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Where to go from here? (platform-wise)
2 years ago
The issues from May with FA itself seem to have calmed down (even if people still disagree and suffer from the vague rules put in place), but I think Twitter has taken their absolute incompetence to an ultimate end-point, if not just one step before actually shutting the platform off entirely or preventing new signups. Rate limiting individual users to VIEWING (not posting) 6-800 posts per day, and preventing non-logged-in users from using the platform at all is a great way to kill the platform entirely.
Unfortunately, Twitter can't die, because people will just keep using it, since there is nowhere else for them to go. The platforms that exist currently as alternatives are all either unstable, inconsistent, untrustworthy, dead, or some combination of those four.
Discord is suffering from comfort in complacency as well, having been around since 2015 and having made untold billions of dollars thus far. Unfortunately, their management was totally gutted and replaced by ex-facebook and ex-twitter staff who have turned even that into a cesspit. Prior employees are review-bombing the company on glassdoor and the platform itself seems to be becoming adversarial towards its users. The username change thing is just the most recent cut of the thousand it deems necessary to wear people down with for some reason.
I've compiled a list of platforms that people might end up migrating to if anyone ever ends up motivated enough to actually leave. This list is absolutely not exhaustive, but it contains all of the ones I was able to find that had anything resembling life on them. I doubt anyone is going to "move" and we'll all just end up having to access 15 different sites at all times to see all of the users we're watching / following, until a postybirb equivalent comes along for end-user use, but I figure it's better to have the information out there. I've tried to order it by best to worst in terms of support for artists and people who want to view their art.
If everything ends up totally discombobulated, I recommend postybirb: https://www.postybirb.com/. You can more quickly upload art to multiple places at once. Twitter's API thing broke this, but it works for most other places.
Good IMO: these are all fine platforms from what I can tell / have experienced. They work and there are either people using them or there is the potential for migration to them.
- Mastodon / Activitypub Was in a much worse state than it is currently during the last attempt at an exodus from twitter. When I say Mastodon, I am referring to the entire platform style, including stuff like: Mastodon, Misskey, Micro.blog, Friendica, Pleroma/Akkoma, WriteFreely, etc. I personally recommend Akkoma over base mastodon, but I only do so because I have experience with it. There are likely other flavors out there that do the same or similar things and work just as well. It is effectively a FOSS and decentralized version of twitter. Decentralized in the peer-to-peer / torrenting sense, not the scumbag crypto scammer-y sense. Anyone can host an instance using whichever of the aforementioned systems they want (or something totally unique), and it will basically just work, and connect to every other instance as if each instance is part of one big central site, like Twitter or Instagram. I recommend this one with the caveat that you should either join a large and crowd-funded instance, or a small one run by a personal friend or yourself. Data retention and permanence is a big issue when everything is hosted on what is usually a dinky little homeserver in someone's basement, so hosting your own or knowing the person who hosts it will provide assurance that your instance won't just one day poof out of existence along with your account. If you must use a public instance, I recommend either Mastodon.social, aka the OG, or one of the furry-specific ones, from this list here: https://furryfediverse.org/
- itaku is great for artists, but their UI is not the best in the world, in terms of usability. Some of the way things are placed and how feeds work is confounding, but they do have feature parity with FA and then some. They're supported by patreon donations.
- Cohost had a rough start and is still very clunky but seems functionally the same as pillowfort. They are not very large and there is currently not much draw to them, but they have said they intend to support activitypub at some point in the future, so they may eventually fold into the mastodon-alikes and be a good choice if you like their interface.
- afterdark.art is a lot like furrynetwork UI-wise and works basically like FA. It's not great for sharing things but it works well as an art gallery.
Not great: These platforms are either past their prime / missed their chance, or don't really serve a function that would make people want to use them. These may be useful as backups.
