alias_sqbr

My account is at https://bsky.app/profile/sqbr.bsky.social but you can only see that if you're logged in. I have four invites for the first four people to ask for one.

Bluesky is a twitter clone created by the guy who made twitter, and currently is a lot like early twitter: very quiet, buggy, and uncomfortably ambivalent about nazis. But at least it's not run by Elon Musk.

Since I dislike using twitter-style social media regardless of who's running it I'm just using bluesky to follow former twitter folk who happen to have moved there, and for those purposes it's adequate enough so far.

I was poking around the Japanese art site Pixiv and there was surprisingly little art for some MXTX characters/pairings I like, so I finally got over my self consciousness and uploaded some of my art, eventually going through my art tumblr and posting a bunch of my better pieces from the last few years. I've gotten a smattering of likes which is good enough for me.

The site is pretty easy to use in English, especially if you're just bookmarking other people's art. And then you get some very pretty recs! You can see my bookmarks here if you have an account. You don't need an account to see this little article about MDZS which has some lovely fanart.

Figuring out the Japanese tags for non-Japanese canons can be challenging, in some cases I gave up and used English. Luckily, for the MXTX novels they use the Chinese spellings(*), and from there I could find the pairing tags.

Two annoyances are that the site keeps randomly not loading, and that free accounts can't edit an image once it's posted, though you can edit the tags and notes.

I copied over my existing author's notes, which are generally like 90% image description, but I feel a little weird about it. The odds of anyone who needs an image description AND reads English stumbling across my art on a Japanese art site seems low, and I imagine all that English text is just a confusing annoyance for the average only-kinda-English-fluent Pixiv user. But they can hopefully still enjoy the art!

Since I'm an inveterate tweaker I'll probably only upload art every now and then, when it's old enough that I'm unlikely to edit it again.

(*)I know Japanese people sometimes write Chinese words/names using the same characters as in Chinese, and sometimes don't, and am incredibly fuzzy on the difference.

Pillowfort bans someone for NSFW content in a very hamfisted way

Expect anything you do on Pillowfort.io to be publicly-visible and temporary

Also see: VidMe or Why Platforms Aren't Your Friends (which someone posted to tumblr with some Pillowfort commentary but I didn't save the post)

I do get that a good replacement for tumblr would be amazing right now, and Pillowfort seems the closest on the surface. And I'm really enjoying having active lj/dw style communities posting lots of art. But I would not trust the site in the short or long term.

It's paid accounts and opt-in advertising:

• Premium Account Features: Essential site features will remain free from a paywall, while users can pay for premium features. (For example: being able to upload larger file sizes, uploading gifs to a library, personal analytics.)
  
• Advertisement Opt-Ins: All Pillowfort blogs will not feature advertising by default. Instead, users will have the choice to opt-in to advertising to help support the site. This means overall less ad revenue, but we believe it is important to respect our users' experience and not force advertising on anyone.

Which is something? I'm dubious as to how many people will opt in to advertising out of the kindness of their hearts.

In related news: Today marks the first time someone actually posted in any of the several Writescrib communities I joined a month and a bit ago.

A crosspost of this writscrib post where I test everything out:

People got back to me about some of the misconceptions in my last post.

* the gift art is user submitted which makes the varying quality more understandable
* tags are done as hashtags, eg #writscrib, and have a nice autocomplete dropdown
* formatting is done with BBCode
*I still haven't figured out how to view all the latest posts from all my groups at once but am quite willing to assume the problem is me being dense. There's a discord to ask questions on I may ask when feeling less self conscious. https://discord.gg/K5KAnRv

I joined the latest beta round of the social media site Pillowfort. So I made sqbr and joined some communities. It's nice enough, very quiet.

Structure-wise it's a sort of mix of dreamwidth/lj and tumblr: posts have a comment section, but can also be reblogged if marked rebloggable. Communities also have chat posts in a sidebar organised by "most recently commented on". Making posts is very tumblr-ish, including in-built image hosting (that crashed when I tried to use it :/)

Also: it seems like you have to write your posts in rich text D:

The "friendslock" feature is weird, unless I'm misunderstanding it: the only option is to show posts only to people who follow you, rather than only people you follow. That seems open to abuse.

You can turn on reblogs, comments, and "nsfw" on a post by post basis which is nice.

Most of the communities I joined haven't had any posts in months, or have one dedicated poster doggedly talking about their OCs to the void.

There's an in-built tag blacklist function. To test it out I added a tag on the top post of my feed and the post vanished entirely, which I don't like. I much prefer xKit's "a post has been blocked for containing X tag" approach, that way I can decide if I want to check it out based on my mood, who posted it, the other tags, etc.

It's a little slow, but it did just get an influx of new users and is still in beta.

Based on the most popular communities, the people there skew fannish, creative, and queer, which is no bad thing.

They got their initial costs paid for by an indiegogo compaign but I can't see any way for them to make money long term, unless they're planning on adding paid accounts/ads later.

Overall I see them going the same way as imzy and soup: a nice idea that won't take off. But we'll see.

The irc-like chat program Discord is the new shiny fannish social media. One advantage over irc is that it shows all messages posted, not just the ones you're there for, which makes for a better ongoing conversation. The advantage over tumblr etc is the ability to have private-ish, moderated, communal conversations. The advantage over message boards and mailing lists is that it's new and shiny.

I quite like it but it can be tricky finding servers (eg chat rooms) relevant to my interests. Currently I'm only a member of public ones, so I can share the links freely. Here are all the ones I know about.
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