I have also joined sheezy and begun posting there, and have been enjoying it thus far. I apologize for dropping out of the habit here. x'D I've just found it difficult to find some aspects of art community here that I tend to really value. but I do appreciate side7 for its dedication to being a good space for artists.

I tried artfol as well but the UI wasn't for me either. I've unfortunately found it completely impossible to use inkblot; no matter what I did or what solutions I tried, the site slowed down my computer too much to spend more than 20 minutes there, and I ended up closing my account. I tried pillowfort, but encountered a bit of a personal incident that discouraged me from sticking around. I tried cohost, but felt the complete inability to see post metrics on an otherwise blog-based site to be a little jarring. I was in the ArtSpacious development discord server for a while, but the last update they gave was that their main programmer has not been able to be reached for around 1 year now (after giving some personal updates about his day job taking up more of his time), and the rest of the team expressed their regrets and said that ArtSpacious would now be on indefinite hiatus and possibly shelved forever. I tried BlueSky, but there are virtually no non-professional artists there with any kind of community. I respect and admire many artists I ran into there, but the platform highly prioritizes the most-followed, most-liked accounts at the cost of anyone "smaller" trying to band together and - it's basically exactly a twitter clone as I'm sure many people were more wise to than I was.

I closed my instagram account today upon learning that in the wake of EU laws being passed, the platform is now required to provide an opt-out for users who do not wish to have their data & art scraped for Meta's AI engine - but this opt-out is being provided only to UK residents (and is very difficult and convoluted to find, even then.) so, having public proof that Meta is doing that scraping and not providing an opt-out for US residents (because they legally don't have to), I removed my art and will no longer be posting there either.

I even announced on my tumblr account - the only place that I've been reliably posting for the last 5 years - that by the end of 2024, I will likely slow my activity there significantly and post infrequent updates if at all. my reasons for this are maybe silly,, but I more or less feel that I've been ignored there because I don't tend to post much fanart. I had a friend with a very popular blog there who unfortunately also stepped back from social media recently, and as soon as he was no longer regularly reblogging my art, pretty much no one was interacting with it at all. this was extremely demoralizing. xD made me feel like people thought my art was only worth interacting with if someone else showed interest in it first.

other than sheezy, the only art sites I plan to consistently keep up with are toyhouse - which is really a character/OC site, but people can follow you and see character art updates there, and even like/comment on specific pieces if you enable the option - and comicfury - which is of course a webcomic site that I technically havent begun posting on yet as my comic is still in development, but will likely be a place I come to spend more time on as soon as I have the material to begin posting. actually, my main stomping ground has been Chicken Smoothie, which has an oekaki embedded into their forums, and I very consistently get interaction there, more than I ever have seen on any gallery-based sites I've posted to. (I guess I might even consider myself popular there? some of my better pieces receive somewhere between 50-80 likes, and though that's still a small amount compared to "popular" artists on other platforms, when I'm used to receiving 0-5 likes/interactions anywhere else I go, it feels like a big deal. and tbh x'D it boosts my self esteem. maybe I should be ashamed to admit that but it just genuinely means a lot to me to have that.)

I have such platform-migration-exhaustion and there's so many places I find myself just giving up on. I hope that this is just an extremely low point for online artists communities and that maybe we'll have a comeback sometime in the future. but also I'm tired and not staking my expectations on anything in particular.

wow, i'm not surprised... well i hope your stay here at Side7 be fruitful... i came from DeviantART after deactivating my account before Eclipse was forced onto it's users so it had time to delete everything off of there.. well i recovered what was left in my stash. I left mainly because i didn't want to put up with the drama anymore since i wanted to leave it behind and start over. I just now deactivated my Tumblr because it was sitting there collecting dust. Plus i have this site now. Hopefully i can get back into making art for everyone to see.

back when I was tired of waiting for both Artrise and Artspacious in 2021(former did ended up comes out as it's not-so legal fork named Buzzlyart, latter went somewhat overdue hiatus), I tried sheezy only to have it's developer got beef with me.

