Discord?

Not really a viable way to get my pictures and stories out to people who aren't already looking for them, hell, I already have pretty few people in my discord server.


https://discord.gg/72YhrJx

just joined (user name is skriata)

Not that I know of.

The only "alternatives" I've heard of for it are even worse than twitter.

From what I've seen on your posts on Twitter, at least over half of your number of viewers are almost always seeing your posts, so I don't think you are shadowbanned, maybe you just need to find different ways of posting things.
Maybe try to get some fellow artists to share? Or make some polls/gift art vote things or just try to interact with the community to get more attention to your porfile.

I've used a tester, I actually am barred from search suggestions and not infrequently end up with hidden replies or other major problems. If the posts are literally only being SEEN by fewer than my own followers, that kind of is much more of the problem right there

I've been happily using mastodon since the takeover. It's giving me much less mental distress than Twitter. Happy user ever since. It's just different from Twitter and people are getting culture shocks.

I tried to get into mastodon but the fact that everything is instanced seemed like it would be hard to find a wide audience and also I had no idea what specifically I was supposed to join

You can try meow.social, a large instance where most furs are on. If you are worried about wide audience, just join this one. Or try macrofurs.social, a small instance with mostly macro furs.

I think the majority of people I follow on Twitter are search banned, I can't even type in a given person's handle and press enter- I need to type in their exact handle and press "go directly to @xyz" which is very annoying.

As far as I know the only way to get more followers is to get retweets by others with lots of followers, word of mouth kind of thing.