Social Media
Here on Neocities, most of us are pretty familiar with what’s been happening on Twitter. Today I’m going to talk about some pretty worrying news thats been coming up lately, both regarding Twitter and regarding social media overall.
As usual, Twitter has been making some egregious but expected decisions, again, for like the millionth time; about their new-ish AI model “Grok.” The latest-and-greatest dumb idea is that by November 15th, all images posted on Twitter will be fed into Grok’s training, regardless of whether you want it to or not.
This has been the final nail in the coffin for a ton of individual artists such as myself, because we all naturally hate the idea of our art being used as a way to power low effort generation of half-baked images, and frankly nobody likes it when their art is being used without permission, especially within something they don’t agree with.
Alternatives
So, the question at this point is: “what now?” So far, the answer to that has been difficult to come up with, but there have been a few things worth noting. Blue Sky is shaping up really well recently (and I even already have a profile on there :3), and, other social platforms such as Fediverse or whatever Threads is, have been showing up lately too.
The reality is, in this world we can’t have a perfect, unified platform and expect it to last. So our best option is to spread out and find our community, wherever that may be, from private Discord servers to things like Mastodon, there’s a lot of places available to go right now.
Sustainability and Counterpoints
As of October 1st, Cohost has begun the process of a permanent sunset, due to the competition with other “Twitter-likes,” as well as the crushingly high costs for what the developers could afford to keep it running. A devastating event that shows how fragile these new platforms still are.
Blue Sky is planning to become “Twitter 2,” essentially recreating as much of the Twitter experience as possible, which may or may not go well. In the end it really depends on who chooses to use it and who doesn’t. As one of my friends has stated in the recent past, Blue Sky is good right now because none of the dumb parts of Twitter have moved in yet.
As for Fediverse and similarly decentralized places, their instances are primarily comprised of hobbyists and programmers, so there’s not a lot of regular boring people filling up the space. If you are a “regular boring person” (my condolences, but I get that sometimes the simple life can be cool), then you’re going to have a rough time there looking for similarly simple people, or similarly simple-to-use platforms.
Part of the problem is that Twitter is still an internet superpower, and thus it can’t truly “die” beyond the point of becoming hollow and colorless, and for the alternatives, besides Blue Sky or Neocities/Nekoweb, there is no “THE place to hang out,” which is difficult for a lot of people to adjust to.
However, I personally believe that this metamorphosis will become easier as time passes. All we need to do is stay open to the options and try our best to hold on to our friends and community, because to survive something together is far easier and far healthier than to survive something alone.
Wrapping Up
Hi! Hope you’re doing okay, talking about this stuff with my friends makes them start dissociating so, hope that last bit didn’t cause too much harm, just really needed to get these thoughts out of my head.
And about the Blue Sky profile; It’s the start of my efforts to disconnect from Twitter completely, and in fact from now on I’m not going to be posting my art on Twitter at all. I’m also planning to possibly move to Nekoweb.org, because it supports git which is absolutely fantastic, and it’s designed with independent developers in mind, which is great for me as well. but for now, I can’t use some of its features because I haven’t become a supporter yet.
When it does happen though, I’m just going to make Neocities redirect you to it automatically so it shouldn’t cause too much of an issue. (I’m also going to keep the 88x31 widget intact on neocities to not interfere with the only like 2 people’s sites that currently use it lol). Also, I’m finally in the Trans Ring! So, hello to the people of Transing the Internet, I promise I don’t bite!
In addition, I’m going to keep trying other platforms such as Fediverse, to see where I can stick and continue sharing my creations, besides just this website.
To conclude, I want to say that I’m grateful for my friends that I have and the time I had with the good side of Twitter, and that the world is fucking scary right now, but I’m gonna keep swimming despite it all. And, you can too!
Let’s all have the audacity to continue living colorful lives with our communities and friend groups, and prove to the world that we aren’t your average little bugs!