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?
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.
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.
Probably Mastodon.
Bluesky started off as mainly a community of comic artists.
Mastodon seems more heavy on “furry” stuff.
A project in the Fediverse is not an encapsulated unit. Therefore, each project is potentially the right one to create and distribute content and all others are able to receive and display the content.
Could you expand on that? If I were looking for federated platforms that get a lot of activity from artists posting their work, what would you recommend?
The short version: It doesn’t matter if you use Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica or any other platform to participate in the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is an open stream of data (writing, images, videos, geodata, etc.) and all projects in the Fediverse can receive this data stream.
There is a certain degree of specialisation in order to better meet certain challenges. For example, you can easily share long videos with Peertube. Pixelfed specialises in the sharing of images and Lemmy in the aggregation of links.
There are also sites such as Mastodon, which specialises in microblogs, or Friendica, with which you can write long content and structure the content with Markdown or BBCode.
This content is created with Friendica, for example. So I don’t use Lemmy. Nevertheless, they can see the content and we can interact with each other. This is because our software, which we have used to log in, is connected to each other via the same data stream. Only our front end looks different.
But this also means that with your Lemmy account, you can receive all the content if it is available in the data stream. Enter a few hashtags that you would like to be displayed. When posts with this hashtag are published, you should be able to find this content in your personal timeline.
Sadly not entirely accurate for Lemmy, as it does not display content from other platforms (except comments or posts from mbin, piefed, etc) unless a Lemmy community is explicitly tagged. You cannot follow mastodon or Pixelfed user from Lemmy in any meanjngful way.
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.
They also often rely on commissions or supporter pages to cover costs or make a living, which Lemmy is often hostile to.
Where did you get that from? Why should Lemmy be hostile to that? We often get posts about donating to valuable projects and such.
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.
