#alternatively i can set up my own website hosting to do that but I haven't looked into that

[l-e-morgan-author]

if I started a Patreon/something equivalent (e.g. email list) to release a novel would y'all follow it? with a cost I mean, a low cost? I haven't looked into it to get an idea of pricing but it would be low

[ungrateful-cyborg]

Social media comparison

Alright. I've tried different new/alternative platforms lately in hope to find something I really liked, and there are very promising ones. I didn't try everything, of course, but this is a kind of overview of my journey so far? Or just my thoughts on the matter.

I've tried Pillowfort, Bluesky, Mastodon (didn't last long enough to have much of an opinion, it simply didn't click), Dreamwidth and Cohost (as of today, can't post there yet).

My comparison under the cut:

► I appreciate that they're algorithm free, whether it's because they truly believe in an Internet rid of the most invasive of them or because it's too expensive to implement on a brand new platform or some other reason. Only the future can tell, but for now it's nice.

► Pillowfort: beside the post formatting that I find extremely comfortable, my favourite thing is probably communities. I feel like this is the strongest "pro" in favor of Pillowfort because this is where they truly distinguish themselves from other social media.

Communities, in a way, remind me of forums. They're however easier to take in hand since you don't have to deal with as many options and choices. In my opinion, communities on Pillowfort are a bit lacking in functionalities though. I think more tools to easily organize them would help, like a widget or something to link stuff so you can create and animate events within said communities.

(I also feel like Pillowfort would gain from not being dark blue. We have more than enough dark blue websites, and it doesn't go well with the warmth invoked by its name in my opinion, but that's a minor detail and just a matter of taste.)

► Bluesky: basically Twitter but better. No algorithm, for a start. The curated feeds are nice. They're a bit like communities on Pillowfort since they can be moderated but from a non-mod user, it's even easier to post in them: you just have to use the right keyword for your post to appear there. Well, if the mod left it open to all rather than chose to vet who can or cannot post in it. Lots of flexibility and control over your timeline overall.

I don't like the 300 characters limit, however. Never liked it with Twitter either. It's not really conductive to conversations, and the general design tends to make the website feel rather impersonal. It's really more like parallel talking than community building.

Overall I think it's a good tool to promote your (visual) art or website, etc. but not great for hosting conversations past commenting briefly what others are doing. I mean, you can make threads but it'll never be as good as Pillowfort or Tumblr for this.

► Dreamwidth: I'll start with saying that Dreamwidth isn't a social media, it's a journaling platform and I haven't used it much yet. Had in plan to post my headcanons about my muses there and stuff like that so I did spend some time trying to figure out how it works.

First, there is a lot of options to let you have complete control over who can see what. Like, a lot.

You can entirely personalize what your journal will look like. It's a bit easier than having your own website—since I reblogged a post about that yesterday—because you don't start from 0, so it might be a good option if you don't feel comfortable jumping into Notepad++ to start coding. You can just change a thing here and there, or nothing at all, or almost everything. It's pretty old school though, so for those completely unfamiliar with early/pre-web 2.0, it might not look very appealing at first. However, I'd say don't let that stop you! If anything, it's a good opportunity to learn a bit of code without pressure.

You can also create communities, which as you might have guessed is very important to me. When creating one, you can set up whether everyone can join, everyone can ask to join but has to be approved by a community admin or to limit the access to those you have personally invited. Like for your own journal, communities are completely customizable, and Dreamwidth allows adult content.

I'm not sure you can top DW communities in terms of functionalities—aside from making a forum—but it's not as intuitive as Pillowfort (though in exchange you get more customization). You're also more limited regarding image hosting (see here). That said, hosting services exist, many are free, and that's without mentioning that you can post on Twitter and the like and use the picture link in your DW posts. I don't think many will only use Dreamwidth anyway.

► Cohost: I was expecting nothing when I registered earlier today, but this is an overall good surprise: it's Tumblr, but better.

More control of what you see. More user-friendly UI. It's not fucking blue. Adult content allowed. You can change your main blog page and make it private.

The only two downsides I'd mention here would be that you can't customize your blog page appearance and you have to wait for one or two days before being able to post. Although if it means less bots, I'd rather wait.

And this ends my rather non-exhaustive tour of the social media/blogging/journaling platforms. If you catch any mistakes let me know. I didn't dive deep, this was just me sharing my thoughts.

(As far as I know, they all allow adult content and give you tools to not see it if you don't want to.)

