Dear diarheaa..

Most everyone's seen the mass panic about Twitter. I'm one of the many unfortunate artists who use social media to share and shill art, so I'm not leaving until it's completely burnt to the ground.

I am very annoyed at people pointing and laughing at those who use Twitter to share their art, including folks who depend on Twitter for a large portion of their audience and income (artists and writers!!!). It's about as annoying as people who would make fun of someone for losing their job, like yeah we all know social media is Bad and sucks but we live in a joker society where it's easiest way to spread news and art. It's not like we don't have other sites we use, Twitter just happened to be the one where we find the most people. So yeah. People making fun of others' suffering can fuck off.

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Some thoughts on sites:

Dreamwidth: I've already spread my presence to as many different sites as possible, as I've learnt from 2018 Tumblr not to put all my eggs in one basket. Dreamwidth is one of the sites I've always meant to make an account on, especially because a lot of slower moving art and fandom events are on here. It's established, seems stable, and I already know what the general community vibes are like because it's a livejournal offshoot.

Mastodon: I'm not interested in Mastodon or whatever other instances, because I am not interested in something that has the same format as Twitter but with less people. I don't like the format of Twitter. I'm only on Twitter because there are so many people there, that I can force to read my horrible tweets about Bruce Wayne's anal blockage.

No one I personally know is on Mastodon. A lot of the people doing community outreach for Mastodon right now are aggressive and rude, calling confused strangers "tech-illiterate idiots shooting themselves in the foot" for not knowing or wanting to do Mastodon. I do not want to join communities of strangers where the loudest people are arrogant, smug, and condescending.

I do not know of any specific instances for communities I would be interested in (diy art, zines, and yaoi), the one instance for art (Baraag) with the laxest NSFW rules is full of art that I do not want to see, and I am loathe to talk to strangers on large instances/cliques for my own safety and sanity. If I wanted to talk to 10 people I know on an instance "tooting" into the void, I'd rather just make a group chat.

Cohost: I am not interested in Cohost because they openly admit to mishandling their finances, and they already had their "Pillowfort" moment where they poorly handled the banning of "lolicon art".

Cohost's funding is one guy giving a couple of people a bunch of money, and they've already lost $23k. I do not trust that their finances, and thus the website, will be stable for the future. We've already seen this with Pillowfort and fanexus, where those projects make (or made) little progress because of the lack of funding and direction. Cohost does not currently make money (which a site needs to survive), they're leaking money. It does not seem like Cohost has a financial plan other than asking people for subscriptions, and I don't know how many $5 subscriptions can pay off $150k.

On their handling of the "lolicon" situation, the staff opened up the conversation to users and of course there was resounding negative feedback. Much of it accusing the staff of being pedophile enablers themselves!!! Any privately owned site has the right to moderate their content however they want, but I do not like that the Cohost staff seem too spineless to make this decision by themselves (they kept repeating they find lolicon art disgusting and they don't even want to discuss it in staff meetings??? Just ban it then.) and got bullied + harassed + death threated by their own userbase. A moderation team that cannot even handle their current small userbase, or make their own decisions on issues they all seem to agree on, doesn't seem promising.

(Pillowfort did the same thing, and alienated half their userbase by retroactively banning art of fictional characters that appear to be "under the age of 15", which is a strange ruling because they're still underage. Thus, they alienated both people who thought Pillowfort was still pedophile-enablers because they STILL allowed pornography of Naruto, and people who thought Pillowfort would be under similar NSFW rules as AO3 because of the fandom-y marketing.)

I do not draw lolicon art, or any art of prepubescent characters engaging in intercourse. A lot of the stories I create contain subjects that would upset same crowd, however: age gap, power imbalance, gore, abuse, murder, rape, incest, cannibalism, necrophilia, unhappy endings, and so on. I am confident in my art and have no intention of stopping making art that reflects the horrible shit humans do to each other. I wonder if the current crowd on Cohost would go on to harass and send death threats to me?

Pillowfort: Already made one a long time ago, even donated $5 to make my account! It was fine, but their handling of the "lolicon" situation as detailed above, as well as their security issues at launch made me never use it again afterwards. Doesn't seem like they're making too much progress right now, will check back in on them in a couple of years. A lot of the same stuff I'd put on there (nsfw art and writing), I just put on my own site that I made after I forgot about Pillowfort. And now I can put my ramblings here :)

Tumblr: I'm very annoyed at their current marketing campaign of "The Home of Fandom!!!" and being very quirkly lel and selling merch of memes their users made.  I'm even more annoyed at their "lol female presenting nipples are allowed now" ruling.  I'm still using it, just because I've been on there for like 10 or 15 years and my blog has hella shit to archive.  It's also really easy to upload art.  I hope I cost them $50 in server usage every year with no gain to them.

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Anyways.  Social media is funny.  Siloing into just a few websites is funny.  I think anyone who wants artists and writers to completely abandon social media because of its inherent evils are ridiculous.  Girl I want to see where my friends and fav artists and writers are, and also I want money to exchange for goods and services.  Until they have universal basic income and I can see old man yaoi writers and artists at the old man uke convention, it's nice to have a place to meet people.

I still think there's a lot of value for us to have our own websites, especially in CONJUNCTION with all our different blogs and socmeds.  I'll make another post about website hosting some time.  Seeya!