tl;dr for reasons I’m not going to operate the Mastodon account for the foreseeable future.
Right before Twitter shut off the API support for third party apps January 2023 I had just refreshed the OpenCommish logo and posts for the Twitter account. I had the thought to open a similar account on Mastodon because not everyone knows how to easily follow commission posts from across instances. Then a few things happened over the next few months:
- Shuttering of third party Twitter apps completely nerfed my interest in using the service at all. Even now, I struggle to make the time to check the RT account there. Sadly, when artists need it more than ever…
- Having the boost account on mastodon.art was clearly starting to show its drawbacks. The rules there are very strict, and since the account is manually run I already filter out most bad actors. This meant that during the big rush to Misskey, I couldn’t support any artists I knew from the Twitter mentions.
- Bluesky is booming, especially with artists, at least for now. Though thanks to how powerful Feeds are, I don’t see a reason to make a curated RT account.
- Given Bluesky makes it easy to follow “commission feeds” that reminded me how on Mastodon you can easily follow any hashtag you wish, and the posts show in your timeline.
I don’t have any intentions to fully give up the Twitter account yet. It still has use and reach on the one of the three sites that is primarily algorithm driven. Since Bluesky and Mastodon offer easy access to finding new commission posts by default I don’t see much reason to spend the time and energy there.
To make up for all this though, my goals for 2024 and 2025 (pending unplanned house/life/travel) is to commission artists far and wide as much as possible. Aurora and Nyx exist for that reason, to make it super simple and easy to commission any artist at any time.