Follows and stuff
It took me a couple days of using this site to realize it even had a followers page. I did notice that information isn't up front though which shows the approach of not wanting to put that as a major focus, which I do appreciate. From what I can tell it's currently impossible to find who someone follows or who follows someone outside of your own account, and I'm fine with that too. I also appreciate if someone manages to find my content interesting, though I never intend to focus on getting a legion of followers on any site. And if you do follow and I happen to see the account on the list I'll at least see what you're about.
As far as who I do follow at the moment, I'm getting back to that being a thing. Generally just finding friends who are on here at the moment but might branch out as I find more stuff. Long story short, if someone's just posting about politics and everything wrong with society and how capitalism is bad non-stop, I'm probably not going to follow that account, even if I agree with any of the points. I really just don't want to be constantly reminded even more of everything wrong with the world. But if we do find an answer that works I might be on board either way. I'm really just trying to find the positives in life where I can, but not just shut that out entirely either.
What I might follow as far as interests might be art or tech or video game stuff, it depends. Maybe cute animals. Seeing cute animals is a pretty reliable disarming mechanism against my frustration with anything so I'm often trying to surround myself with cute things for sake of a clearer head. Back on Tumblr I think I was mostly following artists and friends, so if that ends up being the case then sure. On Twitter it was random brand accounts, sometimes in foreign languages, as well as friends and artists. Not sure how many brands are going to find their way here though. Honestly fine if they don't. I've found a number of not-quite-official ones from what I can tell. But if a small indie game studio or something like that shows up that might be neat. Either way, hopefully me being picky about what I want on my timeline wall thingy doesn't imply not being able to be friends if that happens here. This probably all sounds selfish, but I'm being extra cautious with anything in social media for the time being, given how the big corporate implementations are on average pretty trashy and putting algorithms over chronology, so the idea of one that's much less like that is still weird to me. I have been looking through a few tags though.
I did forget to mention one thing in my previous website plans: AI generated image gallery. I've messed with the tech across multiple implementations and gotten thousands of weird results. I'm also very aware of the moral concerns with how they were pretty much built from image scrapers without any notice, especially when someone tries to profit from it, and how crediting those whose work was used in the process can be near-impossible from the sheer volume of the dataset unless someone did a really deep dive on it. Even so, I'd like to share what I managed to get out of the systems at no charge instead of minting it as some weird scam coin token thingy, of course noting the moral issues up front and warning about the usual body horror that seems to keep coming up with it.