- Bluesky social is being created by the former CEO of twitter,but is not yet released. Seems to be centrally accessible but decentralized in practice. Everyone can see everyone else and files will have parity in case one component goes down. Likely the future of social media if it goes according to plan. Is currently in closed beta (7-27-23), and the feedback has been largely negative. I signed up for the waitlist a while ago but have not been allowed in yet. From what I've heard, the platform has egregious performance, but has a decent featureset, though makes some boneheaded choices. I have not heard much specifically what those choices were, only that they were boneheaded. It also does not federate with the rest of the activitypub system (the "fediverse"), so it will be insular like twitter and instagram and so on were. Initially it seemed like a good idea, but of course marketing never meets reality. and is still in closed beta. The platform itself is still having teething issues, and it is still fundamentally incompatible with activitypub, which means it will be a walled garden like twitter and instagram were / are. They are still claiming it will be self-hostable, but no source code has been provided for anything other than the front-end, and the only current method for getting onto the platform is still via an invite code from another user, as well as using their own servers. I want to advise people to stay away from this if they can use Mastodon instead, for sustainability going forward, but it seems like most users are flocking here rather than anywhere else currently available. major artists are gaining their following back, but slowly.
- FA was a good candidate but now is also being stupid about file upload limits and so on.
- deviantart is both a laughing stock to people who used to use it and a weird middle child like newgrounds where some really big artists are there but they're basically the only reason people use it
- newgrounds exists and probably will continue to for the foreseeable future but same problems as deviantart, being that most people associate it mentally with cringe-y mid-2010s culture. It is unfortunately functionally the same as it was in the mid-2010s. It is not likely to grow much into the future.
- you could self-host your own website like the good old days but most artists don't have enough money or computer experience to do that. Search engines also aren't what they used to be and I really don't think an RSS feed for every artist is the way to go here or what people are going to use going forward, as cool as that would be. (most mastodon-alikes do have RSS, if you'd like to go that way as a viewer! I recommend QuiteRSS if you need a client.)
- there's neocities, but again, size limits and programming experience. For context, neocities is basically a free do-it-yourself, all-in-one website with optional paid features for more storage and whatever else. You can have multiple pages and run scripts and access a database and a bunch of other stuff, though all of this is true of most other methods for which you could pay to host.
Largely pointless: These are sites that have not been maintained, are becoming unusable, or are not tailored towards hosting and viewing art. Some of these may be good sites in general, but they are not good replacements for FA or Twitter.
- tumblr has rescinded the total ban on porn, but has wasted any goodwill they have with any prior users after literally erasing them with little to no warning. You can disable the spoilers / blurs in your account settings, and allow NSFW to show up in searches, though NSFW does not seem to appear in your feed, even if you follow NSFW accounts. They claim they'd like to support activitypub at some point, though all this will allow is for their users to interact with the rest of the web, as it doesn't seem like the kind of thing anyone will be likely to join going forward. The only reason I don't put this lower is because there is still a community on there, for what it's worth. I'd not recommend making an account here if you do not absolutely have to.
- Wordpress is a lot like tumblr, but lacks the social aspect, so there's no way for posts to spread without another platform. You can follow people, but can't interact with their posts, can't re-post them, or otherwise. Have sparingly seen people try to use this as an art platform, and it works as a gallery, but not for much else. Intends to support activitypub at some point, for what it's worth.
- pillowfortallows public sign-ups now, I think? nope, closed beta w/ 5$ entry fee. not worth bothering with. it is majorly clunky and isn't sure if it wants to be tumblr or twitter or even work half of the time. I won't put this in the lower category, if only because it hasn't become horrifying and obviously greedy yet. it gives me the vibe that it is very open to that kind of corruption, however. Extorting 5$ from people just to see what's there is pretty lame in my book but whatever.
- inkbunny is full of pedophiles and has been for years. Anyone unaware of this will very quickly find out how much cub there is there when they try to turn off the NSFW filter.
STAY AWAY: These platforms are worse than the plantation many people are currently in. They are actively hostile towards users and are on the path to end up the same way that twitter has, or are already dead.
- newtumbl is dead (officially offline) as of June 8, 2023. They enforced a bunch of random DMCA claims against their already miniscule userbase, a bunch of people got mad about it, and then they shut down because the remaining people and good faith they had evaporated.
