AshMcGivern

MY SON MY BEAUTIFUL BOY

Commissions for @ashmcgivern.bsky.social I did a while ago

#originalcharacter #dragon

It’s Reptile Awareness Day so I’m going to make you aware of my reptiles. Little Mans and Pesto are doing really well!!!

Id also like to see them adopt an inbox system in tandem with the timeline but thats really my old soul speaking… if they managed to make robust Groups like dA had, I’d be really happy even with a feed.

Ive been on Cara for a long time! Long before the big boom. My biggest gripe with it is that its really just an instagram clone, without the reach. But as far as places for us to be, my bets are on Cara. If it can overcome its growing pains I think it’ll be the one to win out in the end.

I’ve tried to mimic a similar thing on Discord channels and communities, but it doesn’t ever really land the same way. I think you're right in that only big websites really can do it, but theres no good money in it so… kind of left in an awkward position. dA has never been profitable, after all.

Fam this isnt the inspiring text post you think it is. I know my damn limits and my limits are I don't have the capacity or means to re create something like this lol.

I mean "death" in the sense of it's death as a platform anyone is engaging with. It's still running, but it's a shell of its former self and unrecognizable from it's older iteration.

I tend to do better on Tumblr than most other websites these days just because of how it recycles posts forever (I'm still getting notes on art I made 5+ years ago), but I feel this in my bones. People also just don't really leave comments anymore which was a HUGE part of dA's ecocystem.

I don't have the expertise to make something like this lol I'm just an artist not a web developer with endless money to invest in image hosting.

Thanks for reading this thread btw it really is just a summary of my feelings - a friend and I have been nonstop talking about this all week and we CANT be the only ones who feel this way.

I just miss the old DeviantART and what it stood for, and I miss the internet of old, where it was about creativity and not about marketing. I don't know what we need to do to get that back, but I think we owe it to ourselves to do something about it. (18/18)

I dont really know what the answer to any of this is. I just miss the days of old when dA was the place to be to find people who like the same stuff I did. My oldest friends are from there, and I gotta be real, I haven't made a lot of artist friends since. (17/18)

ArtFight is the closest thing I feel every year to having some sense of artist community, and I think our excitement for it every year is really telling of what we are missing - that sense of community that comes with just making something together, for the sake of making it. (16/18)

The way things currently are, the only way to FIND people who like your work is to play the social media game of chasing algorithms and just guessing on what will hit a broader audience. And that's not really building a community - that's advertising yourself. (15/18)

So where does that leave us.

I think it leaves us in a space where artists have nowhere left to go, and nowhere to find communities of people to engage with. At the end of the day, I think a lot of us don't actually want a lot of internet fame - we just want people to like our work. (14/18)

But it's not just them - Twitter is basically gone, Bksy is a shadow of what Twitter was, Instagram is more cluttered with ads and fake influencers than ever, and now social media is video-centric with sites like TikTok and Youtube dominating the space. (13/18)

It doesn't help that dA was bought and the new owners not only did a rebrand that nobody wanted, but it also started buying into fads that most didn't want anything to do with - NFT integration and most recently, the building of their own GenAI model built off the backs of their submissions. (12/18)

It was super appealing, and people left dA to chase this idea that being popular on social media was important to supporting a career in being an artist. In some sense its true, but it came at the expense of community building as people started moving to their own individual islands. (11/18)

And then, Social Media came along - the broad appeal being that you could reach MORE people than just fellow artists, you could break into the normie crowd, get more eyes on your work, become a PROFESSIONAL this way. (10/18)

Many Groups were made to be art games with a specific setting - you make a character, and progress by drawing or writing. It really promoted community activities, and it was all collected into one easy to find place, with an inbox system that mean you never missed anything. (9/18)

While we only really had tags in the early days, Groups made it easy for people to collect and share with a specific theme. You could make a Group for anything you wanted - photography, digital, crafts, etc, but you could also make a group for specific fandoms, characters, types of OCs. (8/18)

What really made dA stand out tho was how well it fostered COMMUNITIES of people. (7/18)

It's inbox was also extremely clean - it was chronological, could be collapsed into groups and users, and ensured you NEVER missed posts from people you were following.

All of this combined made it a perfect hotbed for artists to post and share their work. (6/18)

This doesn't even scratch the surface of what you could do with journals and custom CSS of your profile, which gave everyone the chance to have awesome custom profiles and really promote individual creativity. (5/18)

Not only was it easy to host these things, but it was also easy to sort and organize them - you could categorize your gallery, and even your favorites, with custom organization that made it a breeze to store all of your uploads and favorite things from other artists. (4/18)

Importantly, you could also find RESOURCES for these things as well - tutorials, brushes, reference packs, patterns, etc. (3/18)

Honestly, nothing did it quite as good as dA did. You could really post anything you wanted there - visual art, animation, literature, crafts, you name it. The site was built to accommodate just about every type of art it could reasonably support. (2/18)

Has anyone else noticed the huge lack of artist spaces online? How difficult it actually is to find like-minded people who share your tastes? How hard it seems to not only find, but keep track of resources?

It's cuz of the death of DeviantART, and that nothing has come close to replacing it.(1/18)🧵

Daughter of Hallownest, savior of Pharloom 🪡

#asharts #silksong #hollowknight #hornet