l_b_i

l_b_i, 6 months ago

furaffinity, DeviantArt, weasyl, SoFurry, InkBunnny… A more art and commission focused site as opposed to a forum (this), or micro-blog (Mastodon, twitter).

Each one has its own issues I’ve seen discussed.
FA, moderation, photography, and more recently a very ambiguous moderation change. Every few years they change something and people flee, but its where the most people are so most come back.
DA: AI scraping, art theft
weasyl: dead looking, no comments from developers for a few years now.
SF: old/awkward
IB: That’s where all the cub artists went.

I’m sure there are more, but this is what I remember off the top of my head.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I only ever think of e6 as a place to browse. A lot of whats on there is not uploaded by the artists. For what it is, I don’t think you could easily improve on it

l_b_i, 6 months ago

for itaku, I couldn’t really find anything about who runs it. Their about page only refers to themselves, not even any admin or dev accounts on the site. Their roadmap and plan look decent enough, but without knowing anything about the background or philosophy its hard to know.

I think twitter is popular because of the ease of posting. Another complaint about FA is difficulty to post, especially many at once. I don’t post anything, so I can’t comment to that. As for fediverse, yes integration would be a bonus. Whether a fediverse site, or something that talks to it would have to be determined. A stand alone site has more capabilites to grow with certain features that would add value, such as an integrated escrow system for commissions, ability for subscriptions and direct payments. With the fediverse you have all the connections and integrations that are already there and should be able to integrate with them. You also have the plus and minus of dispersed moderation and communities.

In my idea, a good api would allow plugins and tools for the community to build integrations.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

Part of FA coming out on top is because there is a feeling of nowhere else to go. I’ve lost track of how many artists/creators have gone to twitter only.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I have never had a twitter account. If I want to see something have to use nitter now, nitter.privacydev.net/ is the only one I know that supports 18+. I avoid using that instance when possible because it gets rate limited frequently.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

those are rookie numbers.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I’ve seen this crash too many times. The “filling” always seems to come out the best in these. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi-qitmfvlI

l_b_i, 6 months ago

Its still his standard vernacular, Everybody was passing him. He just happened to be facing the wrong direction too.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I think I’m both. If I’m driving my mind just wanders aimlessly. If I’m riding… Oh god what do I say?

l_b_i, 6 months ago

It would be an interesting survey for sure. I am not an artists, but I will give my intuitions for the results I would expect. As a note, I mostly watch commissioners as I usually like a theme more than a style.

• I would expect no money, at least at start. Think about it like athletes and sports, most do it for fun, a few do it for some money, and only a small amount make it as a living.
• For those that try to do it full time, I see a lot of burn out. I have seen many try to do a drawing a day, sometimes as patreon rewards. This usually doesn’t lat more than a year before burnout. I’ve seen both transitioning to art as full time, usually after a patreon threshold, as well as moving art to a side hustle after getting a more traditional job for a more sustainable income.
• Based on rough math, I have seen about $30 k - $115 k, although the higher end is usually game related. www.patreon.com/ruaidri , www.patreon.com/fek , www.patreon.com/caroo . Both ruaidri and caroo do commissions and other project as well. I usually see the transition to art full time after a sustainable income is achieved, not before.
• See previous
• I would assume networking is a big part of this. Trades with big artists, pushes on social media, presence at cons…
• No real intuition, but I would assume if its doing commissions, its work, if its opening a patreon to continue working on personal projects, its not.

This is all just based on intuition and looking at it as a skill field like any other.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

The bondage rate has never existed (any gender ok). Although I think we need to hire more users, management is ok.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

Its static for me unless I click through the link. Ruaidri is really having fun figuring these two out.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

They’ve been hiding NSFW and given users the ability to block guests for as long as I can remember. Most of Ruadri’s work is on e621 too. That’s where the put the full quality. e621.net/posts?tags=ruaidri

l_b_i, 6 months ago

The gif? Could it be size? Although others almost as big from e621 work.

Aurora and Jessie? gotta make sure those models are perfect.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

Dialog is a good thing. I asked about lemmy/yiffit, because that is where I have been spending my time, to not expect general fediverse issues to be discussed would be naive.

