now what? thoughts on the next few months...

I felt kind of compelled to write this, because I have a lot of thoughts over the looming death of Twitter; the thing that kickstarted everything Foulveins.

If reports are to be believed; Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed "genius" of the tech world, sent an email to his Twitter employees in the late hours of Thursday evening. In it, he demanded "hardcore" working conditions in a bid to spin the site into a "2.0" version; whatever that entailed isn't clear, unsurprisingly. This came off the back of him already firing a considerable chunk of his own workforce, with many others straight up jumping ship than go down with the captain.

In my opinion, such a brain drain on one of the biggest social networks currently in service, not to mention days before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, spells nothing but doom for Twitter. We already know it couldn't sufficiently handle events such as the death of the Queen of England, even before the takeover from Musk. I feel that come Sunday, the site itself will be a sluggish, unresponsive mess that won't be fit for purpose; and will probably remain that way save a literal miracle.

And yet, despite all of this, Twitter was, and god willing, is and will remain an important tool for artists. To deny that is foolish, at best. 

The site being centralised in the way it was was both its boon; allowing an audience who would probably be too shy to click on Rule 34 anywhere else; and its bane, primarily because some people hadn't quite figured out just how the block button works.

True, it has never been actually perfect for artists of any walk; not just us smut peddlers in the gutters, but musicians, photographers, video artists, etc etc.

Art has never been the intent of Twitter. Tweets were meant to be 140 characters, and were just to contain text. But we all made it work! Somehow! We made a site known to many power users as "the hell site" work sufficiently for us, and now suddenly, the rug's been pulled up from under our feet, and we now have to cope with where to go next. 

Which all leads into what this means for me and the future. Let me state:-

I have zero intent to quit what I'm doing for the foreseeable future, let me make that crystal clear. The issue is distribution off the Patreon platform.

Twitter has always been the core of my audience. It's taken for granted; the fact it has existed in this capacity is honestly nothing short of a miracle. 

And ultimately, Patreon for me has always been a bonus, or a supplement, to what I do. Again, Twitter has always been the core of my audience.

Unsurprisingly, a good chunk of the income from this platform comes from requests and commissions. I've never wanted to force people to pay an admission fee just for my content, because it'd never get seen. I've never also wanted to feel at the mercy that I have to post stuff to Patreon; my own insane output rate is more to do with myself than it is to do with fulfilling a quota.

And even if I believed that all of my content should be paywalled, that ignores the giant eye patched elephant in the room. I'm not stupid enough to assume that not one of my patrons has ever shared any of the rewards here, be it between their friends or on scraper sites. 

People here pay me for my work because I assume they want to support me; if they go ahead and share paid-for rewards, I am basically powerless to stop them. (Though I am judging them...)

For better or for worse, Twitter has been the ideal place for me to publicly post my art. It allowed me to post art on a schedule, with minimal censorship and content cuts, to a broad audience. The alternatives are simply not great:

• Reddit does not allow, for what I can see anyway, for timed posts to a subreddit, or even your own profile. That makes sense; to prevent spam. However, this is also not to mention being at the mercy of whether or not a post survives in the 'New' section of any subreddit...
• If Twitter was not usable for artists, Discord is ten times worse. Akin more to IRC than social media feeds, any post I make on any Discord server runs the risk of being buried under chatter. It bothers me people make entire communities out of Discord meaning to emulate forums, but that's a different kettle of fish.
• Pixiv, being a Japanese website, means that I must censor visible genitalia in accordance to their laws, and is also part of the reason I have never registered for a FANBOX account.
• DeviantArt does not allow any NSFW content; involving, let's say, coupling; to be published on the platform without a paid subscription, and I don't want to make people double dip for content that DeviantArt may deem unsuitable, even behind a paywall.
• The same is true of Tumblr, minus the paid subscription; that isn't available period. That ship has long sailed.
• Just to rule this out for obvious reasons: Instagram.
• Mastodon, Pillowfort etc etc are all too new and volatile in comparison to Twitter. Asking, as of writing, 17,000 people following me to re-register to yet another service to see my content on a daily basis? It's a tall order.

So where does that leave 'early access' as a tier? 

If there's no Twitter to post stuff 48-72 hours later; where do I post it? 

I was considering dropping it entirely earlier today; statistics show that the majority of subscribers who are on $1 eventually either drop off after a month or two, or end up upgrading to the $5 tier anyway; sometimes within hours of grabbing it. 

But it makes no sense to just get rid of it. 

Would people pay $1 a month just to support me, and receive literally no other benefits? I don't know if they would, especially the few that've been on that tier for months, even years, and I don't want to assume either way.

And with that said, where does that leave me? I don't have a reason, at least, as of right now, to stop posting over on Twitter. The site still works, at least, to some extent. 

I also have no reason to stop posting on Pixiv, the only other site I bothered with. Like I mentioned, the issue is censorship; it's giving people a bum deal for content they would have to pay to see without pixelization in the event Twitter does die. 

And lastly, splintering off stuff to other sites under "maybe too spicy for this site, have to censor this for that site" is busy work I don't really want to have to deal with.

That said, it leaves me in an existential conundrum I'd never actually considered. 

For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that, like LiveJournal, MySpace, and several more aside, that Twitter could and actually disappear. 

I never made contingency plans, because who would? Twitter survived so much since 2007, it's always been around. Why would we expect it to not be? That's like expecting YouTube or Facebook to fold, right?

For now, I intend to be like the band on the Titanic -- "Ladies & gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight" -- and perhaps I'll come out of it on the other side unscathed regardless. 

Maybe all of us artists will. 

For now, I just had to get these thoughts out somewhere.