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The post-Twitter landscape, an overview
2 years ago
General
Since a musky husky took a huge steaming dump on my former online home, I have been wandering the wasteland of the 2023 internet like Max Rockatansky scrounging for likes and faves.
I know a lot of furries are waiting to see where we will go from Twitter, oh sorry I mean X, and are staying put until an alternative is clear. X is still very busy and its where most people are, despite all the recent bullshit. I get it. But it’s time to think about moving. The decision will be made for you eventually, as the site inevitably crashes and burns. You don’t want to be the last one posting to Livejournal.
Here is a roundup of the sites I have been active on and my experiences with each, as an artist whose frequently NSFW and whose particular fetishes are less than popular among the furry mainstream.
A TL;DR version: there's no clear obvious replacement for Twitter - except what we build ourselves. Right now I am the most optimistic about Mastodon, due to its structure and protocols making it difficult for hostile CEO attacks. But it will take time.
A small note: The only statistic I care about when it comes to posting art is raw views. That determines to me the reach of a site. Whether people LIKE the art or not depends on its quality and the audience. Sometimes a piece will go nowhere on one site and be beloved on another. But all I care about is views, because if i post something and it gets 10 views i might as well not bother. Ain’t nobody got time for 10 views.
Bluesky - I can’t get an invite, but to be honest it’ll just slide into the same dumper as Twitter did so there’s no point. I have very little interest in jumping out of Elon’s frying pan into that fire. Jack Dorsey is almost as bad as Musk, and about as trustworthy.
Telegram - it was my #2 most active communication tool after Twitter, and now it’s #1. I run an art group and a discussion group and I’m a member on dozens more. Plus all the one to one chatting. It’s my favorite place to chat. But its not great for discoverability. The most i can hope for is some bab art group post my stuff with a credit, and that always links back here anyways.
Discord - A few years ago everyone and their mom started a Discord group, and now they're mostly pretty moribund and full of lurkers. I post to some of them, but mostly out of habit. I never liked Discord's extreme siloing of content into tiny little compartments. Its not bad, but there's better options.
FurAffinity - still the most active furry gallery site. Despite its own levels of bullshit and arbitrary moderation and inconsistent policies, its the ramshackle treehouse of furry fandom. I get most commission business here and see all the porn I want here. My stuff gets seen here almost more than anywhere else.
DeviantArt - I’m scared to post anything even slightly NSFW there because I don’t know their policies. But I do post there and it does get seen. I kind of think of DA as the place to put the normiest stuff i draw, or super tame babyfur stuff. Like maybe there's a boob in it. thats as far as i can go. Its stifling.
e621 - it used to be the 4chan of furry. Now its more chill. I posted a lot of recent art there just to get it picked up by the telegram bots. Its tagging is second to none - i wish other sites tagged art as well as e621 does. its fantastic for finding stuff. There’s a fair amount of noise though. And the commenters on e621 are the fuckin worst, if the art is anywhere slightly outside the mainstream of furry porn. Its tiresome. But at least the real bad comments are gone, which is better than it used to be.
Inkbunny - Rapidly becoming much more active. It used to be about 1/10 the traffic of FA and now it’s about 80-90% of the traffic of FA. Yes they allow cub stuff. So does e621 and other places. That doesn’t affect me. I post the same art just about everywhere. There’s stuff there that kind of grosses me out, but that’s true of any website. You can cultivate a blacklist and not see stuff you don’t want to see - which is more than I can say for FA.
Pillowfort - It was founded by Tumblr refugees and has a small but active community. Unfortunately nothing i post there seems to get any traction. It’s got busy accounts, and posting groups, but it’s not somewhere that feels welcoming to me. I wasn't a Tumblrite and its not for me it seems.
Itaku - same as pillowfort. A couple of my pieces got yanked for being too close to “cub” for their tastes - stuff that passed FA’s policies and isn’t cub porn. Again thats the only notice anything I’ve posted has garnered. I feel like anything NSFW and especially anything babyfur is being squashed by their algorithms and nothing I post is getting seen by anyone but mods. Postybirb makes it easy to post there but I am not sure why I am bothering.
