Drawn in Procreate, 2019

Hello bear blog! I'm not sure exactly how I want to use this blog just yet (especially in relation to my Neocities I want to build) but I do know I definitely want to upload my art here as an easy way to create an RSS feed of the things I create.

I'm generally irritated with how the internet is set up these days, and I'm hoping to change that both in my life and others. Back in the day when Deviant Art was at it's peak, you could follow artists and be sure to see each piece they created in your own time. You could take a break for days and not worry about missing anything. Now that Twitter and Instagram is the norm for artists (I'm still unsure why everybody abandoned DA), it's a constant fight to actually see the art I followed for through the noise and without getting sucked into discourse that brings me no value. I'm hoping to use RSS to end the endless scrolling without giving up seeing new art from artists I enjoy.

For now, I'm using rssbox hosted on a server to turn Twitter accounts into a feed that only shows me 1. posts with media and 2. original posts, no retweets. However, the dream is to not have to hack together RSS feeds from a social media site and instead encourage others carve their own place in the internet. Since Musk just recently officially bought Twitter and Facebook has been a shithole for a while, this feels especially timely. I am realistic however, and so have been looking around for easy to setup alternatives that could work for most people. Bear blog might just be the thing, so I figured I'd test it out!

After I work out some kinks and have a solid workflow going, I plan on making a full guide on how to exist comfortably on the internet as an artist and still get your work seen by others AND see the work of others through RSS. I know I'm just one person and people are unlikely to listen, but I dunno, somebody has to try, right?