It's a blogging site, and people can use it to post whatever they like. It gets pretty stream of consciousness at times, because you see what they write or what pictures they post, alongside anything they see on tumblr and want to reblog.

Ie: they could be browsing other blogs/tumblr accounts and see something they like and reblog it [similar to a retweet]. Or even just be looking through the accounts they follow and be replying to posts they see, or reblogging them.

It's hell for viewers who want to seek out any particular artwork from an artist, though. If Artist X has a tumblr and draws A, B and C types of content, and I only care to look for C things, I have to click and scroll back through hundreds of posts of random things that they may have posted or reblogged. Only if they properly tagged EVERY SINGLE ONE of their original content posts [ie: anything they created themselves, not reblogs], only then can a viewer find them all.

This is contrasted with gallery sites like FA that at least have organized pages that can be viewed at a glance.

So it's like a Livejournal but you can repost stuff from other people? Is there any real advantage to having one? It doesn't sound like it if it's hell for viewers and if so, why do some artists use it to post artwork that they don't post to a better organized site?

I meant hell for looking back through a blog for anything specific. Also, if I want to look back through someone's art on Tumblr, but I'm not looking for anything in particular, and I just want to see what-all they actually HAVE, then I'm just stuck there going back through random shit for hours on end.

But I guess people like it because of the community one can create with all the interlinking of posts via reblogging and stuff.

Thank you for the information. Sounds like something I really don't need after all. I have trouble enough not dealing with whatever community exists on the sites I'm already on.

How about joining stuff like Aim, Skype, etc.?

A blog is a bit different situation to a messaging program. I don't really have much in common with most of the users of this site outside of fur art and talking about that all of the time gets pretty dull. Most people aren't interested in my style of conversation either. I don't use the face images or actions. It's just text and that doesn't work for people these days so I don't see myself signing up for any of those either.

Tumblr can be nice to post things that just won't fit on Twitter like long in depth articles and well sourced written content, but it is true that it can become a huge mess trying to navigate sometimes if you want to go back through content. That being said it can be useful to post stuff if you only really keep up with newer content, but reblogging stuff can quickly lead to your page being full of stuff you didn't create. It sort of depends on how you use it. If you don't spam reblogs it can still be okay to post content.

That being said if you are mostly talking about posting art, art galleries are still easier to navigate in my opinion. There are others besides FA like Weasyl now. FurryNetwork was supposed to be the FA killer but it has some issues of its own in how content is displayed. Also their user bases are smaller.

Twitter is a decent medium for communicating briefly, but the brevity can become restrictive. It's not perfect but it does work and many artists use it as an aside coupled with actual art galleries. More personal stuff and announcements go on twitter and they can also post images with brief descriptions that link to their gallery.

Some people do use IM's to announce and communicate with people. Though that's definitely not for everyone. The new ones are Discord and Telegram which let you make groups where you can announce stuff. Usually if people are streaming art or opening for commissions.

It really depends what you want to do. Tumblr might be useful if you try and connect with different people and go through their content and other's content they reblog. However, for a stable gallery of art it's not that great. Twitter is good for connecting but everything is very brief and fast moving.

I hope that is somewhat helpful.

Thank you for that explanation. It's been most helpful in my understanding. I usually don't have trouble with technology but social media seems to be a totally different beast.

I've been on Weasyl for a while but until I upgraded to a new system recently, the site's coding made it unusable for me. I'm playing catch up uploading certain works to it a little at a time each day. I also joined FurryNetwork about a month ago and have had more activity on it in the past couple of days than I have in the previous weeks. I never thought I'd see a site that would make Weasyl look busy but now I have.

I'll probably stick with the art galleries. Despite having a super fast connection, I have enough going on just keeping up with them. And I really don't have much to say outside of the art that anyone else wants to hear.

Well, sometimes you never know until you start communicating with people. You can remain as detached or as engaged as you want on Twitter. It might be worth checking out some time just to see if you like it.

Either way I'm glad to see you being active again. Happy to be helpful!

I might sign up with Twitter to follow an artist that posts stuff only to there. I'm not sure what use I'll have for it beyond that.

Thank you again. I thought I was always sort of semi-active somewhere but I could be mistaken. My memories about several things probably isn't what it should be especially for time frames.

Tumblr is really only good if you're either looking to post porn, stupid meme's, troll/get trolled or get into dramatic political/cultural arguments with a bunch of teenagers who think they know everything. I'm not saying there isn't anything positive there (did I mention the porn?) but for the most part I rarely go there. There's way too much concentrated drama and if you don't agree with the masses you get buried in salt. I say that as a very liberal person. Even I can't take how wacko some people there get. Proceed with caution.

Sounds a bit like Facebook but with porn. I suppose I could post porn but I already do that on my galleries and with relatively few political/cultural arguments. And I've never been very good at reposting things. I know people that do almost nothing but repost and it drives me crazy. I only find out about what they're looking at and nothing about how they are, which is what I really want to know.

Thank you for the input. It's been very valuable.

Facebook isn't as annoying and has better security/filtering options. On tumblr you pretty much have to go through every single thing the people you're following post while on Facebook you can select what kind of content you want and don't want to see, follow/unfollow friends so that you only see important posts and select whether or not you want the public to see your posts or just friends/friends of friends. It's not perfect but then if I wanted perfect I wouldn't use social media at all. I'm too much of an attention whore to do that lol.

I used to rp on Tumblr a lot but the posts that go on forever, rants and inability to keep spam from showing up means I only use it when I'm bored or when someone links to it.

I've never used filters on Facebook. Given some of the content that's popped up recently, I might have to start looking into setting up some of them if I want to keep looking at things on the site.