its rough for sure. I find being active on twitter is helpful (commenting, responding to comments on your stuff, tweeting lots of art etc). hosting raffles can help, but only if thats financially viable for you.

otherwise, just drawing and posting as often as you can.

I'm not active on here but on another site. A few things that I think attract people are tagging, fanart, and engagement. On sites like FA with a tagging system, use as many relevant keywords as possible whenever you post. I've ended up finding quite a few artists I love by simply looking up something like "@keywords anthro lioness" on here.

Fanart is up to you, but a pretty easy way to get eyes on you is to draw characters from already popular franchises.

Lastly is engagement. Basically replying to comments and watches. I only really thank people for watching me if they are an artist I already like.

These are just off the top of my head, but the truth is a lot of popularity is simply luck. Hope this helps!

Do a free art raffle, you'll get alot of new follolwers

I would say it's how the modern internet is. Back then the internet wasn't so heavily commercialized as it is now. Now everyone wants money off the internet. Algorithms alone does not favor content that isn't marketed towards Normies or the most common denominator. Plus the proliferation of general content creators, It's harder to grab attention when there's so much more subjects a viewer can see and yet so much limited time.
But in general the other Peep's advice are good. You just have to experiment and try to attract people's attention, just a tricky thing to do though if one doesn't want to lose one's soul during the process.

I feel the same, haven't gained many more followers since 2018-2020. Recently someone followed me on tumblr and has slowly reblogged my every post, I got some 50-100 new followers since then but that's it. A friend got pretty popular on twitter a few years ago by drawing the OCs of every artist he liked, but results may vary, since not everyone would like a gift like that. On the recommendation of another friend, I've tried to join discord servers for artists I followed, but it seemed like people weren't too interested on pieces in styles that deviated too much from the themes the owner of the server themselves were currently drawing, and keeping up with all the social interaction felt draining. People often mention drawing fanart, but, in my own experience, people give way less attention to any fanart I draw than to my personal art, so I only draw fanart for fun when I feel like taking a break. On the other hand, there were times where personal things like vent art and things I drew as a joke for a friend got lots of attention and it was just annoying.

It seems people expect consistency of style and themes, so if you draw a lot of fanart and switch to something else, your art will stop getting as much attention; this happened to me when I stopped drawing vintage computers after doing mostly that for a couple years. There are counterexamples to everything, too: Many artists I like who are popular have never drawn any fanart; many of them don't engage a lot with social media by posting or replying frequently, they just post and go away; Sometimes they just post one or two things a month, too.

From my point of view, it seems to be mostly luck: your friend's work gets popular so your work gets some attention as a side-effect; You get followed by some popular internet person and they share your work; You happen to actually draw fanart for the right thing at the right time and it reaches the right audience. One thing that kinda helped in the beginning was becoming friends with other artists, we share each other's art from time to time, and I have a close friend with whom I do trades and collabs every now and then. But trying to get close to people just to become popular is pretty weird. Knowing some people is definitely helpful, anyway.

I've often seen artists in North America, Western Europe and Japan go to anime/comic/furry events, so that's another way, but for us living away from these places, these sort of events seem to only happen at large cities, if they happen at all. Also, for the longest time I've been wondering if taking part in local zines or gallery expositions would be helpful, but I haven't heard of anything like that near me either.

I agree with the people above, but I'll add my thoughts based on my personal experience.

I think luck plays a huge role, and it can happen in very strange ways. Often, I've found that blatantly unsuccessful artworks or studies gathered a lot (for me) of views, likes, and watchers, while more serious works that I put a lot of effort and time into went completely unnoticed.

In my case, fan arts specifically worked well on Tumblr, and overall, I found this platform to be the most friendly for art creators right now. In just a few months there, I managed to gather almost as many watchers as I did here in 4 years.

Commenting on other works and various social activities are supposed to attract the most attention, but in my case, it didn't work. I left comments here and on Twitter, and as far as I can tell, it didn't attract anyone to my page, at least not to watch me and fave works. But it may be because I'm not very active in doing this. I don't always have ideas or the mood to comment, and doing this only just to attract attention to myself - I find bad idea and disrespectful to the artists.

So, I would suggest trying to comment and fave more often on other people's works, draw more frequently to increase the chances of being noticed, and try posting on Tumblr. I noticed that you have an account there, but it seems abandoned for about a year now. Perhaps something has changed in the algorithm during this time. In any case, the more galleries and communication channels you have - the higher the chance of being noticed.

Comment on people's stuff and profiles, and uploading content, mainly. Make sure you tag everything. Raffles can help.