- Threads is a twitter / mastodon clone that federates through activitypub. But it's owned and run by facebook so is immediately unfriendly to real humans. Also officially doesn't allow NSFW so it's pointless to artists.
- Facebook is not a social network, it is a tracking tool. Stay far away.
- Instagram is also terrible and owned by facebook / meta so I cannot recommend it in good faith
Not applicable: These sites really don't offer options to host images in the sense that twitter / FA / e621 do. I am putting these here because I have heard them brought up in conversations about where to go previously. I presume out of desperation.
- e621 has no follow system in the sense that the others do, so people can't get notifications when you post new things. I still recommend posting here, of course, but it's not exactly social media.
- subscribestar/patreon/kofi are anti-social platforms, have no inherent method of spreading content, and are exclusively for supporting creators. Non-paying users cannot see content unless specified by the creator per-post.
- Artstation is a professional portfolio type site, not specifically for sharing works to an audience. I believe NSFW is allowed, but spoilered, and does not show up in public search results.
- Odysee is more of a youtube alternative than twitter, but you can technically upload any type of content you want (image, video, text, files, etc.), since it and LBRY are just a peer-to-peer file sharing platform. You can follow people and so on as well. It is not really made to support anything but video, however. There is absolutely not a community there for artists, in any case. It is largely used to host alt-political content that was banned from mainstream platforms and also files for 3d printing for some reason. It's good for the latter one, at least. (UPDATE 10-30-23: the company that hosts Odysee is supposedly going bankrupt, so this will no longer be a thing for most people very soon. The network it runs on, LBRY, is decentralized and peer-to-peer, but the website itself and the bandwidth people use to interact with it are hosted by a single company. If they do go under, the site will likely become unusable, and the only way to view content from the LBRY network will be through a custom client or if someone else makes a web interface for it.)
- derpibooru/aryion are specialty sites and really more tailored as boorus and forums than social networking sites
- piczel and picarto.tv have posting abilities, but they're really streaming sites, not image hosting or social sites
- pixiv is for japanese artists, but not specifically furries. Unsure of the acceptance there of Americans/Europeans or non-professional artists.
- discord is not a social network. Also a horrifying plantation like FB / Insta / Twitter. Giant mainstream company in silicon valley run by ex-FB and ex-Twitter goons. Candidate for replacement and likely to start dying more noticeably when they do the next big dumb decision that pisses off all their users. The most recent one was the username change. They have largely been silent since then. (edit 11-05-23: they have introduced more aggressive user message scanning to enforce their braindead TOS, including "Intellectual Property violations," whatever that means to discord. Stay away, find another way to talk to people. Discord needs to go the way of Skype ASAP.)
- GAB, Minds and Truth Social are political platforms (and very one-sided at that) so normal people don't want to join. Not really made for posting art in any sense, and the communities there are basically just extremist political groups. Not friendly to furries or probably artists in general.
Anything more obscure than that is a lost cause IMO. nobody is going to use weasyl, or myspace, or like, some internet forum specifically for women with menopause or something. I'll list those here anyway for completeness.
- inkblot.art General art hosting site, largely used by furries. Really only good as a gallery, like FA.
- Furrynetwork Retort to 2015-2016-ish FA when people were freaking out and trying to leave then. I believe this was in response to the IMVU acquisition of the site. IMVU has since returned ownership to Dragoneer, some time in 2021.
- Sofurry FA clone from 2008-ish. Has not changed at all since then and seems to be running on the bare minimum bandwidth to support the dwindling userbase there. Good for a backup gallery but not much else. Very clunky and slow.
- weasyl FA clone from 2010s-ish. DOA because it requires account verification to even use which takes literally months, if it ever even happens. I put in a request for verification 6 months ago and it still has not been approved as of nov 05 2023.
- myspace not really useful to anyone anymore
- transfur TF-specific furry site
- GNUsocial doesn't work and hasn't for a while now
- MISSKEY a mastodon clone. Technically software rather than a platform
- Pleroma / Akkoma a mastodon clone, also technically server software rather than a proper platform. Federates with other fediverse crap through activitypub.