Cohost - I can’t yet use postybirb to post there so its a bit of a pain in the ass. However the community is quite active and fun. they seem to have a lot of babs there. I’m just waiting for postybirb support and i’ll add it to my general schedule. It’s got some technical performance issues that need resolving.
Pixiv - Extremely active. When I started it was 90% Japanese and now it’s like 60%. Lots of amazing art, but also a lot of lolisho. Its also in recent months had a tidal wave of AI art posted to it - its like almost anything you look at now is AI generated unless you turn off that search. I post stuff there and it can blow up into thousands of likes/views, 5x more than anywhere else. Pixiv also has an annoying censorship requirement where I gotta blur out genitalia - its not too hard but it means i have to maintain a seperate ‘pixiv safe’ version of every pic with a boner in it and its irksome. As a result i don’t post everything to Pixiv, but I could.
Mastodon - I’m on several instances. Meow.social is where I mostly post regular furry stuff and occasional NSFW. Cubhub.social is where I'm posting all my porny stuff you know so well. It took some time to get used to Mastodon’s quirks but I’m settling in now and it looks like the place I will be for the long haul - even if I will never get to an account size half of what i had on Twitter.
Weasyl - I haven’t posted here lately. I did for awhile but it was always a ghost town.
Threads - ahahhaha. no.
I know a lot of furries are waiting to see where we will go from Twitter, oh sorry I mean X, and are staying put until an alternative is clear. X is still very busy and its where most people are, despite all the recent bullshit. I get it. But it’s time to think about moving. The decision will be made for you eventually, as the site inevitably crashes and burns. You don’t want to be the last one posting to Livejournal.
Here is a roundup of the sites I have been active on and my experiences with each, as an artist whose frequently NSFW and whose particular fetishes are less than popular among the furry mainstream.
A TL;DR version: there's no clear obvious replacement for Twitter - except what we build ourselves. Right now I am the most optimistic about Mastodon, due to its structure and protocols making it difficult for hostile CEO attacks. But it will take time.
A small note: The only statistic I care about when it comes to posting art is raw views. That determines to me the reach of a site. Whether people LIKE the art or not depends on its quality and the audience. Sometimes a piece will go nowhere on one site and be beloved on another. But all I care about is views, because if i post something and it gets 10 views i might as well not bother. Ain’t nobody got time for 10 views.
Bluesky - I can’t get an invite, but to be honest it’ll just slide into the same dumper as Twitter did so there’s no point. I have very little interest in jumping out of Elon’s frying pan into that fire. Jack Dorsey is almost as bad as Musk, and about as trustworthy.
Telegram - it was my #2 most active communication tool after Twitter, and now it’s #1. I run an art group and a discussion group and I’m a member on dozens more. Plus all the one to one chatting. It’s my favorite place to chat. But its not great for discoverability. The most i can hope for is some bab art group post my stuff with a credit, and that always links back here anyways.
Discord - A few years ago everyone and their mom started a Discord group, and now they're mostly pretty moribund and full of lurkers. I post to some of them, but mostly out of habit. I never liked Discord's extreme siloing of content into tiny little compartments. Its not bad, but there's better options.
FurAffinity - still the most active furry gallery site. Despite its own levels of bullshit and arbitrary moderation and inconsistent policies, its the ramshackle treehouse of furry fandom. I get most commission business here and see all the porn I want here. My stuff gets seen here almost more than anywhere else.
DeviantArt - I’m scared to post anything even slightly NSFW there because I don’t know their policies. But I do post there and it does get seen. I kind of think of DA as the place to put the normiest stuff i draw, or super tame babyfur stuff. Like maybe there's a boob in it. thats as far as i can go. Its stifling.
e621 - it used to be the 4chan of furry. Now its more chill. I posted a lot of recent art there just to get it picked up by the telegram bots. Its tagging is second to none - i wish other sites tagged art as well as e621 does. its fantastic for finding stuff. There’s a fair amount of noise though. And the commenters on e621 are the fuckin worst, if the art is anywhere slightly outside the mainstream of furry porn. Its tiresome. But at least the real bad comments are gone, which is better than it used to be.
