Jules, writing

I haven't been on .art for very long, but I wanted to have a dedicated arts account. To get better at sharing my stuff and process and to find art and artists because art is made to be experienced. You can get some of that on art.

Me leaving boils down to two main reasons:

1. Instance administration

Most importantly, I don't think the instance admin is doing a good job. I don't trust her to run this place with the necessary awareness of (and actions against) how white supremacy plays out on the fedi and beyond. And her role in it. We all must ask ourselves this question. And deal with it. That's not happening right now.

After platforming white Ukrainian nazi propaganda and symbols, the admin seems more concerned with how this makes her look than with asking the important questions. Like for example: – Why is Ukraine so special to the white west, to me, that they can't possibly do anything bad? What is it, that distinguishes them from all the other people in different war and conflict zones? Well? – Why did I fall for the white nationalist's propaganda so easily instead of researching and getting context first? – Who am I in this? – Why am I so defensive about it? – Why did I only acknowledge my mistake after people told me it's a bad look? – Why is the only thing white people from the west seem to know about the (neo)nazi ridden situation in so called eastern europe, that russia is the bad guys and ukrainians are the victims? (It's true for the horrible imperialist russian war, so don't confuse me with putin-lovers. Get over this propaganda trick already.) The history and present of so called Europe is a hot mess, always has been. It's complicated. You should know that. Nationalism is not the answer, it's the problem. Why do you fall for it?

I'm not going to answer these for you.

2. Instance size

.art is simply too big. It turned into the fedi version of centralized social media for artists. If you're an artist, you need to be on .art, right? That's where everyone is. You want your art to be seen, you depend on selling it and on networking. So you're on .art. There's just no other place. Sound familiar?

This is not what the fedi is about. That's why we don't like mastodon.social. Among other reasons. Like how good moderation doesn't scale beyond a certain number of active users. It's certainly not working very well on .art. Because it's a really hard job and you can't just do it like that.

I think .art should stop growing, work on sustainable moderation practices, get people who really know what's important. And we need more artsy instances. Or just... be everywhere else instead. That's what I'm going to do.

See you between the stars.