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...)

[rolypolyphonic]

I struggle with being on social media; the gradual enshittification of it really just one thing. It's also that I don't actually like receiving a lot of attention, especially not the 'social media' kind where people can be silently watching me and I just wouldn't know, or where I feel obligated to be grateful for 'likes' or other statistics/metrics even though they don't really mean anything.

I only share what I make on a personal website, and earlier this year had help in creating an original BBS for it exclusively. There are about a handful of people who visit regularly either to talk about the website itself (which is the host for a webcomic, my main/only project right now) or just to make idle chit-chat. That sort of casual, genuine engagement is much more meaningful than having hundreds or thousands of followers.

I think a lot of artists on social media care a lot about 'popularity' both out of the misguided belief that more followers = more connection, or more 'evidence' of their own skills, or because they want to make art a business and need as many eyes on them as potential customers (which makes sense, but not something I could ever manage for myself: if I made creating my 'job' I would resent it).

Then it can lead to a cycle where the desire for popularity makes people draw only what is popular or at least palatable to a general audience, and as a result the feedback they get, even if they get a lot of it, can end up generic and repetitive. There are certainly creators who are fine making 'generic' works, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I do think it's become more common (especially for those whose works have stories, like writers and comic artists) for creators to 'dumb down' the difficulty of what they make and then they end up resentful and even paranoid of the fear of their audience misinterpreting them or taking their work in bad faith if it isn't 'obvious' enough what it means.

Like the other poster said, the best way to find more people to engage with is to take the plunge and do it yourself. With that said, making work that resonates with you (especially if the work is about a theme or message that you find lacking in the common discourse) can eventually lead people who care about the same thing finding you.

It's likely going to be a very slow process especially without relying on social media to promote yourself. In my case, I practically never promote my project and I discourage other people from promoting it anywhere except as one-off recommendations in forum threads or to people they know, and in the five years the project has existed I'd say there are about 5-10 people who regularly pop by. But it's a very authentic interaction and the feedback people give shows they can engage with the story's themes with a lot of care and nuance. Moreover, since these are people are either care about the same topics and/or belong to the same niche demographics that the work itself is discussing, there's a stronger sense of camaraderie and respect.

[MrsMoe]

It's likely going to be a very slow process especially without relying on social media to promote yourself. In my case, I practically never promote my project and I discourage other people from promoting it anywhere except as one-off recommendations in forum threads or to people they know, and in the five years the project has existed I'd say there are about 5-10 people who regularly pop by. But it's a very authentic interaction and the feedback people give shows they can engage with the story's themes with a lot of care and nuance. Moreover, since these are people are either care about the same topics and/or belong to the same niche demographics that the work itself is discussing, there's a stronger sense of camaraderie and respect.

I'm someone dealing with a lot of the same fears and struggles as OP, and this was incredibly inspiring to read. I often feel like my art and writing is destined to go unnoticed forever because they don't fit the "quality" that's expected on social media. It makes me feel quite often like nothing I make ever matters, but reading this reminded me of why I should try regardless. Maybe it's weird to hear this from me and not the OP, but thank you for this. I mean it sincerely~

[fablefound]

Honestly, yeah, a handful of people who earnestly engage wih and get excited about your work is worth ten or even a hundred times that if it's just surface-level acknowledgement.
I'm in a weird area, artistically, because I have different art forms that are successful in wildly different ways. A lot of my music is on social media these days, while my writing stuff is pretty offline. They both have their perks, but having people actually seek out and enjoy my words is really validating and exciting.

[rolypolyphonic]

I'm someone dealing with a lot of the same fears and struggles as OP, and this was incredibly inspiring to read. I often feel like my art and writing is destined to go unnoticed forever because they don't fit the "quality" that's expected on social media. It makes me feel quite often like nothing I make ever matters, but reading this reminded me of why I should try regardless. Maybe it's weird to hear this from me and not the OP, but thank you for this. I mean it sincerely~

One way I've reframed this for myself is that I am often on the lookout for obscure and interesting things. When I see something I find captivating and meaningful that I know very few other people appreciate, it really drives in the point that attention/popularity is barely if at all a measure of quality or 'meaning', and personally it feels like a disservice to the things I myself care about if I evaluate them by how popular they are in this light. Eventually it's something that becomes easier to apply to yourself. 