- Socialhome DOA, requires account approval from the domain admin who no longer seems to be alive. Truthfully more of a tech demo than a real site.
- Enjin used to host free isolated forums and websites, kind of like reddit but smaller. Now they run some NFT grift nonsense. Very sad.
- Reddit has furry sub-forums and forums for specific niches, but the air of the site really is not conducive to posting porn. It's also very politically charged and toxic, and seems to currently be dying due to their API thing.
- Telegram is really more of a texting platform, but i have seen people use it with a sort of newsletter-type channel or server that they send their art to. This is about as close as I have seen anyone get to just regressing back to RSS feeds in the last like 10 years.
I'm including a list of Discord alternatives as well, just for the hell of it.
- Revolt (best so far, missing video chat / screen sharing. very limited file uploads @ ~15mb. No clear monetization method.)
- Matrix (decentralized, does not have custom emoji. Very feature-rich but also lacks most of the things people actually used from discord. Complicated and unfriendly to end-users.)
- Slack (Made for enterprise users. Servers require payment PER-USER from the host, and pricing is unsustainable for normal people. Not useful to anyone other than businesses, though has full feature parity with discord and then some.)
- Telegram (lacks server functionality beyond single-channel group chats of ~10 people. Lacks screen sharing, but has video calls (no screen sharing). only good as an alternative to texting / iMessage for apple people.)
- Signal (same as telegram)
- Jami (same as telegram)
- Session (same as telegram)
- Rocketchat (individually hosted server system. Not even close to usable for normal people.)
- Steam (You can upload images and stuff now)
- Skype (people left skype for discord because it was awful. same as telegram, functionally. Also turned into microsoft teams, which people hate.)
Unfortunately, Twitter can't die, because people will just keep using it, since there is nowhere else for them to go. The platforms that exist currently as alternatives are all either unstable, inconsistent, untrustworthy, dead, or some combination of those four.
Discord is suffering from comfort in complacency as well, having been around since 2015 and having made untold billions of dollars thus far. Unfortunately, their management was totally gutted and replaced by ex-facebook and ex-twitter staff who have turned even that into a cesspit. Prior employees are review-bombing the company on glassdoor and the platform itself seems to be becoming adversarial towards its users. The username change thing is just the most recent cut of the thousand it deems necessary to wear people down with for some reason.
I've compiled a list of platforms that people might end up migrating to if anyone ever ends up motivated enough to actually leave. This list is absolutely not exhaustive, but it contains all of the ones I was able to find that had anything resembling life on them. I doubt anyone is going to "move" and we'll all just end up having to access 15 different sites at all times to see all of the users we're watching / following, until a postybirb equivalent comes along for end-user use, but I figure it's better to have the information out there. I've tried to order it by best to worst in terms of support for artists and people who want to view their art.
If everything ends up totally discombobulated, I recommend postybirb: https://www.postybirb.com/. You can more quickly upload art to multiple places at once. Twitter's API thing broke this, but it works for most other places.
Good IMO: these are all fine platforms from what I can tell / have experienced. They work and there are either people using them or there is the potential for migration to them.
- Mastodon / Activitypub Was in a much worse state than it is currently during the last attempt at an exodus from twitter. When I say Mastodon, I am referring to the entire platform style, including stuff like: Mastodon, Misskey, Micro.blog, Friendica, Pleroma/Akkoma, WriteFreely, etc. I personally recommend Akkoma over base mastodon, but I only do so because I have experience with it. There are likely other flavors out there that do the same or similar things and work just as well. It is effectively a FOSS and decentralized version of twitter. Decentralized in the peer-to-peer / torrenting sense, not the scumbag crypto scammer-y sense. Anyone can host an instance using whichever of the aforementioned systems they want (or something totally unique), and it will basically just work, and connect to every other instance as if each instance is part of one big central site, like Twitter or Instagram. I recommend this one with the caveat that you should either join a large and crowd-funded instance, or a small one run by a personal friend or yourself. Data retention and permanence is a big issue when everything is hosted on what is usually a dinky little homeserver in someone's basement, so hosting your own or knowing the person who hosts it will provide assurance that your instance won't just one day poof out of existence along with your account. If you must use a public instance, I recommend either Mastodon.social, aka the OG, or one of the furry-specific ones, from this list here: https://furryfediverse.org/
- itaku is great for artists, but their UI is not the best in the world, in terms of usability. Some of the way things are placed and how feeds work is confounding, but they do have feature parity with FA and then some. They're supported by patreon donations.
