Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict
OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14
Mare: E6M76HDMVU
. . .
it makes me sad when i see artists moving to tumblr or instagram, two sites that downscale any image posted to a miniscule 1280px on the long side or 1024px, respectively, making it look like shit
artists shouldn't have to sacrifice their hard work on the altar of Engagement
grabbing every artist by the shoulders and shaking them and yelling MAKE A WEB SITE PLEASE
I get that it's just because we can't have nice things, but, these days, we have 8 megapixel TVs with 30 bit color and 60 frames per second, but we can't hardly display still images much better than VGA anymore...
there are such space-efficient, high-quality image formats available now, but browsers tend to be so slow to adopt them, so a lot of places refuse to utilize these better formats to avoid compatibility issues
which then just means most people don't know about the better formats, so there's no demand for them to be adopted, and it all stalls out for ages
we've only recently gotten to the point where .webp is a "safe" format to use and it's been under development by Google for over a decade and fully available for four years, .avif is still struggling to get browser support despite being an even stronger formatโฆ
I mean, it doesn't help when Google refuses to support JPEG XL, a format actually designed for still images instead of "here's a single frame of a video".
Weird thing is that a lot of popular image editor are still unable to deal with thoses formats. Photoshop cannot open .webp file (or couldn't for the longest time, i didn't tried for a while). I don't know if it's something about patents or something else but it sure slows down adoption. I wonder what makes a file format thrives or fail. jpeg2000 never went mainstream after all.
efficiency aside, we're doing 4kp60HDR these days, a single screen-filling still should be nothing and yet...
tumblr i'm fine with, i downscale stuff anyway if it's not going out to ko-fi supporters but instagram... i will never understand why or how that became an Art Place between the extreme artifacting it inflicts on digital art and the forced square-ness until recently and the complete lack of discoverability/internal sharing that isn't just reposting lol. like what even. how. why
I like my telegram gallery since I -could- upload them as files and not as images if I so please.
I know, it's a big drawback. But for furry folk who tend to use Telegram a lot and often use it to send pics they like to each other, I figured this would be an interesting broadcasting node to try building up for myself as a more social thing where I can get feedback or answer questions via replies. Something about how bare-bones it is has an appeal to me. Like, it's not going to ever be too much more complex than being a nice on-the-go archive.
I realize that artists have many reasons for choosing a particular platform beyond "how high-quality can my image uploads be" and reasons 1-4 are all "there are people there" but it really does pain me how every single site that tends to dominate for art sharing (Twitter, Tumblr, Intsa) is just objectively terrible at it.
Also, if someone goes to Instagram there's basically zero chance I will follow them and make an account there, so that's a huge potential downside of the Twitter exodus.
Instagram has the most unpleasant vibes of any social media site I've ever used, by far. I hope Facebook/Meta drags it down with it
