so, a week after patreon abruptly permabanned hundreds of fetish accounts (with no warning & despite not violating patreon's tos) i'm now seeing a prominent 18+ artist getting his patreon frozen with no explanation at all as to what triggered it, or directive as to what he can do to recover his primary source of income. (link to tweet)
when the alarms started ringing on patreon's crackdown against fetish art, this is the slippery slope we were warning you about. dovegraveyard's work is not particularly niche in terms of content - he does primarily m/m pornography, rendered in watercolor. it is nothing more 'extreme' than you might find in any off-the-rack adult magazine. the fetishists and sex workers were, as they always are, the canaries in the coal mine, and in absence of patreon providing any real explanation as to why they have spontaneously frozen this account i seriously believe the noose is about to tighten further on all adult content, not just the kink.
not trying to be an alarmist or a doomer, but if you have a patreon you should be setting up some type of mailing list to keep in contact with your supporters, today. if your account ends up being targeted, it will be magnitudes harder to reorganize on a new platform without some way to inform subscribers what happened and where they can find you.
finally, if you are so inclined, i highly recommend pledging to dove as he attempts to rebuild on subscribestar. his art seriously kicks ass and he is just the latest in a long string of artists i deeply care about who have been casualties of patreon's dogshit staff shooting itself in the foot to please payment processors.
it was obvious that the mass ban of ABDL artists was a sign of things to come - and, to be clear, incredibly fucking shitty in its own right. not only did they ban tons of artists not violating the TOS in any way with 0 warning but they did it on fucking november 28, suddenly cutting off the next month's income. one of my favorite artists, who's also a key dev on a couple much beloved indie games you've almost definitely heard about (because people can in fact have multiple facets to their artistic careers) suddenly had the next month's rent stripped away and had to scramble to raise funds elsewhere
but what's surprising to me here is how quickly they let the other shoe drop. normally you'd expect maybe a month or two for everyone to cool down and forget before they start going after progressively more "tame" nsfw art, but instead they've just barrelled right along to step 3 or 4. it's fuckin dystopian, but if there's a grim silver lining here it's that these bans are happening close enough that the line from point A to B is extremely visible. first they came for the sex workers and fetish artists, now they're coming for the supposedly "respectable" queer erotica artists, and if we let it keep going they won't stop til everything adult, everything queer, everything payment processors decide they don't like, is wiped off the platform
if you think some subset of artists/kink communities/etc are weird freaks and throw them under the bus, or stand idly by and let them take the fall, you aren't protecting yourself or securing your ticket to acceptability. you're just moving up a spot in line for the gallows
on a final note, i'll reiterate OP's urging that if you are an adult artist on patreon, start setting up mailing lists, subscribestars, any other alternate methods you can for keeping in contact with your patrons and receiving support, and do everything you can make sure your patrons and followers know about them
but even if you're a creator who's not making explicitly adult content, you should do those things too. for one, who knows what else they'll start going after in the future, whether it be content about being queer, or swearing, or whatever else. diversifying is just a smart idea in general. if you put all your eggs in one basket, the modern internet has shown that all of its various baskets are exceedingly fucking fragile and could collapse on you at any moment
beyond that, it's also a way to show solidarity with affected creators, and to allow people to pull back from giving patreon money. as a patron it's not an easy call for me to just go "ok fuck patreon, i'm done with them and their constant parade of shitty moves" because to do so i would also have to withdraw support from everybody i'm subscribed to, and all those individual creators would be impacted far more by my leaving than patreon itself would. if we allow patreon to have a monopoly on "providing regular support to and receiving bonus perks from artists and creators" then subscribers are stuck either accepting whatever bullshit patreon shovels down, or abandoning the whole thing entirely