- Cohost had a rough start and is still very clunky but seems functionally the same as pillowfort. They are not very large and there is currently not much draw to them, but they have said they intend to support activitypub at some point in the future, so they may eventually fold into the mastodon-alikes and be a good choice if you like their interface.
- afterdark.art is a lot like furrynetwork UI-wise and works basically like FA. It's not great for sharing things but it works well as an art gallery.
Not great: These platforms are either past their prime / missed their chance, or don't really serve a function that would make people want to use them. These may be useful as backups.
- Bluesky social is being created by the former CEO of twitter,
- FA was a good candidate but now is also being stupid about file upload limits and so on.
- deviantart is both a laughing stock to people who used to use it and a weird middle child like newgrounds where some really big artists are there but they're basically the only reason people use it
- newgrounds exists and probably will continue to for the foreseeable future but same problems as deviantart, being that most people associate it mentally with cringe-y mid-2010s culture. It is unfortunately functionally the same as it was in the mid-2010s. It is not likely to grow much into the future.
- you could self-host your own website like the good old days but most artists don't have enough money or computer experience to do that. Search engines also aren't what they used to be and I really don't think an RSS feed for every artist is the way to go here or what people are going to use going forward, as cool as that would be. (most mastodon-alikes do have RSS, if you'd like to go that way as a viewer! I recommend QuiteRSS if you need a client.)
- there's neocities, but again, size limits and programming experience. For context, neocities is basically a free do-it-yourself, all-in-one website with optional paid features for more storage and whatever else. You can have multiple pages and run scripts and access a database and a bunch of other stuff, though all of this is true of most other methods for which you could pay to host.
Largely pointless: These are sites that have not been maintained, are becoming unusable, or are not tailored towards hosting and viewing art. Some of these may be good sites in general, but they are not good replacements for FA or Twitter.
- tumblr has rescinded the total ban on porn, but has wasted any goodwill they have with any prior users after literally erasing them with little to no warning. You can disable the spoilers / blurs in your account settings, and allow NSFW to show up in searches, though NSFW does not seem to appear in your feed, even if you follow NSFW accounts. They claim they'd like to support activitypub at some point, though all this will allow is for their users to interact with the rest of the web, as it doesn't seem like the kind of thing anyone will be likely to join going forward. The only reason I don't put this lower is because there is still a community on there, for what it's worth. I'd not recommend making an account here if you do not absolutely have to.
- Wordpress is a lot like tumblr, but lacks the social aspect, so there's no way for posts to spread without another platform. You can follow people, but can't interact with their posts, can't re-post them, or otherwise. Have sparingly seen people try to use this as an art platform, and it works as a gallery, but not for much else. Intends to support activitypub at some point, for what it's worth.
- pillowfort
- inkbunny is full of pedophiles and has been for years. Anyone unaware of this will very quickly find out how much cub there is there when they try to turn off the NSFW filter.
STAY AWAY: These platforms are worse than the plantation many people are currently in. They are actively hostile towards users and are on the path to end up the same way that twitter has, or are already dead.
- newtumbl is dead (officially offline) as of June 8, 2023. They enforced a bunch of random DMCA claims against their already miniscule userbase, a bunch of people got mad about it, and then they shut down because the remaining people and good faith they had evaporated.
- Threads is a twitter / mastodon clone that federates through activitypub. But it's owned and run by facebook so is immediately unfriendly to real humans. Also officially doesn't allow NSFW so it's pointless to artists.