[beesmygod]

I've been reading webcomics daily since at least 2003 & I'm torn on how I feel about webtoons and other comics aggregators. On the one hand, the fact that they're so bad for artists, their websites are shit, & their apps are full of garbage ads/promos is frustrating as hell. On the other hand, the alternative for a lot of amateur artists seems to be twitter or insta and that's even worse as a reader, since it's impossible to actually read archives. Fuckin' hate web 2.0 bullshit some days

i still dont understand why everyone is completely adverse to the most obvious and least damaging option in every single capacity: buying your own website and directing people to it. build a following on social media websites, as is their intended purpose, and make your money via patreon/wordpress plug-ins that allow you to lock extra content behind a paywall.

they only conceivable and easily disputed downsides of this set up are:

it costs money. but to buy a domain name and website is pitifully cheap these days. shared hosting can be as little as 2.50 a month and domain names are like 10 dollars a year. put aside 10 bucks a month to cover all your expenses lol. if you can't manage that you have way bigger problems you should deal with first.

there's a drastic dip in audience. which, if you're playing for the numbers you need to get offline and re-calibrate your entire soul. but if you want a bigger audience for the pragmatic reasons, such as more people=bigger potential profit, then i think you are attempting to make comics literally the single most brain destroying way possible.

what i mean is this: taking webtoons as the example, the advantage of being on webtoons is, presumably, because there is an audience there actively seeking out comics to read. the audience is large, but the audience is also almost entirely children, preteens and teens, demographics that are not known for having money to spend. instead, you have to make money via advertisements loading when the child audience loads a page. this means the more pages you have the more ad revenue you (theoretically) get. HOWEVER, webtoons also has insane panel MINIMUMS for their creator programs, so if you want to be in the special big boys club you have to do 35-50 panel minimums per update.

imo, the purpose of the panel minimums is so that webtoons has an absurd audience retention time to point at for their advertisers. and to be clear i mean webtoons THE COMPANY not the comic format "webtoon", which are designed to be read on a phone. there is nothing objectionable about the format. thats not my beef!! my beef is with how the company line webtoon is so transparently stupidly evil and people keep lining up to get fucked by them.

even putting aside the damage that cranking out 1200000 panels would do to your body, mind, and spirit, this sincerely makes for some of the worst storytelling i've ever seen. the primary audience is dumb because they are children, but the people who have seen movies, read books, other comics, etc can easily see how artificially inflated and empty each "chapter" (? im old i dont know the terminology lol) is.

ive seen webtoons that tried to make the jump to book format with embarrassing results. ive seen webtoons who, because they have no control over their page sizes, have to resort to turning a splash page on it's side which unfortunately always looks horrendous lol. did you know webtoons artists have to chop up their own panels in that incredibly stupid way so that you can't share them with your friends themselves? webtoons makes them do that. people actually do that.

all this and 40k, a massive amount of audience interaction that you would somehow manage to gain despite annoying your audience with video ads, only gets you a pathetic 100 dollars a month lol.

so people are working themselves to the bone for an audience that has undeveloped brains and haven't fully understood the magnitude of what art creation entails for pennies. organ grinder monkeys have a better life. there is no fucking reason to do this to yourselves.

get your own space and direct your audience to your social media for updates. tell them you are leaving webtoons because it is not financially viable. set up a means to be paid directly by your audience and stop. just stop hitting yourself

STOP IT JUST STOP IT AAAH

[beach-illustrations]

Would love to hear your review of Artfol once you've settled in a bit! (Probably wouldn't hurt for me to have a more presentable art archive somewhere either, so I'm curious about the alternatives)

of course!! after using artfol for about a week, i do like it! it's still very new, so i wasn't expecting too much off rip from it but it definitely has some good potential if it gets successful!

putting this under a read more because, as per usual, this got long.

to start: the good stuff! good, robust organization thus far for artists. all the art you post gets automatically put in its own separate tab on your profile called gallery in chronological order and any other art and text posts that you share as well as your own art and text posts get put into another tab called feed. the feed is in chronological order from newest to oldest and it's suuuuper nice being able to have an easy place that contains all your original work people can go to without the hassle of punching in specific tags in a search bar (or inputting them into the website url) and hoping for the best. the feed can then be further organized between posts and art, art submitted to challenges, art submitted to submissions and reshares of other peoples stuff.

you can also make collections for your own gallery, so you can have all your fan art in one collection, ocs in another, etc. this isn't just for personal organization either; your separate collections are displayed under the about section on your profile or, if you've got them, links section! i honestly like this a lot. most of my experience of running an art blog comes from tumblr and getting separate pages set up on your blog, while not horribly difficult, does require a bit of knowledge regarding html and manually inputting website urls where you want the links to go. having all of this steam lined is much better. all of this is relatively easy to figure out as long as you're open to just clicking buttons on the website to see what they do, as far as i could find there's no official tutorial available. you can only have a limited number of these without a premium subscription but i haven't a clue as to what that limit even is.

you can also effectively pin certain art pieces that you're proud of to the top of your gallery by putting them in a featured selection. no idea how to do this yet but i do think this in of itself is neat.