I can adapt to artfol's mobile UI wth little problems where artfol recently announced it will got new UIs, even I got rid of my Inkblot account, I got banned from Cohost for something, I keep returns to Deviantart everytime I deactivated my DA(reactivating it before it got truly deleted), Pillowfort is where I salvage my memes(fill-in or not) there, I too fandom-y to use Toyhouse, I'm optimistic on Artspacious and never give up it(when this will got saved from development hell, unless stated otherwise), and additionally I also friended with Theapprentice225 in both discord and Facebook(where I can consider the website he made(can be worked further if he finished his novels that need to be released anywhere up to this year's Christmas) if Artspacious didn't fare any better than Artrise, if Artrise was something other than it's forking into Buzzly). I archived my artworks on Instagram

and with Side7's new updates on it's text editor, I can salvages written works that either dedicated to my mega-crossover fanseries to this platform further

this sums up my thoughts on those sites

It sucks that you got banned from Cohost out of nowhere, I'm thinking of getting a Pillowfort, in case instagram dose something stupid again, but I'll still think about making a pillowfort tbh, since I have an art blog on Fc2, fc2 blog is pretty chill imo, I started using it since 2022 after making my portfolio site, artfol is also pretty chill, I sometimes heard that Artfol is an alternative to instagram I think, I could be wrong.

actually what makes me banned from Cohost was something that just can't discussed here(other than breaking Cohost's Terms of Service)

I recently deactivated my Deviantart account because I felt no joy posting there anymore. I was thinking of coming back to it but it just made me sad Now this place is the only website I’m on.

I deactivated my deviantart recently too

even there's something that tempted me to returns into that hellsite

I'm pretty sure the whole point of BlueSky was to be more like Twitter for people who were leaving Twitter itself due to a surge in hate speech, doxxing, death threats, and other insanity going down there. Hell, the url "https://twitter.com" doesn't even work anymore; if you type it in, you'll just be redirected to X.com. Not only am I pretty active on Sheezy myself, but I recently decided to dust off my old ToyHouse account for some of my new characters, and I plan to link back to their pages once I post them here, I just need to figure out how to make their profiles public while my account page isn't.

I'm thinking of just adding an anti ai watermark thing to all my art on my DeviantArt, I know that sounds crazy, but I still want to keep my DeviantArt up as an archive, I don't want to delete it.

(I'll re save my art from DeviantArt just in case too, then put the file in my hard drive.)

I did glaze my artworks that posted into Twitter

additionally I archives my artwork posts on Instagram

Apparently Instagram (or Meta) now has an ai thing too, which isn't shocking tbh, I'll just use ai shield for my future art tbh. I won't even panick about it, since my account on there is private.

(I heard about this news from some instagram artists I follow) I'll also use it on every drawing and asset on my portfolio website and personal website too.

there's people that uses generative AIs to become even millionaires with no efforts, by selling AI-generated works and Deviantart may not only websites where algorithms are skew people monetizing AI-generated works

That alone proves that Ai-art is flawed... i'm glad that i left DA for Side7. Also people have no honor using Ai-art to make a some money... I know AI can be used for good things but the way they're treated in our time is cringe.

what keeps me from drawing fair amount of my faves with AI was: using AI to draw more obscure and lesser known characters(which can makes up sizable amount of my faves) can make them look bootleggish

At least one thing I have going for me is my recent hyperfixation on The Backrooms has allowed me to learn to mimic film grain effects using filters which AI art generators don't recognize, so I avoid having my art used without permission, not that I would ever give it.

I'm probably going to log into Instagram just to archive everything and leave, and if that doesn't stop people from stealing, then I'll resort to a subtle watermark that covers the entire canvas, but isn't noticable enough to "ruin" the art. I don't claim to be the best artist in the world, but I learned the hard way ever since I was a kid that any art that I made was at least decent enough to steal. 

https://www.deviantart.com/comments/4/41913978/5139071134

All I could hear when reading that bulletin was the music that plays in Ratatouille when Remmy discovers that Linguine is Gusteau's son, because I already knew the site's decline was pretty bad, but I had no idea that it was this bad! Phew, looks like I have a new deadline, and it's not for a Multi-animator Project part this time.

Quelle surprise 🤣

it's about someone from either this site asking Deviantart's current Boss over the article about Deviantart's decline

Late to the party but I had no idea about what was going on as detailed in the Slate article. In the nicest way possible, my disdain with AI is pretty apparent. 

it's about current deviantart's downfall