- Facebook is not a social network, it is a tracking tool. Stay far away.
- Instagram is also terrible and owned by facebook / meta so I cannot recommend it in good faith
Not applicable: These sites really don't offer options to host images in the sense that twitter / FA / e621 do. I am putting these here because I have heard them brought up in conversations about where to go previously. I presume out of desperation.
- e621 has no follow system in the sense that the others do, so people can't get notifications when you post new things. I still recommend posting here, of course, but it's not exactly social media.
- subscribestar/patreon/kofi are anti-social platforms, have no inherent method of spreading content, and are exclusively for supporting creators. Non-paying users cannot see content unless specified by the creator per-post.
- Artstation is a professional portfolio type site, not specifically for sharing works to an audience. I believe NSFW is allowed, but spoilered, and does not show up in public search results.
- Odysee is more of a youtube alternative than twitter, but you can technically upload any type of content you want (image, video, text, files, etc.), since it and LBRY are just a peer-to-peer file sharing platform. You can follow people and so on as well. It is not really made to support anything but video, however. There is absolutely not a community there for artists, in any case. It is largely used to host alt-political content that was banned from mainstream platforms and also files for 3d printing for some reason. It's good for the latter one, at least. (UPDATE 10-30-23: the company that hosts Odysee is supposedly going bankrupt, so this will no longer be a thing for most people very soon. The network it runs on, LBRY, is decentralized and peer-to-peer, but the website itself and the bandwidth people use to interact with it are hosted by a single company. If they do go under, the site will likely become unusable, and the only way to view content from the LBRY network will be through a custom client or if someone else makes a web interface for it.)
- derpibooru/aryion are specialty sites and really more tailored as boorus and forums than social networking sites
- piczel and picarto.tv have posting abilities, but they're really streaming sites, not image hosting or social sites
- pixiv is for japanese artists, but not specifically furries. Unsure of the acceptance there of Americans/Europeans or non-professional artists.
- discord is not a social network. Also a horrifying plantation like FB / Insta / Twitter. Giant mainstream company in silicon valley run by ex-FB and ex-Twitter goons. Candidate for replacement and likely to start dying more noticeably when they do the next big dumb decision that pisses off all their users. The most recent one was the username change. They have largely been silent since then. (edit 11-05-23: they have introduced more aggressive user message scanning to enforce their braindead TOS, including "Intellectual Property violations," whatever that means to discord. Stay away, find another way to talk to people. Discord needs to go the way of Skype ASAP.)
- GAB, Minds and Truth Social are political platforms (and very one-sided at that) so normal people don't want to join. Not really made for posting art in any sense, and the communities there are basically just extremist political groups. Not friendly to furries or probably artists in general.
Anything more obscure than that is a lost cause IMO. nobody is going to use weasyl, or myspace, or like, some internet forum specifically for women with menopause or something. I'll list those here anyway for completeness.
- inkblot.art General art hosting site, largely used by furries. Really only good as a gallery, like FA.
- Furrynetwork Retort to 2015-2016-ish FA when people were freaking out and trying to leave then. I believe this was in response to the IMVU acquisition of the site. IMVU has since returned ownership to Dragoneer, some time in 2021.
- Sofurry FA clone from 2008-ish. Has not changed at all since then and seems to be running on the bare minimum bandwidth to support the dwindling userbase there. Good for a backup gallery but not much else. Very clunky and slow.
- weasyl FA clone from 2010s-ish. DOA because it requires account verification to even use which takes literally months, if it ever even happens. I put in a request for verification 6 months ago and it still has not been approved as of nov 05 2023.
- myspace not really useful to anyone anymore
- transfur TF-specific furry site
- GNUsocial doesn't work and hasn't for a while now
- MISSKEY a mastodon clone. Technically software rather than a platform
- Pleroma / Akkoma a mastodon clone, also technically server software rather than a proper platform. Federates with other fediverse crap through activitypub.
- Socialhome DOA, requires account approval from the domain admin who no longer seems to be alive. Truthfully more of a tech demo than a real site.
