New place - 🔷🌥️ is awesome
This place - sucks balls
I have wiped my tweets and left the platform. Because I have some self respect. U should have some too
Look at my bio if u want to find me
Cya!
as you know I will be active on bsky, I think there are some misconceptions, so here are my thoughts:
I've been there on and off for the past few years since we as artists have gotten scared with this platform
and I can tell you, it is active and people are still using it to this day and I've seen accounts grow slowly to tens of thousands of followers and many who exclusively use bsky
so it has become a permanent place more and more each time we "panic". it's not becoming a ghost town every time
whenever I post I get reactions, comments and engagements. while I'm not suddenly viral with tens of thousands of likes, it's not like the new algo here on X is gonna give that kinda boost anymore, bsky gives a steady consistent engagement as you build your following
as for going there and finding there isn't content due to a lack of centralized algorithm - follow all your fav creators who have accounts there, (there is also a sky bridge extension tool that makes it easy to find accounts who you are following on X),
then make use of the feeds, there are basic functional algorithms, namely after following a lot of your fav accounts, the easiest is Discover, and Popular with Friends by default and next find the custom feed called For You people have been posting it a lot, and pin it to your home feeds. there are also countless custom feeds you can follow and pin. and u can even make your own that follows certain hashtags etc.
and we also have starter packs like the one I have you can find on my profile that provides you with a curated group of cool accounts to follow, personally I've been collecting anime artists in my pack. you can also still create lists of accounts and you can view a feed of these groupings of accounts you want to keep an eye on and yes, pin it to home feed as well.
yes there's even comedians and shit posters who you can follow and curate your basic algorithm feeds to be as you need
since bsky is more and more active beyond your imagination it is actually viable to start using it and working on a transition. I know I'll still be here on x but as my acc on bsky grows and becomes viable I will be stepping more and more over
only issue is you have to add suggestive or nudity filters and labels there, but people viewing that content will likely have turned off the filter and see your art fine
with a less algorithmic experience it also means you can freely tweet anything you like, use hashtags, links, and post and repost often to make use of chronological recency freely
so I do encourage you to bsky anyway, it's remaining viable at least as a parallel to use or as an alt wip thoughts account etc
artists, seriously move to bsky. I've been there for a while fully now and it's such a thriving artist and art community.
there's plenty accounts there growing to few thousands in a week or few, many 10k, some 20 to 50k even. it's slower than x if you get viral posts but it's more consistent controlled growth.
it has consistent reach to your followers and relevant people who like art and want to see your content (yes even hashtags work to start giving you the traction),
because it is more chronological you have control over what your content is, you can repost a lot, post and blog thoughts or anything frequently without some strong account wide algorithm suppressing you and limiting reach depending on your behaviour
the engagement and conversion is more genuine. many have done comparisons and I have seen it myself, I get more real comments and engagement there, often on an average I have more likes there than relying on one rare viral post here. and people there convert more to real commissions, conversations, friendships etc, bc it isn't as much as pure mass viewing doomscroll behaviour in a feed that forces irrelevant content to you
on blue, full control over/reactive algo for what you see on feeds so you can find all the art and artists non stop, so do browse and enjoy
it has great algorithmic feeds (multiple) that you can opt in for and place on ur home, or just use the default ones which are effective enough following after your behaviour (likes, follows, engaging etc)
there's additional features like starter packs that allows u share and promote a group of accounts to follow all with one button easy mode (check mine out on my profile 150+ incredible anime artists some of which u already know from twitter)
make sure to label your more spicy content with sensitivity filters if needed, there are a few levels, so moderation doesn't have to do it for you and self labeling does not affect your reach, people will opt to see it or turn off their filters and it still gets distributed. leaving it to mod may incur shadowbans if you basically don't do it yourself and they're forced to. also if you get mislabeled you can actually appeal it and it gets removed quickly by human mods, it's a good system overall and avoids big platform wide suppression
yes you can lock your account from view by logged out users (so similar to twitter or whatever) although no platform can guarantee any third party brute force scrapers. (yes you can scrape twitter. just google "view twitter no account"
so really there's no downsides to bsky rn, a healthier engaged relevant place to be. just put in the effort to engage, rather than post and run away and it will be a really good experience.
Based on X's new Terms of Service and art editing AI update, you should probably keep your artwork off of the platform.
I've seen a number of people suggesting using poison like nightshade, or posting your art as a gif. While it sounds nice, they don't help much if at all.