If your instance is the defederator, you can at least search, if its the other way, I don’t know that there is a built in way you can see it. Maybe you could try to fetch something at some interval and have a notification when that starts to fail. You would never really know that hundreds of voices just became silent.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

The biggest problem with small communities is discovery. You wont just stumble on new things, you have to seek everything out.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I find it very odd that the furry community didn’t transition to Lemmy, since they’re everywhere on Mastodon and furries are always there first for the new/techy/left-leaning things. Whenever reddit does the next user-hostile thing we’ll be more prepared.

Lemmy, especially lemmy.world was very rough the first few weeks. Constant downtime and stale posts. There are still a lot of stale posts. as for Mastodon, I actually think I see more talk about bluesky these days than Mastodon. That’s a different can of worms. Federated sites are both a blessing and a Curse. With reddit, there is one site and you get everything and one experience. The fediverse can be quite confusing. Your “all” is different for each instance. If your on Yiffit, you can’t brows local on pawb. If you don’t have an account on pawb, but have one on yiffit, its hard to find all the content as not all communities are listed. So before you can even interact you need to know that you have to join an instance, and you have to decide which one to join. And even then, you might have multiple accounts across instances just to see everything.

On reddit you’d almost always see a single comment (probably a stupid pun or something) with 90k upvotes and 700 replies underneath, and nothing else in the thread would get any attention.

On the other side, sometimes that top comment is top for a reason. Although nothing here is big enough to cause good info to drop off… yet.

Yiffit got defederated from lemmy.ml which is really brutal since there’s a lot of big communities there.

We need more fine-grained defederation procedures, like defederating from specific communities so that users don’t get swept up in the mix.

I don’t know much about AP, but yea, the ability to chose to defederate from communities, instances, or their users, or any combination thereof, would probably be a net positive change. Although it was my original understanding that defederation was a one way thing, yiffit would still get data, just couldn’t send. I guess that’s not how it actually works.

Communities also need to spread out onto more servers

I’ve generally noticed the same thing, the network effect and fediverse confusion is quite a strong force.

We also need more posts/topics, and I’m not very good at this part.

I’m doing what I can. A few things combined to make me decide to start participating. I have been doing 2 posts a week and commenting when something comes to mind.

I don’t know where to find OC/new content to x-post to Lemmy

The gallary sites, twitter are a good place. If your talking about more general, there are some interesting mailing lists, hackernews, blogs. If you find it interesting, someone else will too.

We have many people with a lot of knowledge ready to comment on posts, but the double-edged sword is that everyone already knows everything and no one needs any help.

I think the bigger issues are that its just harder to find the niche and ask communities !askelectronics. Also some of them just went to matrix. You still have to deal with the network effect of reddit, and a lot of those communities are still active there.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I’ve posted more in the last 3 months here, than in 8 years on reddit. I’m really trying to be more active. The more you post the easier it gets. For me, its less scary posting on a small instance.

lemmy.ml is the instance run by the developers of lemmy. They have very strong feelings about certain things and one is a distaste for NSFW. You’ll notice that other than lemmynsfw, you have to log in to see NSFW. lemmy.ml doesn’t allow NSFW. Them and lemmy.world have some pretty big de-federation lists. The idea behind federation is to have lots of small sites each with their own communities and the sites themselves can talk to each other. People can decide what instance they like most and join there, or join a personal instance. That has issues with discovery though.

The admin(s) of an instance have complete control over de federation. If @Wander wanted to, he could decide to de-federate from everyone, I trust he won’t ever do that.

If you have lots of small instances, the threat of de-federation is much less than if you only have a few large instances.

If you have FOMO, there is nothing that stops you from creating accounts on other instances. You can see some other discussion about federation issues at yiffit.net/post/3321843

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I still see some unconnected dots.

l_b_i, 6 months ago

Where are you looking? Artists? Sites? Tags? As others have said. I don’t think there is any shortage. Some Artists leave with new ones taking their place, sites change. There is a lot posted in harder to search locations too; Telegram, discord, twitter, subscribestar, patreon,…

l_b_i, 6 months ago

I guess this brings up the age old question: How do you torture a masochist?

l_b_i, 6 months ago

The humor and story telling really adds a lot to many of them too.