#want me to talk about how there's not a single platform currently where i'd reliably post adult art?

[nights-at-crystarium]

*inhales* I HATE BSKY FOR THAT

There's indeed a culture of hate/alienation towards artists that don't add alt text. The blocklist the op talks about sounds new but not surprising to me, people have been silently ignoring/refusing to share posts without alt text, and sometimes trying to be "helpful" by getting in your face and telling you that your art doesn't get numbers because of that.

Now. I finish a drawing. I resize it and put my little watermark on it, the only layer of protection I can do. I don't have the spoons for glazing it, I've given up on that for the same reason as alt text: too much extra busy work. If posting art 10 years ago felt like walking, today there are heavy weights chained to my legs.

Posting art nowadays isn't just uploading an image, adding tags, hitting the post button. NO, you go to downdetector and check if the platform isn't on fire. And, oh, did I mention that you've gotta crosspost to a dozen platforms? There are often outages which you'll feel acutely if you post regularly. No outages, all seems fine? Post and hope that the hidden ai content filters don't see the pornography in your art, no matter how sfw it actually looks to a human. Sometimes sfw posts indeed get erroneously labeled on bsky, which you can appeal, on tumblr your post's completely hidden from tags and dashboard in that case, you can only delete it and try reposting with minor edits. Done, passed that? Now you sit and hope that people actually like your shit. And then, on bsky, some twat walks up and "um ackshually where's your alt text? I won't share that."

Do you see how the only thing this notion can inspire is outrage? You have no bloody clue how mentally taxing it is to be an artist nowadays. Go fuck yourself if you refuse to share posts with no alt text.

You're harrassing a person and trying to police them into something that's still new and underexplored in the collective consciousness of an internet user. Some of us have been there for decades, some of us have trouble adapting to change, some of us don't have the spoons for it, you know what's that called? A person's autistic and you're attacking them.

I'm autistic and I can't force myself to do things that I don't want. No punishment in the world will encourage me to start adding alt text. By accusing me of being an exclusionary asshole YOU are being that to me, an autistic trans person fighting for their life every day as the internet, the only place where I can survive in, gets worse and worse at a terrifying speed.

observations