#also please don't tag this with any algorithm-ruining things

[rustbeltjessie]

Hey friends—I, once again, could really really use some $$, and I decided to add a poll for traction cuz that seems to work on other people's posts. Anyway. I'm not in dire dire straits, in that my rent and utility bills are paid for the month, and we currently have food, but I'm basically entirely out of money otherwise. I need to make sure I can put gas in the car (it's almost on empty, and my kids both have doctor and dentist appointments coming up in the next couple weeks), as well as have money for other bills, household goods other than food, and anything else that might come up. My goal right now is $150-$300, but of course more than that would be even more helpful, as it would leave me in a better place heading into March.

Ways you can support me:

I have a Ko-fi, where you can purchase things I made, commission me for a custom collage, or hire me to proofread or line-edit your writing. If you're looking for zines to read, I have many. My main project right now is a year-long zine subscription, where I send you 1-3 mini zines every month. It's never too late to sign up—you can do it month-by-month, a six-month subscription will get you any combination of past and future zines that total up to six months' worth, and if you sign up for the full year at any point you will receive all past and future issues. February's zines, which will be sent out sometime in the next ten days, are going to be one containing a couple excerpts from the novel I'm writing, and another that's a remembrance of an old friend and a favorite band. I also got a pin (badge) maker for my birthday, and I've now put some of my designs up for sale on my Ko-fi.

Speaking of pins: I'm unofficially offering custom pin commissions. I'm not offering the type of service where you can send me your own design and I'll make hundreds of pins from it. What I mean is, for a base fee, you can commission me to design a custom pin for you. The base fee will include one pin made from the custom design. For an extra fee, you can pay for up to 10 more. If you are interested in something like that, please DM me, or email me at coeur(dot)de(dot)fantome(at)gmail(dot)com.

And, as always, if you appreciate the art and writing I share for free on my blog, in my Substack, and elsewhere, you can just tip me—either directly through Tumblr, or via Ko-fi, P*yP*l, or V*nmo.

P.S. If you live outside the US and need help calculating shipping costs, or you want to order something/hire or commission me but you prefer to do it outside Ko-fi, please DM or email me.

Ko-fi: ko-fi(dot)com/rustbeltjessie P*yP*l: coeur(dot)de(dot)fantome(at)gmail(dot)com V*nmo: (at) JessieLynnMcMains

And, as always, reblogging/boosting this post helps, too. 🖤💗

[wishingstarinajar]

Hello Wish! I'm a refugee from the world of the blue bird. (X marks the spot and all that, yuck) I was wondering if you have any advice to someone starting out tumblr? What and when should you reblog? Is it rude to only do that and not have original content in your profile? How does this all work?

Welcome to Tumblr!

Sure thing. Lemme drabble down a little list for you:

First, get yourself an avatar and a bio/description to set yourself apart from the dreadful bots. You don't have to go personal or deep with your bio/description, you only need to show you're human so people won't block and/or report you. (If you want to follow 18+ blogs, an indication of your age in your bio might be useful but not a must!)

Reblogging is preferred over Liking posts and is also highly encouraged here on Tumblr. There is no algorithm here so reblogs make the world go round. That said, if you only Like stuff and hardly reblog, then that's fine too so don't feel forced.

You reblog whatever you want to and how often you like. It's your blog, you cater to yourself and your interests. You aren't responsible for anyone else's eyes, morals, or whatever else. Be free!

You're allowed to reblog super old posts. It's not weird or intrusive, dig up those fossils and show them off!

You don't have to post any original posts if you don't want to. Being a reblog blog is just as valid of a use of Tumblr. Just avoid being seen as a bot and you can reblog to your heart's content.

If you reblog a post with tags (tags related to the contents of the post), you get bonus internet points. Tags also help with making posts easier to find on your blog (or filter for your followers).

You may leave compliments in a reblog's tags or tack a description with your thoughts, additional info, or compliments to the reblog. If you do this, you very often make the OP's (Original Poster) day!

Hateful tags and responses or unwanted criticism attached to a reblog are not tolerated so please don't.

Tumblr has a queuing system so you can pre-set when reblogs appear on your blog and your followers' dashboards, especially when you have tons of reblogs and wish to spread them across a few days or hours. You can queue posts by selecting "Schedule" after clicking the downward arrow next to "Post now" or "Reblog" at the bottom of a post/reblog.

If you decide to reblog mostly spicy/suggestive content, a warning in your bio or pinned post is appreciated (but not a must!).

Tumblr has a mute/filter option for both tags and post content. Go absolutely crazy with this if there are certain subjects or (trigger) words that could ruin your day. This goes for blocking as well. Be kind to yourself, block and mute/filter generously.

