It's a good idea. A great idea even. But it's way more cumbersome and asks significantly more from its users to be usable for a fraction of a fraction of the traction. I'm taking a break from the platform for a bit and wanted to express my issues with the platform somewhere else. SO:

To find stuff on Mastodon, you need to know where it is already. The search system is opt-in only. On paper, that's great. The problem is that the community hasn't adapted to the opt-in search. Rather than developing a tagging culture, most users just treat Mastodon like it's Twitter: A platform where you can get away with posting and image with the caption "drew the boi" and still get traction.

The only tag relevant to me that I could find that people gravitated to was #furryart, which became a one-size-fits-all receptacle for anything that could be considered furry and art. Kind of like going to the library and only being able to search "mystery" instead of Arthur Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes. Meaning you have to spend a lot more time and effort to find anything, sorting through stuff you don't want to see.

Information travels very slowly on Mastodon. Considering the platform doesn't work if the users don't know things, that's kind of a huge problem.

The culture is... something. I wouldn't call it nice. Maybe polite, but certainly not nice.

A few good things going for the platform: No dunking, outrage farming, interaction bait. And most of the all, the blacklist system is fucking superb. It has folders, you can choose to block terms completely or collapse them with a label, you can set a timer for terms, you can flag untagged content for your own blacklist. It's great. I wish everything had a blacklist as good.

Figured I'm due for a new journal. Killed my Patreon a while back as I got too busy and overwhelmed. I've spent most of my art time trying to make comics and trying to move away from Twitter.

Twitter was always bad by design, but the last 6 months had slowly eroded at most of the positives the platform had. It has since become so hostile and unreliable that I spend most of my energy trying to get others to move elsewhere.

So there's Mastodon, which has its own problems, mainly its unpopularity with fandoms. I sincerely believe it could make a better twitter for furries than actual twitter one day, but that day is not today.

Mastodon: https://meow.social/@Spextherat

Itaku: https://itaku.ee/profile/spextherat (I posted the first page of a comic here.)

https://www.patreon.com/Spextherat

So, I'm out of a job. Not sure for how long. Pretty scary stuff. This isn't like an emergency or anything. I just have a lot of time on my hands suddenly and figure I should at least TRY.

It's a tip jar for now, but there will be exclusive stuff and voting on what that exclusive stuff ends up being. So yeah. LIFE.

I've got the next week off and want to spend it doing character stuff.
Ask my rat questions, please.
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/33526860/

I'll be doodling regardless, but prompts help.

https://curiouscat.me/Spextherat

With tumblr's current... weirdness and FA being generally unreliable, I've made a dedicated art twitter! It'll probably have more sketches and WIPs that don't get posted here, but you won't miss too much if you don't follow there: https://twitter.com/RattheSpex

I don't got a lot to say, so I'll make this quick. What used to be me and 6 co-workers turned to me, 3 co-workers, and a lot of mandatory overtime. I'm still gonna try, but I'm closing entries til I can reasonably plan around my work schedule again

Nice dick bro

Thank you, FA people! Now to look at ALLLLLL the porn I missed.

As a Christmas present to me, I deleted a handful of junk from my submissions and moved a lot of the stuff I did in November to the scraps. *blows party horn*

I hit 10k pageviews. I'd like to thank the academy, my mom and I guess Satan. That son of a bitch never answers my call, though.

I took a week and a half break from art after the week of Captain Carrot and now I'm back at it. Sort of. We'll see.

I hate making FA journals but decided, why the fuck not. If no one reads it immediately, it'll just be on the front of my profile for the next 11 months.

So, I'm opening commissions again. I opened them for a short time last year to test the water and I learned a few things from that. Some business-y things. Some art-y things. THINGS. Mostly that I hated it. I hated putting myself out there. I hated the art I was making. I hated how much time and effort I invested. I hated how little I was making. I just hated the experience. So why am I trying again? Uh. I do a lot of shit I don't like to do. At least this way I could get something out of it.

Also, I changed my prices because they were fucking stupid. I undersold myself because I didn't think my effort was worth putting a price tag on. FUUUUUUCK. THAT.

In other news: Fuck Amiibos. Why can't I just buy the fucking toys? I want my fucking jigglypuff.

And I'm excited for the FA redesign. The beta isn't great, but I think it's a step in the right direction. It's starting to look like a website made this decade. I really hope we get multiple color palettes to choose from, like the old one. Not sure how to feel about IMVU or whatever. Until there's an actual fuck up, I'm still here, baby.