Furry Chat

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.

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 think it's just marketing, tbh. Bluesky is exclusive and thus getting into it means You Are Important. Threads is basically one click away for people who already use Instagram, which I guess is their target market. Such is the power of these megacorps, they can just throw advertising at the problem and it mostly works.

I want to hope that eventually people will leave those platforms once the excitement wears off and they realize that they are problematic (training AI with user posts, poor moderation, privacy, etc.). Or maybe some big controversy will happen which causes a Twitter like situation for them. But realistically, I don't see either happening short term.

But honestly, Mastodon has the IRC problem where it seems to be aimed at "techies" and require significant buy-in to its ideology. I made an account with Otaku to follow someone last night, and all it needed was an email and password. Whereas for Mastodon you need to pick an instance, write an application (how much do you need to write? Is it an exam? Will you get rejected?) and wait. The Mastodon team have done an amazing work on making all of this as smooth as possible, but ultimately it's a hurdle that you need to invest time and energy to understanding. And then your friend just sends you a BlueSky invite and you decide to just go there.

I'm not sure I agree with other comments saying that it's because it's too hard or that people think it's too hard... It's more that it's an additional hurdle and complexity that people won't go through unless they agree with the fediverse ideology.

And then there's the elephant in the room, which is probably just my personal experience. My first Lemmy account was on an instance that defederated with a bunch of others, and my "main" Mastadon account is/was with an instance that was silenced by meow.social for an unknown reason. Not a good experience for me. Not to mention the immature "I'll defed you if you don't block Meta!" thing going on right now...

Fear of "Picking the right instance" is legit something I would have left the fediverse for if I wasn't so angry at megacorps all the time. I don't want politics in my social media as a matter of policy, and "fediverse politics" is something that I feel I always need to be aware of. And it results in me making long venty posts like this, because I have Opinions...

Although, I have a question... How many fediverse accounts do people here have? Is having multiple mastodon/lemmy accounts something that's normal, but not really talked about?

EDIT: Wow, I did not realize how much I posted until I sent it. See why I try to avoid drama and politics? :P

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, and Twitter doesn't have that problem.

But also, Twitter has always been an awful place to post art (and by extension, Twitter clones). You have to continually scroll through newer posts to find older ones, it doesn't have nearly any of the features that websites made specifically for posting art have, and the tagging system is broken.

What you're asking is, "Why aren't people posting art on a website where each individual post is treated as disposable, as something to be seen for a short while before being buried by newer posts?"

What I'm asking you is, "Why would anyone do that if they had any other choice?" It has all of the drawbacks of Twitter's website design with none of the benefits, and it does some things even worse than Twitter.

Aside from all of that, right now, artists feel like Twitter is where their audience is and the only reliable source of commissions. They're not going to move until that changes.

I dunno, I suggest looking at places like The Furry Fediverse. Lots of instances there for the furries! Cyberfurz is an instance I would recommend. But at the end of the day, the only real way to get artists to follow is to just be the change you want, and they will follow for the interaction. Places get big and centralized because "all my friends are there" or similar.

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.

I can't stop seeing furry art on Mastodon. If I can channel all of those to you I would lol

A problem is that some of the early adopters of Mastodon were the worst people, that were banned from Twitter for hatespeech, thus giving it a bad name. Early on, Mastodon was known as "an alternative Twitter for nazis".