What would make artists join a "federated" art platform?

[k-cottonears]

So, studying to be software developer, I always get ideas of some things I could make. These are just ideas that pop into my head of course, most of them probably bad. But there's an idea that I have from time to time.

Ever heard of decentralized/federated platforms like Mastodon? I always wanted a decentralized/federated and community driven version of DeviantArt or Artstation before the AI bullshit. Not just some instance, but a full platform made for art.

It's still just an idea that I'm probably not even going to make, but if I ever do create something like this, it'd be difficult for me be able to justify its existence. If the "fediverse" really needs a DeviantArt clone, what would it need to be suitable for artists? It obviously needs users, so what would it have that makes users join?

[SourCherryJack]

You gotta be able to offer your target userbase something they need.

Different Art platforms offer different services or benefits to artists for using them.

Artstation - a professional places to host your work that recruiters may find you off of. You can link to it as an artist as a portfolio site and not look silly.

deviantart - a massive art community accepting a broad range of content with a large userbase of artists and non artists

Newgrounds - smaller art community, shared with communities of animators/musicians/game devs etc.

Behance - Art job board,

Then social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok have massive communities of nonartists that can potentially become clients or customers.

And then for more direct inter-artist community interest: there’s individual discord channels/communities

each of these sites/services are offering a service like hosting art and/or access to employers/community/clients.

When developing a website for anything you need to start with who your website is for, and what it will do for them and build out from there.

[k-cottonears]

At 1/3/24 12:37 PM, SourCherryJack wrote: You gotta be able to offer your target userbase something they need.
Different Art platforms offer different services or benefits to artists for using them.
Artstation - a professional places to host your work that recruiters may find you off of. You can link to it as an artist as a portfolio site and not look silly.
deviantart - a massive art community accepting a broad range of content with a large userbase of artists and non artists
Newgrounds - smaller art community, shared with communities of animators/musicians/game devs etc.
Behance - Art job board,
Then social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok have massive communities of nonartists that can potentially become clients or customers.
And then for more direct inter-artist community interest: there’s individual discord channels/communities
each of these sites/services are offering a service like hosting art and/or access to employers/community/clients.
When developing a website for anything you need to start with who your website is for, and what it will do for them and build out from there.

Yeah, I can't figure out what kind of audience I would cater to. I have some principles and ideas that I would design the website around, but I don't know what kind of person would be attracted to it.

[Skoops]

At 1/3/24 12:01 PM, k-cottonears wrote: So, studying to be software developer, I always get ideas of some things I could make. These are just ideas that pop into my head of course, most of them probably bad. But there's an idea that I have from time to time.

Ever heard of decentralized/federated platforms like Mastodon? I always wanted a decentralized/federated and community driven version of DeviantArt or Artstation before the AI bullshit. Not just some instance, but a full platform made for art.

It's still just an idea that I'm probably not even going to make, but if I ever do create something like this, it'd be difficult for me be able to justify its existence. If the "fediverse" really needs a DeviantArt clone, what would it need to be suitable for artists? It obviously needs users, so what would it have that makes users join?

I already am on Mastodon so from the perspective of someone that wants it to work, I think what's missing and/or not getting through are multiple-fold, but it mostly boils down to this:

People do not and will not care or understand what makes a platform federated or how that benefits them. This is an impossible hurdle, and it's Mastodon's primary area where it continues to stumble optically. They're lost in their own sauce about the advantages of federated social media, so they immediately frontload all of the complicated details onto would-be users before they even sign up, info-dumping on anyone at the first sign of curiosity, driving away more than they attract. There's no short, concise sales pitch, so the only people left are enthusiasts with more of a vested interest in the model than 99.99% of people.

