home and comfortable talking with all the people I see and visit with while traveling and attending conventions. If Twitter collapses I guess I won't be too bothered by it because I expect *something* will rise up to take its place... but I hope the replacement will be better and ideally as large of an audience. The thing that was so great about Twitter vs. Fur Affinity is that the artwork I shared would reliably reach people who never knew I existed previously. FA is a lot more insular and that's part of what lead me to not spend as much time sharing here. It's odd to think that FA might be the site with the most stability for posting and sharing?
Other people on Twitter have posted notes with extensive lists of where they can be found if the site goes under. I don't have very much to share. I have an account here, and that's just about it. I have started to make some random posts back on my old Live Journal account and that may be something I'll use from time to time since that's more of a place where I'm totally me and not necessarily trying to talk to an audience. I never had an account with Tumblr, Instagram, or DeviantArt. I still have an account on Facebook but I've pretty much exiled myself from there because that was the place where I only established connections with family and friends who I knew personally, and after the turmoil of the past few years it all became too much for me to bear, -constantly reading about the things people were angry with and the devastating amount of cynicism and rancor within people who I thought I knew better than that.
Soo... here I am. Wondering what to do with myself. I keep hoping that Twitter will stay around and still be useful, but if it gets broken in the process of making it all new then maybe FA will become the widest audience I have to talk to and share with.
To everyone who reads this, let me just say I'm terribly glad to know you find my output interesting enough to watch and to sit and read through all this. At heart I'm deeply interested in the people behind the text and pictures and I hope that comes through in all the communication I offer whether it's in person, the images I upload, the work I do for people, or the messages I send out on the internet. You guys keep me motivated and glad to be sharing.
Either way, I like FA's format too and it'll be nice to see you around here to whatever degree works for you!
However, FA can be complete crap when it comes to finding artists. The front page of this site is inundated with artwork, that unless you already have a large following, it's nearly impossible to grow. I've found a number of artists pre-Twitter by going through someone's favorites. Bad thing with that is it requires a person to actively go through each person's favorites. I'd like there to be a feature of this site (that you can turn off) that will notify an account's watchers of that account's favorites activity.
I made a tumblr some near 10 years ago, but I never could get used to that, so I have no real idea of how that place works. I am enjoying the increased activity of those I watch on here since the Musk fiasco with Twitter.
So, I know all the artists I see people hiring or putting in galleries etc around my town come exclusively from Instagram. Not sure, maybe that's just the facebook effect?
Tumblr is buzzing again, though the sudden surge in focus actually knocked them offline for a few minutes tonight.
Mastodon is the up and coming social media tech, not sure it'll replace Twitter for posting/sharing your art, but it's definitely got a similar vibe for posting online about whatever today's subject is. (and unlike basically everything else online aside from email, it's not one site but rather a site software any web admin can run, and all those individual websites talk to one another). For example, you might check out socel.net which is an animation themed one, or meow.social where lots of furs are. Like email, you only need one account on the internet unless you're doing separation of concerns (work vs play vs nsfw, etc).
Of course, lots of furry artists still on Telegram as well!
Interacting with others: Not at all. Like email, as long as you put the person's username @ server, you can follow, like, boost, & reply anyone's account and posts.
So I'm on
Also like email, it is NOT one company, it is a way for different websites running the Mastodon server software or similar to talk to one another.
The experience is roughly like Twitter once you have an account somewhere.
A lot of servers: Yes, and they may have different rules. But it also means that a very rich person can't just go buy the whole thing and tank it. In fact, like email, since it's based on an open standard, the network cannot go away so long as people want to use it, someone can always make a new node. Some servers can't be seen from others - but that's usually because one is letting a bunch of problematic folks on, or the server owner is causing problems, so the community has generally blocked it from interacting.
The big one (mastodon dot social) run by the dev of the original version of the Mastodon software is partly restricted/muted by a lot of the other servers. because he's gotten rid of all the other mods and with tens of thousands of users, it's unmaintainable. But in general the community is great, on that one and others.
Last I heard there are now over 7 million people scattered across the various sites that make up the Fediverse (Mastodon-like websites, as well as other sites that use the same tech to communicate and "do social")
There are several software products that make it easy to post to many sites. A lot of artists and myself use PostyBirb. Write one post, press the post button, and the software takes care of creating the post on many sites.