I use twitter and I really like the furry art community on there. I also like Mastodon or related ActivityPub services.
Due to recent events lots of people search for alternatives and I feel just very frustrated see all those artists looking for Zucks Threads or Jacks Bluesky when Mastodon is right there, without a chance of a twitter situation ever happening again. They seem to avoid Mastodon like cats avoiding water.
What have we done wrong, and how can we make it better.
Remember how people said that from millenials onwards every generation will be skilled in tech? It so happens that gen-z actually ranks lower in advanced tech skills. Gen-Z learned to use tech, but not to understand it as much as those of us who experienced the early-to-mid internet and computers.
As such there’s a large amount of people who don’t know or understand the pros of decentralized platforms like Mastodon. And of course, there’s also the artists who need to follow the masses because they make a living out of it.
I’m oversimplifying things a lot, but if you grew up discovering the internet through your parents’ ipad, there’s a higher chance that the corporate internet has a much strong impact / incentive for you.
It so happens that gen-z actually ranks lower in advanced tech skills. Gen-Z learned to use tech, but not to understand it as much as those of us who experienced the early-to-mid internet and computers.
The kids today do not even know what a folder is, or what filesystems do. I am scared about our all future.
We need to do it like the brits, give every kid a Rasperry Pi in school and teach them actual computer skills, not Excel.It is by design, unfortunately. Apple pushes iPads into schools so that people grow up in Apple’s walled garden.
How do kids not know what a folder is? All operating systems have it. Even iOS has folders, whether in the Files app or just as the homescreen folder.
I will admit that I am not an expert on how the different filesystems work.
The thing is, most of them are looking to Threads and BlueSky because that is where the majority of normie non technical people are going to go. It will also give them a far bigger outreach of having their art seen and noticed by bigger groups of people.
But mastodon also suffers because the second biggest instance, pawoo.net l, leaves many people with a bad experience since they host rampant amounts of pedophilic content and fetishists galore and a lot of mastodon instances defederate from it because of it’s peoblems.
I left that instance when I got hit with some of that content, disturbing to say the least… I left for the much better packmates.org mastodon instance (hosted by our yiffit admin @Wander@yiffit.net )
Pawoo was meant as a tie in to the Japanese art gallery site pixiv but even though it still has those tie ins, it’s been sold off multiple times. And the current owners will not do anything to curve the pedophilic content on it
Pawoo is one of the biggest black eyes for mastodon and probably hurts it when people are deciding to use mastodon, threads, or bluesky.
I remember a viral post on Twitter from someone listing nothing but complaints about Mastodon/federation which was written after the big furry instance, snouts.online, imploded. This was a few years ago. I’ll admit it made me skeptical about the fediverse, but after actually trying it out for myself it’s not as bad as that thread made out. Might be that that thread is still in the back of people’s minds when they consider twit alternatives.
Simple: if what you want is to try to get eyeballs on your art, you’re not going to post it on a website that restricts its visibility. I’m never going to see that much content beyond my own instance. I need to follow the artists individually to see their art, or they need to be somehow connected to someone on my instance.
That’s the ultimate non-starter.
Twitter doesn’t have this problem, and Twitter still works (mostly). It’s still the only reliable source for commissions.
I’m never going to see that much content beyond my own instance.
I just do not see that. The way I found artists I like on twitter was by what other artists I like retweeted or based on specific hashtags. And thats the same way I found all artists I like on Mastodon that I did not yet know from Twitter.
Like yes sure the amount of people simply is larger on Twitter, so that is a valid point. Yet I see tons of artists I like going onto Bluesky which is invitation only and made by a club of web3 people which is something normally famously unpopular with art twitter, or Threads which is limited to the US and UK. There is the same problem, yet artists flock to it.