- Enjin used to host free isolated forums and websites, kind of like reddit but smaller. Now they run some NFT grift nonsense. Very sad.
- Reddit has furry sub-forums and forums for specific niches, but the air of the site really is not conducive to posting porn. It's also very politically charged and toxic, and seems to currently be dying due to their API thing.
- Telegram is really more of a texting platform, but i have seen people use it with a sort of newsletter-type channel or server that they send their art to. This is about as close as I have seen anyone get to just regressing back to RSS feeds in the last like 10 years.
I'm including a list of Discord alternatives as well, just for the hell of it.
- Revolt (best so far, missing video chat / screen sharing. very limited file uploads @ ~15mb. No clear monetization method.)
- Matrix (decentralized, does not have custom emoji. Very feature-rich but also lacks most of the things people actually used from discord. Complicated and unfriendly to end-users.)
- Slack (Made for enterprise users. Servers require payment PER-USER from the host, and pricing is unsustainable for normal people. Not useful to anyone other than businesses, though has full feature parity with discord and then some.)
- Telegram (lacks server functionality beyond single-channel group chats of ~10 people. Lacks screen sharing, but has video calls (no screen sharing). only good as an alternative to texting / iMessage for apple people.)
- Signal (same as telegram)
- Jami (same as telegram)
- Session (same as telegram)
- Rocketchat (individually hosted server system. Not even close to usable for normal people.)
- Steam (You can upload images and stuff now)
- Skype (people left skype for discord because it was awful. same as telegram, functionally. Also turned into microsoft teams, which people hate.)
So what I hope is Elon does funny and make people wanna really leave. Be it make twitter paid only, lose his fight against zuck, or just ban specific things relating to art actually like porn!
Bluesky I'm hearing good stuff but I'm just getting tired jumping ship from one place to the other, I already did it once, how many more times do I gotta do it again?
Just curious, what may you do?
I jumped ship from tumblr to twitter when that was a thing everyone was doing, but that was a little smoother, given most people already had both.
It was a lot easier to move away from skype and steam because one saved all of your chat logs locally and the other never saved any at all so there was nothing to migrate with. I suspect discord and twitter will be a lot more difficult to jump ship from because a lot of people have neglected to either save their stuff locally or mirror their posts on other sites. I still have everything worth saving from twitter saved locally, but discord is going to require a scraper for any server I've ever been in so I can save my logs for searching's sake.
I think I'm going to do what some people did when tumblr shut down. I'm going to stubbornly stay here and on twitter until i'm removed by force, either the platform shuts down or becomes totally unusable. I'll move over to a better platform alongside using these and hope others decide it's worth moving there too, so I can eventually abandon these like i and so many others jumped ship from tumblr.
Ideally FA and twitter just die off so someone who sucks less at managing a website can finally take over and people are forced outright to find a new place to post. That'll be hell watching the scramble to whoever has open space on their servers for user data and seeing 90% of them crash and burn hard with the hundreds of millions of new users who don't have anywhere to post things.
Data is expensive, especially at the sizes twitter and FA use it. There is a reason a lot of these sites stay small or do things that force them to stay small, even if it would be better monetarily if they were larger.
There's a whole discussion I could have about the recent reddit and twitter things about how advertising was never a sustainable business model for anything and the modern internet was doomed to die from the start but I don't think this is the place for that.
Data IS expensive given how they use it. It felt now twitter is more for the "daily person" rather than people who use it a lot. I wish they thought of better things to do. Hell I can think of more things they could do. But I feel I need more years of experience with it(Only in college still so I never got fully into this)
Sadly I do agree, this horny insane site is an odd place to have a talk like this lol
Twitter is a terrible site for viewing or hosting art. Even when an artist media section isn't half filled with reaction images it's a pain to scroll through everything. But people still use it because it's where they can reach the largest audience.
Unless there is a large shift in the silence majority of viewers I don't see much changing. Though Twitter does seem to be doing it's best to burn itself down. In the end though the only thing that really decides where artist post is where has the biggest audience they can capture/engage with and that also won't ban them for what they post.