Inkbunny - Rapidly becoming much more active. It used to be about 1/10 the traffic of FA and now it’s about 80-90% of the traffic of FA. Yes they allow cub stuff. So does e621 and other places. That doesn’t affect me. I post the same art just about everywhere. There’s stuff there that kind of grosses me out, but that’s true of any website. You can cultivate a blacklist and not see stuff you don’t want to see - which is more than I can say for FA.
Pillowfort - It was founded by Tumblr refugees and has a small but active community. Unfortunately nothing i post there seems to get any traction. It’s got busy accounts, and posting groups, but it’s not somewhere that feels welcoming to me. I wasn't a Tumblrite and its not for me it seems.
Itaku - same as pillowfort. A couple of my pieces got yanked for being too close to “cub” for their tastes - stuff that passed FA’s policies and isn’t cub porn. Again thats the only notice anything I’ve posted has garnered. I feel like anything NSFW and especially anything babyfur is being squashed by their algorithms and nothing I post is getting seen by anyone but mods. Postybirb makes it easy to post there but I am not sure why I am bothering.
Cohost - I can’t yet use postybirb to post there so its a bit of a pain in the ass. However the community is quite active and fun. they seem to have a lot of babs there. I’m just waiting for postybirb support and i’ll add it to my general schedule. It’s got some technical performance issues that need resolving.
Pixiv - Extremely active. When I started it was 90% Japanese and now it’s like 60%. Lots of amazing art, but also a lot of lolisho. Its also in recent months had a tidal wave of AI art posted to it - its like almost anything you look at now is AI generated unless you turn off that search. I post stuff there and it can blow up into thousands of likes/views, 5x more than anywhere else. Pixiv also has an annoying censorship requirement where I gotta blur out genitalia - its not too hard but it means i have to maintain a seperate ‘pixiv safe’ version of every pic with a boner in it and its irksome. As a result i don’t post everything to Pixiv, but I could.
Mastodon - I’m on several instances. Meow.social is where I mostly post regular furry stuff and occasional NSFW. Cubhub.social is where I'm posting all my porny stuff you know so well. It took some time to get used to Mastodon’s quirks but I’m settling in now and it looks like the place I will be for the long haul - even if I will never get to an account size half of what i had on Twitter.
Weasyl - I haven’t posted here lately. I did for awhile but it was always a ghost town.
Threads - ahahhaha. no.
To be fair, my art has never been, probably will never be, and doesn't currently need to be my source of income.
I would respectfully push back a little on e621 being great with tagging, in terms of some specific contexts at least, but IDK if you're interested in hearing me complain.
I quite like Cohost so far, though I'm using it more for general posting / reading others' posts moreso than posting art. I'm also sort of concerned about whether it can sustain itself financially.
I guess the most important thing I'd say though, is that I'm kinda trying to make this sort of thing happen myself. After the whole Twit-X thing, tons of folks are going all over, and others are upset at having to return to going all over to get their status updates or art or whatever, rather than just going to Twitter.
I've said for years that Twitter was just a worse RSS, but RSS and Atom are still around. Nobody is using them, though, and there's flaws in the tech that folks tell me haven't been solved.
So, one of the projects I'm working on is trying to make an easy way to help artists develop personal gallery sites with indieweb style POSSE and backfeed stuff, so that instead of going to a dozen websites, all of the content comes and goes from your own personal one.
Do you know indieweb? https://indieweb.org/
There don't seem to be many folks in that group, and despite their work on tech to make this sort of thing happen, it's inscrutable and unusable for the casual non-tech person. I want to figure out solutions to that.
So, I'm slowly trying to make that happen, and experimenting with what's possible. I can start with offering to make websites, and figure something out for hosting or managing hosting for different artists. But, there's three big hurdles I've identified so far.
First off, even if I make a website or tool to make things easier, there's still work involved, and folks tend to go the easy route or no-where. So, I need to make it really easy for established artists to upload and categorize all of their art from potentially years and more.
Second off, not everybody can pay, and people are used to 'free' gallery sites like FA and DA. There are free webhosting solutions out there, but can they support a gallery? Can they support indieweb tech? Gotta find out.
