Reclaiming Creativity without Social Media

[hikatamika]

Hi!

Art and creativity have been a huge, symbiotic part of my Internet experience since I was young. Neopets, forums, deviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky…

…at first I felt inspired and connected to small communities. Then the bigger social media userbases became, and the more trend/engagement focused social media feeds became, the more inadequate I felt. Things like Bluesky felt like a return to form, the fun, communal feeling being a creative online used to have, but now it has me feeling as unseen and unheard as Instagram and Twitter did—despite me having unimaginably way more followers on Bluesky than I did on any other social media site.

Because… it's not really a Social Media site's intention for your followers to really connect with you as a person, or what your art/writing is trying to communicate. Moreso just taking it at face value, detached from the context of who made it, for the entertainment and stimulation it provides.

My soul/human nature still calls for me to self-express through art and storytelling, but social media has made me feel like, without it, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound (like, if no audience witnesses it, no creativity happened). All despite social media not being a direct and efficient line of communication to my followers anyway. (Something-something only 1% of your followers see your posts, etc..)

I post what I create to my own site, and it looks nice on there, and it's nice feeling like my visitors will see it if they stop by (unlike how my followers on social media, by the nature of it, miss a lot of what I share), but I wonder how I can peel all the social-media-external-validation brain-poison off of my creative practice, and how to still feel in artistic community without social media?

Does anyone have any insight?

[AbsurdPirate]

This is gonna sound like one of those "thanks I'm cured" situations, but I just genuinely stopped giving a damn about what others thought of my creative work. I do it for me, to get something out. It's no different to making a cool build in Minecraft, you are creatively expressing yourself purely for your own enjoyment.

I feel like trying to make something with the intention of posting can often make the art feel worse. Did I do it for me? Or did I do it for the appeasement of strangers?

[arcus]

Email other artists about how you feel about their art, and link back to them. Join art related webrings and connect with other members in them. For your site specifically, make it clearer that WaveBox is a guestbook, and move your contact details to somewhere more visible.

It's harder these days to strike up a converstation with someone new, but remember, no one would list their contact details publicly if they didn't want to talk.

[Dan Q]

This is gonna sound like one of those "thanks I'm cured" situations, but I just genuinely stopped giving a damn about what others thought of my creative work. I do it for me, to get something out. It's no different to making a cool build in Minecraft, you are creatively expressing yourself purely for your own enjoyment.

100% this. I still struggle with it, but I'm so much happier since about a decade ago I decided that the audience for the things I make should be:

• first and foremost, me
• a distant second, anybody else who's interested

I don't quite have the mental fortitude nor enlightened outlook to be completely immune to enjoying acknowledgement and praise! But keeping in mind that I am my own biggest fan, and deserve to give myself my love and respect keeps me creative and driven without caring so much what other people think.

Sometimes, I'll "trend" in some way and it comes as a surprise, because I actively work to not collect any metrics on how widely (or not) I'm read and shared. Last year, for example, an older episode of my pointless podcast (the one about special roads in the UK, which I'd have thought would be the kind of topic that could only be interesting to a nerd like me!) suddenly got tens of thousands of listens, which I only discovered when people started emailing me about it. Similarly, I've occasionally had things I've made or wtitten about hit the front page on Hacker News, Reddit, or similar, and usually the first I hear about it is when my site's bandwidth gets saturated! Because I wouldn't know, otherwise: for the last decade or more, it's just not been one of my metrics for success.

It's harder these days to strike up a converstation with someone new, but remember, no one would list their contact details publicly if they didn't want to talk.

100% this, too. What brings the magic to the smolweb, indie web, Web Revival or whatever else you want to call it is the opportunity for genuine human connection.

"Like, reshare, and subscribe" is a superficial way to communicate with one another, but on walled garden social networks (that just want to push you onto the next piece of "content", see how you react, and serve you more ads) that's the best they can manage. Even leaving a comment, while communicative, can be performative. But a person-to-person connection, whether by an email or a guestbook, is a beautiful thing.

This last year or two I've tried to get better at reaching out to independent Web creatives: sending them a guestbook note, an email, or even postal mail. Fun fact: I was so-impressed with a webmaster I found recently who put a forwarding postal address on their website that I not only sent them a postcard, but I registered my own PO Box which I plan to put on my own website sometime soon! That way, if anybody who wants to send me a letter or a card (it's a free/cheap PAYG PO Box so I can't receive parcels, but that's probably fine) they can, too!

(If anybody here wants to help me test-out my PO Box before I publish the address on my website... you'll find details on my profile...)