I used to primarily use Instagram for following illustrators, sculptors, digital artists, etc., but I dropped Insta for obvious reasons.
There was also a large exodus from Insta to Cara.app almost a year ago due to Meta’s stupid policies on using Insta content to train AI. While Cara is generally a great site and has anti-AI policies (I’m not anti-AI, just anti the way most companies implement AI), my problem with Cara is that it’s an owner funded site that will inevitably need to find a way to monetize the content/users.
On the Fediverse, I’m on Lemmy, Mastodon (though I don’t love the micro-blog format), and Pixelfed (very little activity).
So my question is: What platforms in the Fediverse are you seeing the most original artist content?
Its just been my personal experience browsing, sorting by new. Generally, anything that could potentially be viewed as an ad (nonetheless a paywall) gets downvoted. For example, I used to see more art shared, and often users who included watermarks (even non-disruptive ones), or links to a patreon would be immediately downvoted. I’ve also seen YouTube creators criticized here for simply selling merch. Even just a couple days ago, I commented on the same trend, and another user quickly replied to tell me its a good thing nothing here can be monitized because money ruins everything. There are exceptions, esspecially with open source software, but these seem more the exception than the norm, in my experience.
People on lemmy downvote anything it’s actually really harmful to the user experience.
Like a completely harmless post into a niche hobbyist community is often downvoted because a couple people on all decided to downvote it for no apparent reason.