1y ago

Devianart alternativ

Edit: thank you for all information, it is really helpful 💖 I will check out pixelfed (.art) and go from there, maybe later setting up something "at home" ! Thanks again !!!

Hello !

I just got asked for a link to my paintings, and well I don't have an art portfolio online and after trying some free ones out, I haven't found anything nice (ease if useno nag-ware) so I thought of Devianart where lits of good pixel artists hanged around some ten years ago ...

But I have heard Devianart is no longer recommended or the goto place for your portfolio, is that so (or not ofc!) and if, do you have any recommendations for a free online portfolio? Say 30-40 paintings tops.

I'm thinking about setting up something myself so self hosting (FOSS) recommendations are greatly appreciated too!

Cheers!

34 comments

DeviantArt has been declining over the past few years due to controversial design changes and, more recently, a push for genAI garbage.
A lot of artists I've seen have recently been going to https://cara.app/ , although it's relatively new and it's unclear if it will last.
If you want something ActivityPub, you can also consider finding/hosting a PixelFed instance.
- Cara has it in their terms of service that they gain the shared copyright of anything posted on their website. Nothing in their terms of service says they can't open a store and sell prints or even sell the data to an AI company.
  Cara is literally one of the worse places for artists.
  
  It also has rapidly-ballooning expenses with basically no income model other than a donation link.
  I want a decent new art platform as much as everyone else but I'm not moving my entire portfolio over to a new service that, honestly, looks like it'll be dead in 6-12 months.
  
  Tos: https://blog.cara.app/terms
  The closest thing I can find is the following:
  The Cara Site and all works of art (“Art”) and/or other user generated content (including without limitation commentary, images, third-party links, and similar content and/or works) (collectively the “Art And Other User Generated Content”), text, data, and other materials contained in the Cara Site are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created any individual piece of Art And Other User Generated Content (the “Artist”). No such materials may be copied, reproduced, republished, modified or used in any way except as provided in these Terms and Conditions.
  Which doesn't actually grant any copyright; it just explicitly states that the artist remains the copyright holder.
  There seems to be a weird hateboner on Instagram for Cara, for unsurprising reasons.
  
  What are the terms that say that? I just want to be sure because every few years I see uproar over misinterpretations of some social site's terms of service saying "we have the right to modify and redistribute your work", when all it means is that they can host and make slight modifications to the files you post.
- Yep, after 18 years on dA, I closed my account there yesterday.
  I had about 2000 photos or so, but a year ago I got too pissed off at how slow and annoying it was to navigate, so I set up an index page on a webhost and use digiKam to create albums.
  I update the index page in HTML/CSS and link to the albums.
  The albums does have some javascript, that is to enable arrowkey navigation, else it is just pure HTML and CSS, and it is blazingly fast.
https://pixelfed.org/
Might be worth checking out Pixelfed. It's more a replacement for Instagram than DeviantArt, and isn't really structured like a gallery, so may not suit your needs. But I'm going to mention it anyways, simply because I don't know exactly what you're looking for and it is an open source, federated, reasonable way to show your work.
- and isn't really structured like a gallery
  I think that might depend on which instance you create an account on. I just had a quick look at pixelfed.social and profiles come up with a gallery view.
  Edit: I also use it exclusively for looking at and posting art, as opposed to social stuff, and find it great for this.
  
  So what I mean is that, to me, a real gallery type site would allow you to do things like filter down by tags and explore specific types of posts by an artist that catches your attention, with combinations of filters, etc. (This would obviously depend on how they used tagging as well.) pixelfed is also built around adding pictures as posts.
  There are third party clients that can present information different ways, but the actual website is how you'd generally expose people to your content (especially because it's not something massively popular like instagram). It also, while good at what it is, just doesn't provide the kind of control over structure and organization that I personally would prefer to share my pictures with, which is why I haven't managed to bring myself to add my pictures in bulk there.
  But like I said, it's good at what it is and may fit his needs better than mine, so it's worth a good look.
I highly recommend using Pixelfed. It looks really nice, is easy to use, is FOSS, decentralised and federated, and is a really positive space. It's designed as a sort of Instagram replacement but whereas Instagram is used as a 'social media' advertising platform, Pixelfed is all art and photography. I actually find it to be one of the only genuinely enjoyable and uplifting parts of the internet at the moment and have discovered loads of art through it that I love and am inspired by. Have a look at some user profiles on a few instances to find one that looks like how you want to present your portfolio before signing up to one, as there may some variety between instances.
If you don't mind doing a bit more work, it's also not too difficult to set up a wordpress website on a cheap VPS using YUNOhost.
For ease and goodness I think Pixelfed is unbeatable though :)
- PixelFed is also part of the FediVerse and uses ActivityPub, meaning people using Mastodon clients can follow PixelFed accounts.
  You can run it yourself, but if you're not able to for whatever reason, there are a ton of established servers.
  
  Yes. It's worth noting though that as a Pixelfed user you will only see posts with images. In fact a lot of my favourite art that I see is coming from mastodon.art, which is (as the name suggests) a Mastodon instance!
- Do you recommend a particular instance?
  
  I only have experience with pixelfed.social which is my home instance. I think you'll be fine with any general purpose instance though. They should all federate well, so your home feed will be made up of accounts and hashtags that you follow which can come from anywhere on the fediverse, not just your own instance. It's well worth exploring and getting a nice feed for yourself based on people and styles/mediums/subjects that you like. It's also good to comment on others work and keep the encouraging/supportive vibe happening :)
- Pretty sure you shouldn't use WordPress - it's an aging platform with serious security vulnerabilities. 😬
If you want to self host with FOSS, you could try something with good ol' Wordpress. It also carries the bonus of apparently being able to federate (I never got this working ☹️)
It's not open source, but Tumblr is a decent option if you want something fairly easy to setup. Additionally, it can look very professional with a good theme..
As others have already mentioned, Pixelfed is probably your best option for a FOSS solution to your problem.
There's sheezy.art and inkblot.art which are the ones I use, and Cara.app which I'm not familiar with but seems more professional (like artstation) than the former two. None of these are FOSS though.
- Inkblot Art is a buggy, authoritarian mess that prevents people from seeing anything if not logged in. That's the last thing I'd recommend.
May I introduce you to Side 7?
- These images are troubling
  
  What about them is troubling?
Try Photoview simple selfhosted gallery. Needs only reading permissions on a folder. It creates a gallery based on your folder structure ☺️

34 comments