Artists, PLEASE: do not post your art only on Twitter/X!

This is an open letter to all artists that share their art only on Twitter/X or other closed platforms, or doesn't update their other places regularly. Please, continue reading and take it into consideration.

Since Twitter was bought and reconstructed to be what it is now, the service is going downhill. I don't need to recap all the garbage that happened since, you already know. The focus here, however, is the recent decision of locking out unlogged users from viewing public profiles and posts.

I use web feeds to follow my favorite artists. They are a great way to follow anything from multiple sources, without the need of checking different pages and profiles to see if there's anything new. In the past Twitter officially had web feeds, allowing anyone to follow accounts and posts without sign in - but yeah, they removed it, like every other enshittified social media on the market.

The community still developed tools to continue creating web feeds from Twitter/X. After all, it's a public social media, it's not hard to scrap its pages content. However, since Elon Musk ordered the decisions mentioned in the beginning of this article, it got harder and harder to keep these tools working. The last of them, Nitter, died.

Should I care?

Twitter/X enters in the category we call as "walled garden". Walled gardens are any "public" website or service that locks its content behind a "wall", which is usually the obligation to create an account or log in.

You may ask "what's the problem in creating an account?". Even if you don't care using a service that uses a algorithm to dictate what you shall see, constantly worsens the user interface and experience, and heavily collect user data to sell to profit from it, a lot of people do care.

What Twitter/X and other services like Facebook and Instagram are doing isn't democratic and disrupts the information cycle of the open internet. You share your artwork publicly for the world to see and appreciate it, but posting it only on walled gardens goes against all of this and breaks this promise.

The World Wide Web allowed us artists to have an audience that our ancestors could never imagine. Let's use this potential in a good way and allow everyone to follow our work, contrary to what big corporations want.

What should I do?

You don't need to stop posting on Twitter/X. It's still a big platform where all your fanbase is, and you probably make money of it. That's fine. But you should post your art in at least one other open space too.

One open platform is already good, since posting in multiple places is hard to keep up. There are a lot of examples of open platforms, like Bluesky, DeviantArt, e621/e926, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Tumblr or even a personal website. Any place that allows viewing someone's profile and their posts without an account is good to go.

You don't need to pay attention to comments, direct messages or anything on a secondary platform: just post your art. After posting a new work on Twitter/X, upload the image (or video, audio, etc.) and copy paste the description you wrote before if you want.

Final words

I can't force you to do anything, but please take this into consideration. I had to stop following multiple artists whose work I like thanks to walled gardens like Twitter/X. Do your part and share your work in at least other open public space too. It's easy, you just need to spend one more minute copy pasting what you already posted, and you'll make a great difference for everyone.