Hey everyone! Just wanted to mention that I'm still alive. I took a bit of a mental health break around September-October, but when I was ready to come back, everywhere that I post art was on fire. From least concerning to most concerning:

Furaffinity has put high-res uploads behind a paywall, meaning pretty much all of my future uploads would be downscaled.

DeviantArt now has an AI image generation tool. Despite opting-out posts by default after major backlash, they still include some concerning mitigating conditions.

Twitter has now banned linking to other social media. This is blatantly anti-user and just the latest best example of how Elon Musk has no clue how to run the site. I'm not holding my breath for the replacement CEO he ends up hiring to do any better.



Also, I've made will continue to make art that I can't upload to FA or DA due to content guidelines. I don't have plans to leave these platforms in the near future, but I also don't want to be reliant on any of them for community-building, so I'm looking into other platforms to post my art. Here are my thoughts:

I began making a Discord server a few months ago, but abandoned it before telling anyone because I didn't think I had enough of a following to properly utilize it.

I'm in the process of setting up accounts on three Mastodon instances: meow.social (large, furry-centric), thicc.horse (medium, lewd-centric), and transfur.social (small, TF-centric). A short note: you do NOT have to be part of the same instance to communicate or share content.

Now that Tumblr allows nudity and "sexual themes," I've thought about setting up an account in spite of the remaining provisos.

Pixiv is more restrictive than most of the other platforms I'm looking at, and it would be more difficult to navigate without fully understanding Japanese language, law, and custom, not to mention the site culture, but I have a handful of Japanese followers on the bird app, and the last two people to approach me for commissions were both Japanese.

This has more to do with monetization than community, but I have long thought about making a Patreon. I do have a couple of sequences in the works that might be appropriate for a staggered release that accrues a little financial support.



If anyone reading this has the time, I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me feedback to any and all of these ideas, or offer some of your own. Thank you for your time and attention.