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Long lived the fediverse
a year ago
Yes yes Journals. By modern standards - or lack thereof - almost novels with how many words you encounter in a single chunk of text. :P
TLDR: I've nuked my fediverse presence. If you used to follow me there, you can delete it.
--
Now for my very opinionated take on why - if you care. If not, yanno. Grab a shovel and a box of dildos, go into a dark cave and have fun or something! You do you!
--
So faced with the choice to carry the instance onwards when migrating between hypervisors and root servers, and looking at the meager growth opportunities that the Fediverse presents, I strongly felt my will to live leave my body. 💀 And that's usually the point where I change things, so it didn't make the cut.
I like nerdy people who host their own instances. I can relate to them, I like tech, I like hosting things, I like tinkering with them. If it was for the sake of just staying in touch with techy folks and not to post art, then I'd maintain an instance.
But there the issues (issues to me, maybe not to you!) begin. You can't browse the fediverse properly.
You have to painstakingly pry your way through instances manually, hoping to find interesting stuff.
You can't easily find art because all of it is hidden behind walls of text. Content warnings. I will rant about them more later.
You can't find users because the fediverse HATES discoverability. Attempts of some people to make a large central registry were met with such hate and toxic responses that they abandoned the ideas pretty quickly.
Your own growth is limited by how many users your home instance has. Network effects do not really exist (outside of your small home instance). Which again is really no problem when you go out there to find a few people to share thoughts with. It *is* a problem if you want your artworks to be seen! And found. And spread.
10 months on it, less than 300 followers. Granted, many interesting people with their own instances. Just, from an art perspective.... What am I gaining for my troubles? Nothing much.
Rant incumming.
Content warnings.
The fediverse is stuffed to the brim with 'em. Everyone warning *potentially* offended people who are unfit to deal with life and reality, about virtually anything.
Character makes eye contact? WOAH it is triggering maybe, best warn about it.
Penis? Yeah no this is definitely horrible, OH GOD THERE ARE NIPPLES best warn people.
EXPOSED ELBOWS?!?!? *GASP*
Someone is smacking a mosquito, this is gross violence, we must warn about it!!!
OH NOE THE COLOR RED, THIS CAN HARM PEOPLE how dare u post this WARN THEM ABOUT IT -- you get the idea. I'm also not exaggerating by much.
Instead of art or interesting content you just see warnings written on behalf of people that exist on *some* instance out there (which the poster does not know!!), who will go thermonuclear if their instance imports those posts because one user on that instance - unrelated to them - interacted with it.
Is that the burden of the poster to warn about? I think not.
It's a systemic issue because nobody thought about implementing content types, and content rating metadata.
It is also a result of what looks to be an isolationist culture of mentally unstable, easily triggered pricks that make up the core of most old fediverse instances. Play by their rules, or they get triggered. Their rules. Not yours. You dirty newcomer with your dirty newcomer ideas and memes best fit in or ELSE. Don't you dare post X, it is not welcome! <Insert tribal warfare here>
When bluesky came around, it was an eyeopener. It still is. Frictionless, granular content types which you can block, hide, warn about, or show without any fuss. It works, it is easy to do, it is part of the protocol, every user can make their own choice about what they want, and if that is not enough they can subscribe to user curated block lists. Or custom feeds.
And it doesn't take me writing a novel to explain causal users how to use it.
Yes I know. It's still a shitty microblogging service owned by yet another narc of a billionaire CEO who will eventually sell out your userdata for quick ad money while getting rimmed by underpaid pirate prostitutes on his private sex yacht while fellating a bag of money, and it is not Tumblr or an art gallery. All true.
Sadly the enshittened internet isn't offering up anything better that has actual reach right now and appeals to people who do not like more traditional places like FA here.
I am actually hoping we'll get back to the point where everybody hangs out on a single art site or has a cute custom personal website but... well I can dream!
Anyhow, that's all.
Also if you made it this far I'll let you know that https://todexart.download has gotten six months worth of more Patreon-exclusive artssssssss! Enjoy UWU
TLDR: I've nuked my fediverse presence. If you used to follow me there, you can delete it.
--
Now for my very opinionated take on why - if you care. If not, yanno. Grab a shovel and a box of dildos, go into a dark cave and have fun or something! You do you!
--
So faced with the choice to carry the instance onwards when migrating between hypervisors and root servers, and looking at the meager growth opportunities that the Fediverse presents, I strongly felt my will to live leave my body. 💀 And that's usually the point where I change things, so it didn't make the cut.
