I used to primarily use Instagram for following illustrators, sculptors, digital artists, etc., but I dropped Insta for obvious reasons.

There was also a large exodus from Insta to Cara.app almost a year ago due to Meta’s stupid policies on using Insta content to train AI. While Cara is generally a great site and has anti-AI policies (I’m not anti-AI, just anti the way most companies implement AI), my problem with Cara is that it’s an owner funded site that will inevitably need to find a way to monetize the content/users.

On the Fediverse, I’m on Lemmy, Mastodon (though I don’t love the micro-blog format), and Pixelfed (very little activity).

So my question is: What platforms in the Fediverse are you seeing the most original artist content?

  • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    1 month ago

    Artists require an audience if they’re going to share their work - otherwise we might as well just hang our works up on our fridge and be done with it.

    Lemmy is a very small audience at present.

    • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      54·
      1 month ago

      They also often rely on commissions or supporter pages to cover costs or make a living, which Lemmy is often hostile to.

      • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        52·
        1 month ago

        Where did you get that from? Why should Lemmy be hostile to that? We often get posts about donating to valuable projects and such.

        • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          41·
          1 month ago

          Its just been my personal experience browsing, sorting by new. Generally, anything that could potentially be viewed as an ad (nonetheless a paywall) gets downvoted. For example, I used to see more art shared, and often users who included watermarks (even non-disruptive ones), or links to a patreon would be immediately downvoted. I’ve also seen YouTube creators criticized here for simply selling merch. Even just a couple days ago, I commented on the same trend, and another user quickly replied to tell me its a good thing nothing here can be monitized because money ruins everything. There are exceptions, esspecially with open source software, but these seem more the exception than the norm, in my experience.

          • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            People on lemmy downvote anything it’s actually really harmful to the user experience.

            Like a completely harmless post into a niche hobbyist community is often downvoted because a couple people on all decided to downvote it for no apparent reason.

  • captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Can’t say that I have found them. I hoped Cara would be a new landing place but I think we are all wary of investing our energy in building another place that gets taken away or drives us out later.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Pretty much this. How many artists did you follow on, say, reddit? There were so few on there, and those that were there mainly linked to alternate social media and just used reddit to get engagement. Lemmy is probably the most approachable activitypub interface (we all remember trying to find the damn content on mastadon/bluesky…) and it’s just not big or established enough to be worth trusting. Hopefully that will start changing soon as more people hop over from the myriad other sites, we seem to be past the critical point for new users, but it just takes time.