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?
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Probably Mastodon.
I know one who’s all about BlueSky.
Bluesky started off as mainly a community of comic artists.
Mastodon seems more heavy on “furry” stuff.
I think a lot of artists are on https://mastodon.art/
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.
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.
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?
Most of Twitter artists I know moved to Bluesky
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.
I see quite a bit boosted on Mastodon, but I’m not sure where they are all posting from. On Pixelfed I follow photographers, so I see photography.
If youwant to see more art, the first step is to follow artists. Try to search for hashtags related to art forms you’re interred in on a large Mastodon instance, and follow relevant users wherever you want to follow them from. Pixelfed might be good if you’re not interested in text posts, but make sure you display boosts. Lemmy is not good as most content is invisible.
Once you follow some, for example @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org, you’ll see what they boost from around the Fediverse. Artists generally have a decent overview over their sphere of interest, so once the ball starts rolling you’ll see content from all over.
I filled my feed up quite nicely with independent musicians very quickly after listening to RadioFreeFedi a little while and following a couple of artists. Their boosts creates a nice little window into the indie music scene.
