I just discovered this essay on Bluesky and oooof... it hit hard...

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

I just discovered this essay on Bluesky and oooof... it hit hard...

https://torrent-empress.leaflet.pub/3m37b3rvq4c22

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

I started on dA a _long_ time ago, and although I never participated in nor invited to any of the clubs, I did meet quite a few other artists there and really enjoyed the site...

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

But over the years, the community there quickly vanished, and then at some point the site clearly started embracing AI, and so I took down pretty much all of my drawings and photographs because I don't want any of my stuff fed into their slop machine...

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

I still have a fair bit of my writing up there, as I can't seem to find anywhere that resembles what dA used to be in terms of hosting creative writing. ScribbleHub and AO3 are more geared towards fanfic and/or long-form writing, not poetry like I mainly compose...

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

cara.app seems to be good for hosting art and photography for the moment; I really hope that the folks there don't give into corporate whims...

[quephird@tech.lgbt]

And oh gosh, this statement in the article above _nails_ it:

"Social media sites are built for consumption, not creation."

[mayabotics@tech.lgbt]

@quephird Hmm, I think what analysis like that misses, is that early DA only was possible by the risk tolerance of the late dot com bubble.

It's extremely costly to run a "universal" site like that, which was why hobbyist-run sites before and since have a narrow focus, and often parochial communities.

Cohost in some ways was an attempt to do a "universal" site, but that conflicted with the goals of also having a community space geared towards the founders and their friends, which was based in nostalgia for things like early LiveJournal, tumblr, and DA.

I think the same tension is in play here, we're trying to have in some ways a "universal" network, but most of the nodes are strongly community-based and supported.

Pre-Musk Twitter was headed in the same direction as modern DA or Reddit, all its financial incentives were towards jettisoning their least monetizable communities in favor of their most monetizable ones, hence why it was a fluke of capitalism that universal sites existed in the first place.