this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Sorry to hear that. Art and photography definitely had a stronger time on platforms like insta, tumblr, and twitter, where the artists felt they were more directly benefitting and growing their presence and audience. It was more so the discussion-based forums that reddit killed.
Not sure how you'd go about building Lemmy in a way that appeals to them. Perhaps if profiles could be posted to and profiles functioned like communities that could be subscribed to, then users could subscribe directly to artists reddit sort of half-heartedly did this but never really made it very visible that you could directly follow a user and never promoted that content via the "follow" feature. Something like that could be done for Lemmy. A feed of your direct user/author subscriptions. This could however create a power-user problem.
Facebook replaced the discussion part because the average artist wasn't nerdy/computery enough to use reddit, which was more obscure at the time (around 2011-2013). It's still obscure compared to FB/IG even now. Then after IG started becoming popular, people hopped there because that's what the customers were using, and at the same time the industry was flourishing.
It was also frustrating, having been involved in ecommerce website and stats development, to see people using Instagram as an auction site... the most feature-free platform to sell your work. Granted, it's because our work (primarily glass pipes) wasn't welcome on eBay, and eBay is overcomplicated and expensive, and Etsy allowed it but is sort of lame... but still, silly to see people have auctions in a chain of instagram comments, and then suffer all these various problems that ecommerce platforms were designed to overcome. Reserve price, reputation, record of bids, backup bids, requirement payment and follow-through. People would be "I sold and the buyer didn't pay!" or "I bought equipment and they shipped me a brick!" and it's like no kidding, that's the reason ebay exists and you're doing transactions in instagram comments.
So yeah, what you're suggesting is basically for people to use Lemmy as a personal blog or website. I think that's a good idea. Sort of something like tumblr. Many people are getting sick of not having an identity, not having a true connection to their customers, getting suddenly cut off from years of followers when a site decides to ban them and being lost on huge generic platforms that cover everything. There's a bit of a movement towards personal websites. The best way to do that, though, is still to have your own website - I can picture that some people will have problems with instance admins who are just as arbitrary and unaccountable as large corp social media, maybe even more. So the best thing for an artist to do would be to run lemmy or pixelfed on their own domain and server, and federate. Then people from the lemmifediverse can follow and comment, whether they're on your instance or not, and you could also add sales software, and you can't be cut off short of losing your domain.
Technically you could hack this together in a certain way with the existing software. An artist buys a domain, hosting, puts up their own Lemmy instances but does not allow registration on it. They put up a single community on that server and make themselves the sole poster on it. They post their art and content, other people on the federation with accounts from elsewhere subscribe to that comm and comment/interact with works.
This is of course not a very clear out-of-the-box way to use Lemmy. And it has the problem of seeking out subscribers. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to find subscribers and fans by crossposting to art communities on other lemmy sites though. Further customisation and personalisation of that site requires css and html knowledge too to edit and change the front end.
Really for all of this to be viable for that kind of audience it needs to be provided as a simple 1 purchase install and setup for that target group. Then they also need fairly advanced understanding of fediverse combined with knowledge of reddit where subreddit crossposting for growth is very powerful in order to get the growth they'd like.
And even then, it's not gonna be what Twitter is to them. They will end up spending most of their time on Twitter because that's where they get the dollars. This setup would be entirely in their own control though, and free of anyone else's rules on what they can post in their own instance.
Yeah, Lemmy is already perfectly appropriate for that. It would just take an easy way to install it, the way that many hosts will install WordPress or other CMS packages automatically, and an easy theming system. I'm not really a WordPress fan (though I haven't had to customize it in 12 years), but perhaps more realistically, Automattic is working on an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. I'm not really sure how that will work but it would accomplish the same thing.
Creating greater accessibility might eventually be about building packages that have preloaded common setups for different audience-types and use cases.
The problem is less so the accessibility I think and more so how to make it valuable enough for them for it to get some momentum. I think one of the things that has always bugged me about following artists in recent years is that there's no one single place I can view their entire portfolio. Their content is spread out over ten different platforms from Deviantart to tumblr to pixiv to twitter to whatever else they were trying at the time. And finding their art is incredibly hard in this way. If they actually owned their own platform they might actually post all of their art.
Ideally you would have the artist post their art to their lemmy, and then they would post links to their lemmy posts on other platforms bringing people into lemmy. Because they own and host the instance they can safely know that this content is never going anywhere for as long as they continue hosting it.
There are a lot of possibilities here but tailoring it into something and then getting the right people to start using it is the hard part.
For the audiences (i.e. content creators who would want websites) I have in mind, it has to be dead simple to set up, like a Twitter or Instagram profile. Anything that involves sftp, ssh or configuring nginx isn’t going to work. Pretty much, automated installers and GUIs.
I think people are increasingly seeing the value in owning their online identity - if you’re nixed by the Etsy algorithm or they or OG delete your account you’re pretty much screwed. Email marketing has stayed steady and is increasing in popularity for that reason as you actually own your customer list.
I tried to find a solution to the issue you bring up years ago when I was an admin on an art discussion forum. The owner wanted to find a way to sustain the site and bring in revenue, and I saw the problem of how people had their digital identities and promotion spread out across 4-5 different websites. My idea at the time was a profile site which would be a central place listing everywhere someone could view or buy your artwork. This was before linktree etc (around 2013) so in retrospect, it was a pretty decent idea. At this point, software has advanced a lot but the problem remains the same, as you describe. I think Lemmy and ActivityPub in general is a viable solution to that. People post on Instagram and Twitter because they provide broad distribution potential. Lack of true ownership is a real drawback, though. Platforms like Shopify are great and very sophisticated, but they’re also turning up the screws (a recent price increase to $40 a month for the basic membership, for example).
The way to get people to use it is of course to build easy to use, powerful software, of course. I suppose this is a decent idea for a project I could work on.
The biggest problem causing this is that artists are basically all forced to go wherever the users are, because they have to feed the audience their art. Users don't come looking for it, the artists chase them with it in order to survive. This is the harder problem to solve because ultimately you won't solve it until Lemmy is big enough to force artists to chase its userbase.
The technical problem isn't too hard. But it would mean setting up a hosting company, or a reseller that uses hosting with a frontend for one click installs.
You could add value to this with additional code for Lemmy that allows you to turn on "shop" plugins and such that essentially function like shopify.
This actually makes me wonder what a federated marketplace might look like. Federated ebay, federated amazon. These are essentially centralised shop markets with lots of individual sellers on them, what if the individual sellers were actually a decentralised federated network of sellers instead? The problem you face with this of course is how to resolve the issue of distribution and logistics.