I like nerdy people who host their own instances. I can relate to them, I like tech, I like hosting things, I like tinkering with them. If it was for the sake of just staying in touch with techy folks and not to post art, then I'd maintain an instance.
But there the issues (issues to me, maybe not to you!) begin. You can't browse the fediverse properly.
You have to painstakingly pry your way through instances manually, hoping to find interesting stuff.
You can't easily find art because all of it is hidden behind walls of text. Content warnings. I will rant about them more later.
You can't find users because the fediverse HATES discoverability. Attempts of some people to make a large central registry were met with such hate and toxic responses that they abandoned the ideas pretty quickly.
Your own growth is limited by how many users your home instance has. Network effects do not really exist (outside of your small home instance). Which again is really no problem when you go out there to find a few people to share thoughts with. It *is* a problem if you want your artworks to be seen! And found. And spread.
10 months on it, less than 300 followers. Granted, many interesting people with their own instances. Just, from an art perspective.... What am I gaining for my troubles? Nothing much.
Rant incumming.
Content warnings.
The fediverse is stuffed to the brim with 'em. Everyone warning *potentially* offended people who are unfit to deal with life and reality, about virtually anything.
Character makes eye contact? WOAH it is triggering maybe, best warn about it.
Penis? Yeah no this is definitely horrible, OH GOD THERE ARE NIPPLES best warn people.
EXPOSED ELBOWS?!?!? *GASP*
Someone is smacking a mosquito, this is gross violence, we must warn about it!!!
OH NOE THE COLOR RED, THIS CAN HARM PEOPLE how dare u post this WARN THEM ABOUT IT -- you get the idea. I'm also not exaggerating by much.
Instead of art or interesting content you just see warnings written on behalf of people that exist on *some* instance out there (which the poster does not know!!), who will go thermonuclear if their instance imports those posts because one user on that instance - unrelated to them - interacted with it.
Is that the burden of the poster to warn about? I think not.
It's a systemic issue because nobody thought about implementing content types, and content rating metadata.
It is also a result of what looks to be an isolationist culture of mentally unstable, easily triggered pricks that make up the core of most old fediverse instances. Play by their rules, or they get triggered. Their rules. Not yours. You dirty newcomer with your dirty newcomer ideas and memes best fit in or ELSE. Don't you dare post X, it is not welcome! <Insert tribal warfare here>
When bluesky came around, it was an eyeopener. It still is. Frictionless, granular content types which you can block, hide, warn about, or show without any fuss. It works, it is easy to do, it is part of the protocol, every user can make their own choice about what they want, and if that is not enough they can subscribe to user curated block lists. Or custom feeds.
And it doesn't take me writing a novel to explain causal users how to use it.
Yes I know. It's still a shitty microblogging service owned by yet another narc of a billionaire CEO who will eventually sell out your userdata for quick ad money while getting rimmed by underpaid pirate prostitutes on his private sex yacht while fellating a bag of money, and it is not Tumblr or an art gallery. All true.
Sadly the enshittened internet isn't offering up anything better that has actual reach right now and appeals to people who do not like more traditional places like FA here.
I am actually hoping we'll get back to the point where everybody hangs out on a single art site or has a cute custom personal website but... well I can dream!
Anyhow, that's all.
Also if you made it this far I'll let you know that https://todexart.download has gotten six months worth of more Patreon-exclusive artssssssss! Enjoy UWU
I have a bluesky as a backup, just haven't touched it; definitely not the worst alternative out there, considering it's not particularly art centric as you stated. I can't really see myself leaving Twitter any time soon, but I understand the struggle of there being so many fractured areas of art posting, one consistent site would be the dream.
Well I wish more people would migrate away from twitter, but I can see that they might be waiting for vid support and DMs first.
It's definitely like a child who only 'has a free cookie jar when their favorite racist son' is around. Yeah i get Elon is stacking the deck to play his cards logically for himself the best (use up benefits and solar incentives, buy a platform he can use to 'not manipulate' elections).
But the alternatives are well ran by cuckoos it sounds like or just overly well meaningly niche nobody uses them. Everyone who grumbles and puts up with it. And even on the shadowbanned account getting like 5-6 comments and likes just batting heads with people every few hours, it was obvious when it went to 1.
It's a 'free speech' for pay per view agendas. Kinda just have to use it but when i lost the shadowbanned account i couldn't even be assed to re create another twitter account. Literally had a site to check, no viewable posts.. Not for the person wishing extreme far RIGHT RIGHT violence.. But criticizing it.
