If you don't like them, that's fine. But we can't afford to wait around until they're big enough or good enough. Right now, good TOS and a user-funded model are reason enough to at least try. If we wait for one big place to go it'll be Bluesky all over again.

These platforms exist today. They're just small, partly because they don't have a venture capital war chest and huge dev team so they can't just "start" great. We need to give imperfect, incomplete, fully user funded platforms a chance NOW. Make an itaku, a Pillowfort and a wafrn, NOW.

not planning on abandoning the platform but I am not a massive name in this area, though it is a near constant, especially now, to move and migrate to other places and host and link to other locations, itaku, pillowfort, some neocities etc whatever, people wanna be where other people are interacting

Let's make it clear: platforms funded by venture capital cannot 'learn their lesson'. They can't just choose not to enshittify. User funding means less resources, but also real humans who care about the project and its users above all else. THEY can learn from mistakes.

Pillowfort has come a long way since the early days, ESPECIALLY on the transparency and moderation side. What they managed to put together with a small team and exclusively user funding is commendable. They haven't meaningfully changed their NSFW TOS or enforcement in years.

Again: the entire reason they're doing this is out of fear, and particularly out of fear of backlash.

Best thing to do for artists, IMO, is not comply in advance, and then raise every kind of hell once they ban someone. Leverage their fear of a backlash by handing them an apocalyptic one.