This is also why I like thinking of work specifically as 'meaningful' (or that it 'matters') instead of necessarily 'high-quality' or other evaluations that are about technical proficiency. Because the fact of the matter is not all creative works are actually good or to one's taste on a technical level, but if you can value something simply for how authentic it is to the person who creates it, it also becomes easier to believe that besides popularity even skill itself is not the sole measure of why a work 'matters'. Something is meaningful if people find meaning in it, and if you (royal you) can't find meaning in what you do, it won't really change anything even if other people did.

[hikatamika]

Email other artists … and link back to them.

This is probably something that's going to take me a lot of practice, but it'd be for the best if I cultivated the self-discipline to maintain this mindset. I currently have what feels like a "Why're You Hitting Yourself?"-relationship with posting art to social platforms (and group messaging services like Discord). I know it hurts me, yet I find myself coming back. I need to get more used to the comparative stillness, quiet, and slow pace of posting to my website and reaching out to other small-web netizens. I feel an unease at the stillness, quietness, and slow pace because I'm not used to it, but compared to posting on social media, I never feel any pain or regret posting to my website or even reaching out to the masters/maintainers of webrings.

I do it for me, to get something out. …for your own enjoyment.

…making work that resonates with you … can eventually lead people who care about the same thing finding you.

This relates to something I've been calling Art as Spiritual Practice. Just art to express something that matters to you, whether it's something deep that has shaped me as a person, or something as simple as "I just think (Thing) is neat!" Continuing the metaphor, I've asked myself, if my art and projects were a religion only I believed in, would I still faithfully practice? And I've told myself, "yes, of course," with honesty. And I have continued to create. I'm quite sure it's my core creative drive… and it always comes back without fail, blow after blow. I've just let it get sabotaged by regret and shame from posting things "that didn't do well" (on Social Media, of course). It's weird: if I were to ask myself "did I express what I wanted to, successfully?" or even "have I improved in the technical skill I used to express what I wanted with this art?" the answer would be "yes". Until I post it somewhere. And it "flops". Then I would erase that "yes" and write "no" in its place. It's sad looking at that thought process from the outside.

I actively work to not collect any metrics on how widely (or not) I'm read and shared.

I do this too with my site… In my case, one hit counter for the whole site, one GuestBook for the whole site, one non-metricated "WaveBox" for all creative output posted to it… and that's it. I've seen people capable of adding per-post/per-media/per-creation metrics to their site but I'm deathly afraid of doing so. I know the moment I do, I'll be measuring post performance and comparing one creation to another just like I have on social media. 😞

the misguided belief that more followers = more connection

I think because there was a moment in time (early 2010s) where interpersonal relationships could properly blossom on social media to then be re-potted and properly cared for elsewhere, when I "took off" in like, 2023, when social media interactions became more shallow because people had more posts to scroll through and even less time and attention to pay to the people behind them, I fell for the illusion enshittifying tech companies wanted me to believe in, and invested more and more energy into my social media profile in hopes of connecting to the people I'd see frequently. That's what ended up fueling the feedback loop that fueled into my art performance/reception pains: the desire to connect. But it all led to a lot of fatigue and pain, with me only able to "re-pot" a few of the friendships I'd forged.

- - -

Sorry for replying so late to everything by the way. I've been watching this thread but I didn't want to just leave brief and empty replies like "you're right", "I agree", "true", etc. Had to do a lot of quote-cutting to get the post to go through as well, haha. For that reason, I'm actually directly replying to more than I'm actively quoting.

It's probably gonna take a lot of time getting reaccustomed to the small-web which I haven't deeply utilized in over a decade, but, it's very much the answer to my conscience yelling at me to "Stop Doing the Thing that Hurts (Social Media) if it Hurts, Then!"