If you've blocked someone, their posts might still appear on your dashboard through someone else's reblogs. Put that blocked user's name in "Filtered Post Content" and you won't quickly see them again.

Hope this will help you get comfy on Tumblr. Enjoy your stay!

[thegreathudsonandrexcampaign]

For Instagram posts:

I put these together real quick. They are the optimal Instagram size, 1080x1080. (Tumblr, please don't ruin them.)

I hope to have more images soon. I welcome any suggestion regarding the styling, I chose yellow on the font because it's the more striking so it easily catches the eye when scrolling (and highly recommended for promotion). I didn't think a lot about the font, I'd love suggestions but it would have to be something to be easily read and to look okay in all caps. No calligraphy. The purpose is not for it to look pretty, just to be read.

I am also posting the photos without letters so that anyone can write their own message. Please, don't leave the photos without a message! We are not promoting Hudson and Rex, we are asking for John Reardon's return.

The post: Write a few things about the situation. No need for proof and such, if someone wants to ask in your comments how you know about this, then you can further elaborate. But it should definitely include the fact that a) John Reardon is not coming back, b) it's not his choice, which will put the blame on Shaftesbury, CityTV and the rest. You could also add the fact that they've been completely silent about this, secretive even, and that they are now deleting/hiding any comments asking about it.

Tags: Tag the Hudson and Rex official instagram account, Shaftesbury, and Beta Films. From what I know, Pope Productions doesn't have a company account.

Make sure to use #hudsonandrex along with any other tag that you want, so that it can appear on the tag! It's important. The goal is to have a lot of these posts so that they will eclipse the normal posts. It's not that easy because of Instagram's algorithm but it could be done.

If you can like each other's posts, it would help with their visibility. Liking comments inside your posts dies the same thing. You can also put post links on this post's replies if you want so that other fans can like them.

You don't have to be using these images, these are a suggestion and to help people who either can't make them or don't want to.

If you can, use a Hudson and Rex image for your profile.

[godbirdart]

You don’t have to answer this question as it’s probably dumb to ask…but do you know what platform(s) would be a good starting point? Particularly for original content rather then fanart? I heard deviantart is a good place where alot of ppl got there start on but there’s lots of art thrives and such.

don't even worry, it's not dumb at all! it's hard to gauge where to Begin in the vast hellscape that is the online world. i do get this question [and some adjacent questions] often so please allow me to use your ask as an excuse to post a few of my site rankings for various art things!!

for reference, these are the sites I'll be addressing because i have used them at some point within the last year. please note: my information on Cohost and Itaku specifically may be out of date as I haven't used them in a long while. naturally, this is all solely my perspective. i run both a furry/original content account and an anime/fanart account on most of these sites and run them reasonably independently from one another. these rankings are based on how well each account fares on each site.

I will be talking about Patreon and Ko-Fi as if people will only be posting paywalled content there. you Can publicly post on both sites, but for the sake of this post i'm only going to treat them as paywalled sites since well, that's kind of their purpose.

POSTING ART IN GENERAL

the A-tier list sites here are the ones that are most practical, with a decent member presence and little to no algorithms impairing your reach. the only sites here with any sort of algorithm are tumblr and deviantart, but i feel they don't ruin your reach that much.

B-tier list is mostly centered around popularity. there are massive audiences on both masto and twitter. twitter can be really good if you're posting certain content. mastodon has countless instances [read: servers / subdomains, however you want to call them] that can help narrow down an audience and like-minded people. for example, i use mastodon.art whereas many furries may use meow.social. you Can be discovered by people on other servers than yours.

C-tier has been sorted in accordance to audience. this is solely in my experience, but not a lot of new people are flocking to cohost and itaku. we also just hate facebook in this house and i will never give a facebook products a high rating.

F-tier: if you are a new or growing artist, putting your art behind a paywall or making it a chat platform exclusive thing can really hinder your growth. you can still do this of course, but you won't get as many eyes on your work as you would on a public gallery. threads is there solely due to privacy issues that Cannot be overlooked. i will not recommend it.

POSTING ORIGINAL CONTENT / CHARACTERS / NON-FANWORKS

here's how i'd grade these sites for posting Original content, characters, stories, etc. your best sites will likely be furaffinity, deviantart, and tumblr. i've put these three here for their tag use, discoverability, and audience presence. tumblr can be a little glitchy with its tags, but they DO function.

A-tier is entirely centered around audience presence. these sites are great for showing off your work, but they don't have the same population as the S-tier. mastodon can be good as the quieter instances give you more discoverability. bluesky has been THRIVING when it comes to the furry community as of late [i'm personally on there daily] - the only reason i don't put it as S-tier is because it's invite-only AND you need to rely on your work being found through the Feeds feature if you aren't an already established artist.

