I welcome everyone with open arms!

That's the best approach!

.... Just maybe everyone should stay out my arm's reach for now, or else risk being sneezed on 😂

I have had the rona im not scared of it again

LOL make covid scared of YOU

Glad people are coming back, I like FA more than twitter by far. :D

Oh 100% the same. The convenience of twitter is nice, but my god does there seem to be a concentrated pool of really unhappy people there. I barely use the site anymore because of it.

Im a bit ill myself.

Let's sit in the corner and have soup

Twitter has never been so entertaining in years until now lol all the trolls making endless funnys

It's a dumpster fire 😅 I do appreciate the anarchy of people misusing the verification system.

well this happens when the meme lord took over and decided to turn twitter into a clown platform xD

I think it's a clever tactic really; create controversy to drive traffic. I don't think the site is ultimately going to go anywhere but it's certainly creating movement.

I welcome this, twitter as an art gallery is terrible and makes it difficult to find anything from any particular artist lol

Dude the more I post on twitter the more followers I lose XD!! Me and Twitter feel like a dance coupe that constantly awkwardly step on each other's toes haha

People are leaving Twitter because of politics, not because it's struggling, ...

Referring to that as a struggle is still appropriate. Different views clashing and all. Struggling in this instance is not referring to finances.

It's struggling because of those politics, but thanks for sharing where your loyalties lie.

You mean like this: After acquisition, Elon Musk taking down child sexual exploitation content from Twitter

I think another reason people are coming (back) to FA is because DeviantArt made a serious miscalculation on a recent feature rollout which burned a fair amount of community good will. They quickly reversed course, but not before the damage was done. This happened a few days before Twitter started its implosion, so it may be hard to disambiguate the two.

Oh gosh yeah I saw that! I was really surprised, rightly or wrongly I couldn't say. I need to look into the situation again because I saw the immediate backlash o:

As far as the situation is concerned, I think they made just about every possible misstep. Unfortunately, those missteps overshadowed the good ideas that were part of the announcement. To DA's credit, the idea of tagging AI generated art and allowing users to filter it out of their feeds was a good one. Similarly, the idea of adding metadata to works to indicate that the creator doesn't want them used for AI training is a step forward.

However, the implementation should have been to mark works with the tag by default unless a creator explicitly indicated that they didn't want their works marked as such. It also only covered visual works, when other types of works (such as literature) should also be tagged in advance of possible evolution of the field. They also glossed over the fact that the metadata label is advisory, and that not all AI algorithms will respect it.

While some of the other missteps may have been forgivable, the decision to make the tag opt-in rather than opt-out was less so. This was compounded by the announcement of the DA branded AI art generator. While this would normally be seen as nothing more than a cash grab, the decision to make the noai tagging opt-in rather than opt-out led users to believe that their art would be used to train the AI, despite the assurances that it wouldn't be used for that purpose.

One other possible misstep was the Friday announcement, via twitter. I feel it should have been announced earlier in the week. Notice should also have been sent via email and through announcements.

Over the past few months, I've observed that DA is pushing Core subscriptions rather hard. When combined with the release of the DA branded AI, I wonder if DA might be in a less than stable place financially.

AI art at the moment makes me uncomfortable. I appreciate the way the tool could be used but I think there's been some very unfortunate choices to get it to where it is now. It's one of those situations I recognise how awesome that could be and how it could really help people bring ideas into a tangible form, but I am wary of the impact implementation may have.

Ultimately I do have to profess I haven't delved deep into the topic and rely on a lot on what information and concerns others raised. Maybe one day I will get the time to explore deeper but that's not for now c:

I hope that this reinvigorates the artist community here instead of appearing mostly as a marketplace

Now that's an interesting point. I appreciate artists need to make a living and the whole need to advertise services. I wonder how much of an impact it would be to have a sub gallery for adopts/ych/sales etc that was separate to finished pieces.

It would probably be detrimental. What's the best way to balance it in your eyes?

A lot of these people are going to return to Twitter in no time. A lot of them are addicted to the platform anyway. Give it a couple of weeks. And who says you can't use both platforms?

Very true, nobody is saying you can't use both. There have certainly been a lot of dormant accounts here for a long time for a plethora of reasons but some are certainly because some people really hit success with twitter. I also hear a lot of people saying the simple upload system suits them which I understand. I think this is why hive is potentially looking to fill the gap.

Twitter literally don't have a gallery let alone such a function which makes browsing an artist's posts let alone browsing for artists abysmal. We'll have to wait and see. Wouldn't mind a better platform though.