customization is light but they cover the basics well. they've got a nice bio and announcement/secondary heading type feature under your username that you can customize, as well as a nice big space for an icon and a big ol' banner you can put your art in. other than that, you can choose a 'theme color' as artfol calls it but it just determines the color of the bar under your banner as far as i can tell on the website version. they also have a separate area for links that automatically turn into the websites icon you're linking back to.

custom warning tags!!! these fully blur the image and you can put as many words to warn others about the content of the art as you want to clarify what someone's getting into if they click show. at first i was worried i could only put one custom warning on an image but nope, it lets you write multiple warnings on the censored image if the NSFW and Gore filters aren't cutting it for the art.

speaking of which; artfol allows NSFW! in places where online spaces have been getting progressively sanitized because big corporations and google ad sense are the ones who can pay the bills of hosting thousands of images and videos on servers, it's nice to see that.

the challenges! other artists can issue challenges to others to either draw their characters in certain outfits, as certain creatures, drawing a piece of art in your style, etc. think some of the various art memes floating around on twitter, except this time they have their own dedicated category! i haven't done any challenges yet but this seems like a great way to socialize with other artists on artfol, as well as stretch your own art skills.

AI art is explicitly banned.

there is an algorithm however it prioritizes art made recently, so artists of all skill level and mediums get a shot at being seen on the front page which is nice! as far as i can tell, your home feed (which is very similar to tumblr's) is in chronological order and doesn't put in any suggested or recommended posts in the middle of the posts of the people you've chosen to follow. the like and share options are easily accessible and when you share someone else's art, it notifies them by telling them that you've pinged them which is... odd to me, but the website doesn't seem to auto credit them any other way in reshares (in contrast, tumblr keeps the OP's username and icon at the top of their own original post when it gets reblogged). i'm also something of a tumblr hermit so this could be a common reshare (reblog?) format else where for all i know and i'm just griping about nothing.

there is a premium subscription you can sign up for as i mentioned earlier. you get stuff like no ads (which you also get if you've got an adblocker on your browser), more collections can be made, you can upload cover art (icons, i think?) for your collections and the art you post, you can have custom profile theme colors (i guess they let you use the color wheel or a hex code instead of the pre seleced colors they already have?) you get more layouts for your featured art on your profile and you don't have to wait 60 days to change your username. oh, and you can make groups that people can join based around one particular thing, however i haven't touched any groups yet because none of them are all that appealing to me.

honestly, a lot of the premium subscription perks are very inconsequential to the core functionality of artfol which is a huuuuge bonus to the devs in my eyes. they easily could have paywalled commission pages or collections all together and them just giving you some extra customization perks instead shows me that the devs are actually focused on making an artist friendly website and app.

over all, artfol is relatively easy to navigate and upload your art to! the base features are solid however the website does have some downsides.

the bad:

the most egregious thing is that I haven't been able to and currently can't access the content guidelines or privacy policy pages. when I first signed up, artfol gave me a link to what the website claimed was the content guidelines however it just linked me to the news page and that really didn't sit well with me.

because the artfol website is so new, I am going to give them a chance and interpret this in the best faith possible and assume that it seems like this is just an issue of certain pages crashing, seeing as I used to be able to access the News page on artfol and now it's just gone like the other pages. on top of that, it seems like every link except for their twitter, android and apple download links, instagram and discord links at the bottom of the artfol website page is broken in the same way. out of all pages eating themselves the content guidelines and privacy policy ones feel like the worse ones to lose. I haven't been able to access the guidelines from the jump and it's been really frustrating. I just got done sending an e-mail to their contact e-mail, so hopefully something good comes from that. in the mean time i've also downloaded the app to try to see if i can find the guidelines and privacy policy on there. I've noticed people complaining about crashing pages in the mobile app reviews so hopefully this is just a case of a website page accidentally eating itself and it's just very unfortunate coincidence that it happens to be some very important pages affected by the crashes.

other than that, the other downsides are that the website takes like a minute and a half to load, clicking on a censored image to view it on your home feed takes you to the individual post and has you un-censor it there rather than directly from your home feed and some features are currently only available to mobile accounts such as commissions tabs, however i'm sure that will eventually be made available to the website version as well in due time. also, while uploading art, not including the custom censor tag or NSFW or gore filters, you can only put 5 tags on your art. these are all only minor annoyances and i'm sure they'll eventually be fixed in upcoming patches.

over all: asides from some concerning hiccups with missing pages, artfol seems very promising for a relatively new, bare bones website! the developers have very much taken a mobile app first, website later approach which at least to me isn't the end of the world, seeing how the website is already doing okay all things considered. the community seems nice and i'm planning on trying out some challenges soon to get more experience using it!