B-tier: useful, but population may hinder your growth. toyhouse is GREAT for posting your original characters and stories, but it is invite-only and not necessarily gallery-focused [it can be USED for a gallery, but it's not the main purpose]. you can also post stories and lore to toyhouse. discord and telegram are Good, but again it can be hard to gain an audience through sites that require invites.

C-tier: it is DIFFICULT to grow on paywalled sites with original content. cohost [to my knowledge] has been stagnating with the release of bluesky.

F-tier: threads sucks, the end.

POSTING FANWORK, FANFIC, FANDOM CONTENT IN GENERAL

S-tier here is sorted because of audience presence. while twitter does suck, i'm finding a LOT of success there with fanart. tumblr is The fandom site of course. furaffinity is great for a surprising range of fanart that isn't exclusive to furry, and deviantart's Groups feature is still going strong which can give you that extra exposure.

A-tier is: fans Go here, but the population or algorithm can make things tricky. instagram is good for fanwork but the algorithm and the speed that things are posted there can make discoverability an uphill battle. patreon; if you make comics or art with fan characters [especially 18+ content lmao] you can grow pretty rapidly there. patreon, like any other paywalled site, should be a secondary site and not your Primary posting location. artfol and pillowfort are still growing. pillowfort has a Communities feature - sort of like deviantart groups - that you can submit your art to which gives you that extra exposure. artfol is just a nice gallery site and the tagging system is,, decent enough. a little confusing because the tag system looks up keywords in posts and titles First, you have to tab over to hashtag searching specifically.

B-tier: invite only and audience reach. again, bluesky relies on your art to be picked up in Feeds, as there's currently no tag search. inkblot is growing but has a decent audience. ko-fi isn't as known as patreon for exclusive content but it's still a good site. mastodon has tagging that makes discoverability easier, but mastodon and its many servers can make things confusing for some people. itaku's not as commonly used so it may be harder to gain new eyes there once you establish yourself.

C-tier: posting fanart to these sites Can Work. toyhouse focuses on posting and sorting original characters, so treating it as a gallery site won't get your far fast. it isn't impossible to grow as an artist there, but the site isn't intended for fanart posting. i cannot say much on cohost here. telegram and discord, again, it's harder for people to discover you out of the blue unless you mention your server / channel on another site.

F-tier: fuck threads.

lastly, to address thieves,

thieves are gonna be everywhere. i'm sorry to say, but there will always be shitty people. i recommend the following:

watermark your art. not in the corner, don't just sign in one spot, place a Huge translucent watermark over the WHOLE art. i recommend making it a colour gradient too instead of one solid colour or greyscale.

also: sign your goddamned art! put your username on there!

post a low resolution when sharing online. less than 1200px wide or tall. 72dpi. JPEG format. keep the high res privately for yourself.

add a subtle noise filter over your art. it doesn't have to be high opacity, and it'll make your art a little grainy, but it's good for fucking with AI bots and ruining any print quality potential.

i hope this offers some insight! if you have a different experience on these sites, please feel free to add your testimonial in the replies or reblogs! not every artist is going to have the same experience and growth rate.

[waterolivecoffiyeh]

Right. Like it was really a fill-in-the-blank thing. You complained for over a month about the issue in Twitter and Tumblr posts. After all, in your so-called first "ramble" everything was easy to connect to what you were talking about. Again; as a former follower of yours, I didn't need to just insert anything. I picked it up from everything you were talking about. More so, you made these posts when there were a lot of attacks and news coming out from Palestine. A lot of people were spreading stuff about as they could with stuff blocking and suppressing news. It's not that hard to put 2 and 2 together. You were not vague at all. Also, I'm glad you're bitter about your Christmas morning being ruined. You don't deserve any peace of mind given how much of an insensitive person you are to others, yet dare to expect everyone else to cater to your need for a "safe space" on the internet. But, I guess you can't even do that right if you're still seeing "stuff" you don't want to see. Since we're on the topic I noticed this little bit.