Third, will the POSSE and Backfeed actually work? The first one is a simple enough idea, you post something on your site and it gets copy-posted to everyplace you have set up to share your stuff. So, you have accounts in all of the places and it has local copies of your work, but the source is your personal website, which also has a unified, bridged social aspect. And that's where the Backfeed is most important. If you get a comment, it needs to come to your site, and if you reply to it, that reply needs to go back where it was sent from, while there's also a record of all the comments and replies on your main site.
The long-term hope is that if this becomes common or standard enough, the big silos will become irrelevant as their walled gardens can't compete with just linking up with whoever.
It's similar to the idea of the fediverse, really, but on an even higher level since you could share to the fediverse as just another one of your targets. Heck, another long-term target would even be making something just anybody can throw on a server and host their friends as a shared service, like Mastodon and other fediverse tech.
I don't know if it'll work out, people seem really dedicated to being under the thumb of massive corporations, but we won't know unless we try.
As an artist, who even before the loss of Twitter had to post stuff to a lot of different places, I've gotten a lot of use out of Postybirb to handle the grunt work of posting to a wide range of sites - but what I want is something more robust. What i need as an artist is a Content Management System and it needs to be a desktop application (could be a web interface) but its where I can have a complete archive of all my pics in their posted form, as well as metadata saying "this was posted to FA on August 5 2023 and Inkbunny on August 7 and modified and reposted August 9" and I can access records for all the posting and also ideally even see analytics across all the sites of what got seen where. I would have in this software a gallery - only for me - with all the versions of all the pics I have posted to each site and the ability to repost or update any pic at any time. If I started profile on a new site I could insta-publish a large amount of pics with a single click, everything tagged appropriately.
If you or anyone could code up something that managed my online art profiles in one centralized location, that would be amazing and well worth spending $50 or $80 on.
Postybirb is closest but not quite there yet to what I am thinking of. Postybirb keeps very poor records and relies on single image posts. it cannot handle folder and groups the way i want it to.
Most applications these days are made for web, and the "PC Version" or "Mobile Version" are just web apps running in a stripped-down (hopefully stripped down!) web browser. I dunno if you already knew that, I don't want to assume.
I think you're right with what you said. There's no need for you to have a personal website if you have an app on your home PC that uploads to all the places and gets all of the comments and brings them to you, and sends out the replies. That would be more basic than demanding you have your own website in addition to all the places you send out to, right?
As it stands now, a lot of folks won't even use Postybirb. ^.^;;
I've still got artists I follow who don't post anywhere but Twitter because it's too much work, even if I tell them about Postybirb or the idea of anything else. That's partly why I was thinking of offering setting this sort of thing up as a service, besides just making or consolidating the tools. It'd have to be a free service, though, because these artists aren't willing to put any more into putting their stuff out there. I'm okay with that, though, because they're putting free work out there themselves, and free work for free work is kinda fair. XD
Everything you're saying you want in a tool there should be possible, at least.
The tricky thing is that some websites/silos are fighting against this, they don't want anybody using automated tools to upload to their website, they want you to do everything through them and make it too much work to be worth leaving. It's possible to make a program that puts standardized input into an interface meant for humans, but if that interface changes you have to change the program. Anyplace you can already access with Postybirb, though, you can be sure that other programs would be able to access as well.
The real tricky part is the doing. I'm working on this sort of thing myself but I'm pretty darn slow in development. I'm not really going for making a salable product, though. I'm pretty into changing how our economy works and I want to try and lead in that. So, I intend to share what I make as public domain, but ask for support as I work. Sort of a crowd-patronage thing. I'm still working on setting THAT up as well. I think it's way better for people to be paid for what they do rather than copies of the results of what they have done in the past.
I should mention I'm interested in PixelFed too. The whole Fediverse! There's a lot of interconnected apps on there. But, there are some flaws in the fediverse and activitypub I've heard of, and no solutions I've heard of. I'm not sure if it'll turn into the disaster some have predicted, or if they're full of crap. I'd have to look more into the ActivityPub protocol. I haven't confirmed it, but it's my understanding that the way it works can only scale so large before there's too much to send between all the instances, because each one is sending everything to eachother. I figure there must be a solution, since the internet itself works, but when I asked about it some other tech friends said something like, "Yes, that's a problem that hasn't been solved yet." and I don't know if that's changed.
Lots of research for me to do.