I basically only use Tumblr in terms of social media sites and Twitter only because that's where the Epithet Erased news is. When I first got on the site I loved how intimate it was, just me a few mutuals and the tags I choose to follow, especially at the start when I was in incredibly small fandoms like Jekyll and Hyde and the adjacent gothic lit fandoms. Our world was so small we often ended up with the same posts on our dashes multiple times cus we'd all just reblog it from each other, passing art around like kids on a playground looking at their friends new drawing. I felt connected to the people there even if we never directly spoke, seeing their interpretations of the characters they'd made just for themselves, showing off their unique perspective on the same story.
These days I don't interact with those people all that much, we still follow each other we all just moved onto other things. I've been in a couple small fandoms since then but it hasn't been quite the same, theres so much more emphasis on creating content nowadays, its all about likes and views. There's a distance there, a taint even in some of the most passionate artists, altering things just slightly to appeal to the wider fanbase. Even I fall into this from time to time, creating pieces specifically because I know its something the others will enjoy, even though I put my whole heart in its still something I wouldn't have drawn if I didn't want to impress others.
I try to keep my area tidy, to curate my experience without interference, but still the commodifiction creeps in and I can see on the horizon just how much worse the algorithm can be. How it can chew up the artists I admire, how it'll chew me up to if given half the chance.
Back on Tumblr we take pride in having no algorithm, we call ourselves one of the last bastions of the old ways hostile to all outsiders. So bad we lost yahoo $4.44 billion. But the truth is that's bullshit. The heads don't care, they keep shoving awful features onto the site to make it more "profitable" and are too busy stalking trans people across platforms to harass them to fix any of the site's massive bugs. We aren't revolutionaries for staying, we're just choosing to go down with the ship because we can't see another option among the sea of enshitification. But recently I was made aware of one.
My journey onto the indie web started with Spacehey, a cute little recreation of old school Myspace. I wasn't really around for the original Myspace but someone dropped a link to it on my dash and I decided to check it out.
Oh my god. When I tell you it was like breathing fresh air for the first time in years.
For the first time in awhile the web felt cozy again, people felt authentic again, even the people dropping links to their sound cloud on my blog were indie artists willing to take that shit down if you asked them to. Oh yeah another thing. No ads. Hallelujah (o_ _)ﾉ彡☆. I got really into it for a bit, I felt so much more comfortable on there, so much more so in fact that I started posting things other than my art. The whole place felt so much more excited about my unhinged ramblings than anywhere else, the joy of searching the blogs there wasn't just to find content you were interested in but just the delight in seeing all the things other people were interested in too. You'd find yourself reading about things you really didn't care all that much about just because the author's passion for the subject was so infectious.
The thing that propelled my forward to making this site though was their layouts. A huge portion of SpaceHey's userbase is dedicated to the customisation of their profiles through html and there were tons of inbuilt supports to help you start decorating your own very easily. Coding, something that had once seemed intimidating, seemed so intuitive speaking with all these people who were so welcoming to newbies just beginning to start, and looking at my finished (mostly templated) layout I felt confident in my skills for the first time. Confident enough to follow the advice of all those teachers, and make my own website.
And now I'm here, I still wouldn't say I'm much good at coding (alot of this site is just hacked together code snippets) but I'm happy with what I've built. I'm especially loving how little pressure there is to be good on the small web, a little jank is just personality and that's always been the most important part to me. I don't think I'll be deleting Tumblr anytime soon, all my friends are still there, but it's nice to have a place to fall back to, a place all my own. I think I plan to stay here for awhile. (*￣▽￣)b