Here you are complaining still about seeing stuff you don't want to see. I'd ignore this post if it wasn't for the fact you mentioned Tiktok here. Tumblr isn't TikTok. That much is true. However, TikTok is where a lot of people are getting their Palestine news straight from people in Gaza. I use it myself to keep up to date. More so, the algorithm is suppressing news. People have to try and bypass things to help spread the news. Even then, how you manage your feed is based on what/who you watch and what tags you look up. You could literally be on TikTok and not see anything. Last time I saw you talking about TikTok on a random art post you admitted you didn't get it or understand how the app worked so I wrote it off as you not being a user. But given the number of times you complained about stuff now, I seriously wonder if you're using TikTok. Either way; it doesn't change what you did in your posts and why I lost all respect for you as an artist. Your first ramble was worse off because you tried to spin it off as a "Woe as me I can't do anything to help so please don't show me stuff I can't handle." type of ramble only an overly sensitive privileged brat would use as an excuse to look away. And let's not forget you dared to reduce this genocide down to a religious war between two Muslim "countries" when it's Israel trying to wipe out Palestinians. Everything else were you complaining about seeing stuff you don't like after that coincided with dates of big news and attacks coming out from Gaza. Then you had to make that insensitive rant online while people were being killed by bombs or kids dying of starvation on Christmas eve as if their suffering was ruining your Christmas. I had every right to call you out on your bullshit because that's what it is. For someone who tries to market yourself as a wholesome and "safe" artist, you are nothing short of a two-faced privileged brat who thinks you can say anything "online" and thinks it's not come back to bite you in the ass. You are posting on social media. People are always going to see stuff. If you can't handle any responses then you shouldn't even be on here or learn to keep stuff to yourself. If you want to be a shitty person then keep your shitty behavior and thoughts to yourself or whoever is willing to tolerate you as a friend, if you even have any. But, I won't tolerate someone who seems to be compliant with a genocide happening and having issues with seeing a "few" screenshots as if they don't have the power to control what they see. That doesn't compare to the horrors people are facing right now and again it's the most privileged take I've ever seen you try and spin in your favor.

[paganinpurple]

AO3 Etiquette -UPDATED

Based on both decent and not so decent replies, I have made some changes to my original post below.

It would seem a whole new kind of AO3 reader/writer is emerging and it is becoming clear not everyone quite understands how the website community works. Here is some basic guidance on how most people expect you to go about using AO3 to keep this a fun community archive that funtions correctly:

As well as likes, kudos is for when the story was interesting enough to make you finish reading. If it sucked or was badly written, you probably left. If you finished it, you liked it - so kudos.

If you really liked it, you should try to comment. It can be long and detailed or a literal keysmash. Writers don't care, we just love comments.

No critisism unless the author has specifically asked or agreed to hear it (so use your notes to say if you want some constructive feedback). Even constructive critisism is a no-no unless an author note tells you it's okay. No, posting it online is not an open invitation for that. Many people write as a fun hobby or a way to cope with, among other things, insecurity and just want to share. Don't ruin that for them. I've seen so many authors just stop writing coz they can't handle the negative emotions the critism brings, and it's only meant to be a fun thing shared for free (pointing out tagging errors is not included in this).

Do not comment to ask the author to write/update something else. It's tacky and off-putting and will probably have the opposite effect than the one you want.

There is no algorithm, it's an archive. Use the search and filter function to add/remove the pairings/characters/tropes etc. you want to read about and it will find you the fics that fit the bill.

For this to work, writers must tag and rate stories. This avoids readers finding the wrong things and missing the stuff they want. I don't care how cringy that trope is in your eyes - it gets tagged.

The tag exception is if you don't want to tag a million things or spoil your story, you can rate it as "chose not to use warnings," and maybe tag the bare minimum.

Don't censor tags. How can someone exclude a tag if the word isn't typed out correctly? There are no content bans for terms so don't censor them.

If the tags are mostly content/trigger warnings, especially if they are things considered very fucked up or graphic, you might want to use "dead dove - do not eat" to ensure people know that you're not messing around with tags and what they get is exactly what you've warned them about.

Character A/Character B means a ROMANTIC or SEXUAL relationship of some kind. Character A&Character B is PLATONIC, like friendship or family.

Nothing is banned. This is an rule because banning one thing is a slipperly slope to banning another and another, until nothing is allowed anymore. Do not expect anyone to censor for you. Because of the tags system, you are responsible for your own reading experience.

People can create new chapters and sequels/fic series any time after they "complete" a story. So it's considered perfectly normal to subscribe, even to a finished story. You can even subscribe to the author instead just to cover your bases.

Do not repost stories or change the publishing date without an extremely good reason (like a complete top to bottom rewrite or an exchange youve written for going public). It's an archive, not social media. No one cares what's the most recent, only what fits their tag needs.

Instead of deleting a story you wrote if you hate it - consider making it anonymous or orphaning it so others can still enjoy it, without it being connected to your name anymore. If you still want to delete it, fair enough.

It's come to my attention that metaworks ARE allowed on AO3, which is something I wasn't aware of. So if you do post an essay or theory, please tag it as such so others can choose to search for it or exclude it. Art is also allowed.

The only reason this archive works is because NON ONE PROFITS. Do not link to your ko-fi or patreon or mention monetary gain in any way or you violate the terms and risk having your account removed. If anyone does link, it leaves the archive open to people claiming it's for profit and having the whole thing removed.

I KNOW there's plenty more I missed but I'm trying to cover most of the basics that people seem to be struggling with.

I invite anyone to add to this, but please explain, don't berate.