I don't see FA going anywhere and Twitter has captured enough users and artists by this point that I see it limping along through it's death throws for at least another couple years, and it's impressive what people are willing to forget in that time.
Twitter is the worse of the two currently, since it seems dead-set on actively trying to kill its userbase, though they unfortunately have the ability to just do that, since there's literally no alternative.
All the platforms I list in the journal have active userbases of maybe 1k - 50k users. Twitter has a userbase that outnumbers the entire US population of ~350 million. These sites aren't even 1% of 1% of Twitter.
Even if most of those users aren't part of the furry community, it's still the largest platform by far, and artists want to use it so people can find their art like you say.
We got a taste of what would happen if Twitter properly died when musk bought it and a bunch of people tried leaving. Mastodon was next-in-line and every instance there basically just gave everyone the middle finger and shut down signups entirely. I don't think the little hobby servers people are running most of Mastodon on could handle a couple million new users either, nevermind a couple hundred million. Images are huge. Hard drives are expensive.
The best we can do, I think, is just spread out to as many sites as possible. I've already updated my profile but I'm going to start posting elsewhere as well. Postybirb seems like a helpful tool, so far. At least then, the people willing to move won't miss out on anything, and the holdouts who want to stay until hell freezes over and the site shuts down can do so as well.
There's no real good way to go about this but that seems like the least likely to result in you being stuck holding the bag and not knowing where to go when everything gets deleted or twitter bans porn or some such other thing.
I wish mastodon wasn't awful but truly the only way to use it is to host it yourself and federate to other instances manually. Using another person's instance is annoying since you have to deal with their stupid rules and opinions on what you are allowed to see (since they determine who gets to 'federate' to you), as well as their awful homeserver with the bandwidth of a toaster and the non-zero chance that they will just *stop hosting it* because they get bored or something.
It doesn't help that all of the instances with content worth having are just shut off from user signups and it's utterly unclear to new users how anything works so people are immediately scared away. Plus, all the elitist linux people and weird outcasts who didn't use mainstream platforms for other reasons prior to it going anti-consumer for normal people are all going to dogpile normal humans for acting as they do on twitter and ruining their platform.
The only way I see Mastodon succeeding is if people are allowed to go to one central place that makes sense to them, sign up, and start using it for free.
Most people are not going to be self-hosting a mastodon instance and paying for a domain, I do not think. No normal people who are there to view content rather than host it are going to go through the trouble mastodon / pleroma / misskey requires one to do and learn in order to set it up. I'm personally not going to be paying for a web host specifically to run a mastodon instance and i don't know if / when I'll have either the time or money to set one up to self-host my own content like Emma on msx.horse does.
I'm certainly not using a fucking raspberry pi again. I tried that for 4 years to run a *plex server and nothing else* and it couldn't even handle that without linux or the fucking drive itself failing on me once a year and forcing me to wipe everything on it to get it working again. Now I use a synology box because it actually works and isn't a giant piece of shit that just breaks randomly without me touching it literally at all.
I have my reservations about bluesky because it's being made by twitter's previous CEO but I am hoping it will actually be accessible to normal users and won't be a giant mess to interact with and won't ban NSFW. if it is how they claim it is, the entire thing will be P2P like torrenting, so nobody can shut it down or block any one user from other users. This presents problems for spam, but is great for avoiding copyright takedowns and potential deplatforming by The Establishment. It also means users can just sign up immediately and connect and there's no BS about downloading and hosting servers or finding an instance or whatever.
I guess I'm more skeptical with BlueSky as on face value as it seems like it wants to be just like twitter with a different spin. Perhaps, I guess when it opens ups and everyone has a better idea of what it is, I'll give it a shot. Though for now I'll stick to using postybirb to post everywhere, and slowly build up my neocities site into a small gallery and commission site
Corporatization has killed the internet. It'll be years before we can get people-centric sites up again.
Elon musk and his...idiots. analed the site in the butt to such a pathetic state now. I knew the bad Twitter staff made Twitter no good. But Elon really analed it hard!