I've also seen people wishing violence pre Musk used to get banned within a 1-2 days, like 60-90% of the time. Now i think you're more likely to get banned for reporting hate than seeing it dealt with. It's all being monetized for ad revenue and almost stupidly the advertisers are leaving. Because who wants to buy "family friendly cruise packages" on "Why the KKK was great!" twitter like posts??
He acquires it.... and like ramps it up against people promoting their paysites like Patreon and Subscribestar. Not a fan of either myself because of the sheer volume of spam for that crap I see in my inbox on this site alone but to shadowban people trying to draw in business? Screwed up and not very free-speechy. Hell I ended up banned under his leadership because I expressed support for capital punishment for the worst of cirmes which interestingly enough others express it just fine without getting banned. Fortunately I had already prepared multiple backup accounts but the fact I even had to resort to that speaks volumes about his free speech bs.
There's too many narcs around reporting what offends them which contributes to this shit. Just seeing the complication involved in drumming up business as an artist where even platforms like Twitter actively work against you is in part why I gave up the idea of being a fandom artist myself.
Granted it led to other more lucrative opportunities for me that had me being careless with credit since I ended up getting so much of it I'm working myself out of that hole while maintaining the primary business but still.. oops. Lessons learnt but at some point though I'll have the time freed up and it can just be a hobby for me. I have this Cintiq Pro 24 that's just gathering dust and dude it's so sad seeing it like that. -_-
People are anal about trigger warnings, but like you said there's no content types which means anything that someone might be triggered by has to be painstakingly typed out. There's no convenient way to categorize the content you're putting on there. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if you only had to trigger tag traditionally sensitive content like porn, graphic imagery and other standard trigger tags. But because of the types of people who use the software, you'll get yelled at for not trigger tagging innoceous shit because people want to burden random internet users with their personal boundaries.
People don't want algorithmic feeds, but without some sort of discovery algorithms the creators don't have a reason to go there. Sure, this is fine for some cybersec researcher who people are going to follow to keep up on industry news. But this means nothing for artists and creatives and meme creators and the likes. One of the most glaring things things I noticed when trying out blusky and Mastodon is that I often went back to Twitter to view posts by the same artists. Not because I preferred twitter. But because I liked seeing memes or discussions from other communities that I didn't explicitly follow.
There are fediverse platforms are there that work pretty good for artists. Misskey is the biggest one. But the issue with that is that it's Japanese software with not much in the way of translations. And while they're a Japanese instances that are well populated, there's the obvious language barrier and then less obvious faux pas' that exists in their social media culture that aren't as enforced in English speaking circles online.
Yeah I ran a copy of that for my instance, very playful features but also quite wasteful with server resources. And sadly the most fun features weren't working for people sitting on mastodon or other instance types.. fragmentation.
And yes I share the same view as you on the points ya mention, basically.
I'm not sure if it's just the instance I'm on, or the fediverse in general, but the main thing I've noticed is the prevalence of posts asking for money, especially around the first of the month. Sometimes it's for rent/housing, sometimes medical needs, sometimes other things. Maybe that's a reflection of the economic climate in the world (or the USA), or maybe those posts are good at picking "popular" tags to bubble up in the suggestions.
In the interest of equal time, I also have a Twitter account, but I've got maybe 20 tweets in 15 years. :D I follow one or two people there, but that's mostly for the "must follow to DM" requirement that (used to?) exist there.
I only hopped onto twitter because Tumblr had its porn exodus, it really never was my first choice >:S
Still sounds like you went through hell and back with that series and sorry you had to go through that.
I do have a question, is there a way to give some support at all?
God damn it is my advertisement for my subscribestar this bad? DAMN!!
https://todexlabs.com/art-project/
Info is here actually.. and https://subscribestar.adult/todex there
I put that under each submission in the text and you didn't notice, FUUUUUUUUCK XD I'll have to rethink stuff.
People here may be too young, but when I heard about furry spaces being gated and invite only, potentially moderated by certain users as owners, I immeeeeeeeeeeediately was like... I've seen this one before, and it wasn't good haha.
But tbh it took me 14 years to get 3000 watchers on FA. 🙃 I have that problem EVERYWHERE. I basically only post for a few selected people who share my tastes anyway. If I'd have to survive on art? I definitely wouldn't waste time posting on Mastodon.
Also, by trying to make a central registry kind of defeats the point of decentralization. XD
Decentralization is more about the server infrastructure, but not about hiding away users in areas where they cannot be found. But maybe I'm biased towards needing an audience for the art
Fediverse? No thank you. Not when the majority of servers are run by petty tyrants and self-hosting is pretty much a nonstarter especially if I'd be subject to instance-wide blocks on a whim.