You're dealing with audiences that are already wary of what they perceive to be starry-eyed tech weirdos hyping up stuff that sounds like too-good-to-be-true scams; crypto has put a lot of stank on the term "decentralized," so it's better to do everything you can to not sound like them. That goes double for artists; a lot of platforms popped up out of nowhere when AS and DA went to shit, and it's hard to tell who's throwing all your uploads into a training dataset, so when people pitch new ideas, less people will be as perceptive as they may have been when their stuff felt more secure. So, to not scare people off and retain a less tech savvy userbase, it'd be better to focus on its resilience against the kind of enshitification deathspiral everything else is in right now. Let people get under the hood with it if they care about federation and want to moderate their own, but I would barely even mention it when selling it to the average user.

[SourCherryJack]

EDIT:

To actually answer your original question though:

As an artist, if a new art site were to pop up, I would be interested primarily in having a sizeable non artist community to display and potentially sell to because I have already have NG as my artist-to-artist community. Another one would a clean, sleek professional site with easily customizable user pages that can act as a portfolio and personal page. maybe something that can filter potential clients to me based on what they’re looking for and what my expertise are— basically an agent but a website. Maybe i should just get on behance but also boo Adobe.

At 1/3/24 06:44 PM, k-cottonears wrote: Yeah, I can't figure out what kind of audience I would cater to. I have some principles and ideas that I would design the website around, but I don't know what kind of person would be attracted to it.

I don’t know your end goals with this project of yours; but if it’s anything beyond a sort of proof of concept for the coding, or a portfolio piece/personal project to see what you can accomplish, then you’re coming at it a a bit backwards.

Building a thing is just to build a thing is great, and can force you to learn and develop new skills, it possibly can lead to expanding the project, or branching into other more concrete projects. But if you’re looking for any sort of return, or adoption of this site for artists, starting from the function of the site and working back will mean more work either convincing artists they need what you’re offering. Or retrofitting what you’re offering to meet artist’s needs.

Like skoops said above with Mastadon, the philosophy and concept of the platform will get the people who already are interested in that type of thing. But a person who doesn’t know what any of these words means will only see that there are larger sites, that can offer them potentially larger audiences, more bells and whistles with app functionality, access to more professional networks etc.

Having one product and knowing who you’re selling to is more valuable than having warehouses full of products and no idea who would buy it.

[tydaze]

There are pros and cons to decentralized platforms.

For me the biggest thing they lack that centralized platforms have, is a meaningful way to continuously discover new creators and explore new interests.

Social media services do this by pushing whatever is "trending", or financially promoted, which is pretty much the worst possible way to decide what's worth spreading to the masses.

They use that in combination with giving "personalized" recommendations, which is foremost a tactic to allow invasive data collection and violation of privacy on users to sell to advertisers, and secondly encourages a closed mind trapping users in a repeating loop of consumption of similar content.

Newgrounds has a markedly better discovery method. It allows users to vote using the 5 star system which I think is good. But of course users do not always vote based on objective quality and artistic merit. So ultimately it is the moderation that decides what gets featured on the front page. It definitely has flaws since it is an inherently hierarchal system. It only works for us because our community is, for the most part, like-minded enough to trust the moderators with their content curation. And the individual feeds are still present for curating things to your own interests.

OK, I kind of lost focus rambling there with my train of thought. With that giving some context to my point of view, here are the features I yearn to see in a user-submitted content delivery platform:

• A "front page" of sorts with content curated by human moderators and not by algorithms. If not one unifying front page, then maybe individual community hubs for specific interests, that serve the same function?

• Individualized Feed which shows users only the latest content posted by creators they have followed.

• Focus on originality. No reposts/reblogs. Only let users share their original content. If you must have a repost function then please allow that to be filtered out by the user to where they can choose to only see original posts in their feed. But I still think this functionality is better served by a simple "favorites" list.

• A 5-star rating and judgment system similar to Newgrounds.

• "Recommended" content in a non-intrusive sidebar, being based on what is similar to what you are currently viewing, and not a persistent privacy-invading profile of your online identity. With more weight given to content that has a higher star rating. Think early YouTube's "related videos"

• A working and comprehensive tagging system and search function.

[Template88]

I dont know much about the technical mechanics of art sites but you should call your site Artbulge.

Trust me.