Hallo,
almost all of my fellow students use Instagram as a platform to show their projects alongside a wordpress website. It’s one of the “must haves” but I have my problems with Instagram for several reasons. I’m super curious for alternatives (maybe decentralized) and where you present your photography, if you do. Maybe some of you use pixelfed (I don’t really know it, just read it) and know a “good” instance comparable to pixls.us?
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pixelfed maybe. (no we wont host one)
no worries, not my intention to ask for it.
I have used “vero” in the past (vero.co)
Sounds interesting. Will have a look at it soon. Thank you.
Yes, pixelfed or mastodon. I think it does not matter whether you use pixelfed or mastodon, your photos will show up under the same hashtags (pixelfed is part of mastodon).
At the moment I am using Instagram and mastondon.online.
If you want to be seen, there is no alternative to Instagram at the moment. There are still few users/photographers on Mastodon/Pixelfed.
I am not happy about Instagram either.
I have my problems with IG, too, but before looking for an alternative that I can recommend, please tell me what problems you have with or why you look for an alternative to IG
IG now requires an account to even look at photos. FB pushing more and more to sync data between their different services (occulus2 lock to FB accounts, whatsapp data now synced with FB (signal and threema are quite happy about that)) just to name a few.
I use (and pay for) Flickr.
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I do, too, but flickr is a pay-service and if you want to see all my work, you need to be a flickr-member (in fact a client) as well. I don’t think that’s what @wapitifass is looking for.
Here are - In numeric order - my main channels
flickr (8,4 k followers, 56 million hits by today)
tumblr (3 k followers)
my own website (hosted on wordpress)
Instagram (250 followers)
ello (190 followers)
flickr is a special case: I host nearly every photo that I keep on my SSD also on flickr. I pay the annual fee and have no restrictions whatsoever in storing (and therefore publishing) my sensual and (rarely) explicit nude shots. Showing a photo here, on tumblr or in the Nikon forum? I copy the BB-Code from flickr. I do NOT (at all) participate in any social networking on flickr.Today afternoon I have 8390 followers and I follow 87 members - all of them personally known to me (like our host Pat here, who hasn’t posted in a looong time ;o) People see my work, invite my shots into various groups and follow me.
tumblr has been heaven and became hell. Tumblr was a paradise for free spirits and allowed nearly all kind of content. Models and photographers showed every kind of work. If you have a tumblr account, please follow lavecchia (Nick Lavecchia from Maine), imiging, fulldestinyavenue, solennejakovsky and tls-airport-photo. In the beginning I showed all my work on tumblr and it was available to everyone, then nude content was only available to members and now nudity is banned - same rules like on IG. Since the ban (due to apple menacing tumblr to kick the app out of the app-store) I lost 2k followers within four weeks but for some reason I gained another 1 k over the last two years and I am at 3 k again. Very creative and sometimes way beyond all boundaries. I still like tumblr ;o)
my website became a necessity in 2017 (?) when tumblr limited nude content to members. I need a place to show my work and that’s it. People interested in my photography, models who think about working with me, magazines looking for a possible cooperation - this is where I point them all to and this is really my only “active” platform. The website has been set up by @anon41087856 here and I am quite happy with it, but there are already ideas for an overhaul ;o)
Instagram is hard to get for me and I suck at IG. I present basically the same images I show on tumblr, but I get one tenth of the reactions and followers. My daughter has about five times more follower, posting photos of our cats, horses and whatnot in rather mediocre quality … and still IG is in the middle of things for the entire branch. Models or photographers without IG accounts simply don’t exist although the average time an IG user spends on a single image is 0.3 seconds. F for effort - you spend a day shooting, a week selecting the few good shots, another two weeks editing and then you get 0.3 seconds worth of attention!
ello is probably cool, but I might not really get ello right. You can show anything on ello, but in my line of work there are mainly members reblogging photos of other members and I see very, very few new, original photos. It seems like all of sensual/erotic photography on ello is coming from Peter Hegre and his disciples.
MeWe is a social nework and very proud of its “not for sale” policy. MeWe claims not to share any user-data with other companies and there is a rather active but still small photo community. A lot (like really a huge percentage) of media in some groups are simply embedded content from other platforms and I fear that this might break MeWe’s neck once the network becomes big enough for corporate internet to care. I have a MeWe account (created - like most “tumbr refugees” in December 2018) but I have neither time nor interest in being active there.
facebook is what it is. My FB account is 99% family and friends, all of whom I know in person. I comment on my nephew’s new mountain-bike, send b-day congrats to fellow catamaran sailors and keep photography mostly out of it.
The internet costs money. Servers, infrastructure, bandwidth … none of this is free. So if you don’t pay for any of it, it’s because you are not the “user” and in charge; you are the merchandise! There are a few spots where you get “free” use and space. No pay, no advertising and free advise like here. That’s because a number of users here chip some small amounts in the pot and Pat invests long hours (and even more of his own cash) to keep this running without advertising.
If you want a good host for your pictures (website, online-service, whatever) you will most likely have to pay for it.
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I use pixelfed.social
I find this kind of question is always ill-posed. Alternative of IG to do what ? Sell prints, get hired for photo gigs, get subscribers/fans/prospects, get noticed by galeries or magazines ?
I mean IG was first meant for non-artistic crowds (and it really shows… see JPEG compression, EXIF destruction and low-res display…) at a time where photographers were on Flickr or 500px, graphic artists on Deviant Art, and average audience on Facebook.
Image professionals going on IG to showcase their portfolio and get hired/sell stuff is bending the design goal of the platform. Proof is the instant messaging is really not business-oriented, and contacting people over there in a professional fashion is really not efficient. Not to mention the usual lack of separation between pro vs. perso accounts/notifs/activites/contacts (witness here your pro contacts getting offended that you didn’t answer them live on a saturday evening while posting personal stuff at the same time…).
Point being, in the variety of usage goals that converge toward IG, what is/are the one(s) you are targeting ?
Just be aware that the audience on these is biased/tainted toward open source. If you look for new clients or magazines, it’s really not the right place.
Given the current state of the internet, and the concerning trends in the past few years, I think personal blogs are the last resort before going full darkweb. There is an ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress, that is supposed to federate blogs the same way Pixelfed/Mastodon/Peertube etc. work, this needs to be investigated (tried it quickly, doesn’t seem to do much).
Be aware that US credit card companies (VISA, mostly) and Paypal/Stripe/etc. put pressure on any publishing plateform that sells subscriptions because they explicitely forbid the use of their paiement services for “sexual” or “obscene” or “offending” content or services. Same applies to platforms that sell advertising spots within your “free” subscription. However, their definitions of “sexual”, “obscene” and “offending” are vague, broad, and ultimately entirely up to them, not really art-educated nor art-compliant (rule of thumbs : if your nude policy ends up banning stuff having been displayed in museums for 150 years, maybe reconsider).
I have this weird dream of virtual artists hives, with federated self-hosted blogs connected to indexing platforms, where artists could make their own content/magazine freely. Such platforms could sell global subscriptions to the audience, à la Netflix, allowing access to their member’s magazines and splitting the incomes between them. So artists could stay truly independent while getting paid and still be referenced on a central place while keeping content under their control, and hosting it wherever censorship is nice enough to allow free speech.
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I didn’t, thanks ! However, the scope of what they do is kind of cryptic on a first read. Is it a CMS ? Is there a showcase ?
The IndieWeb is a community of individual personal websites, connected by simple standards, based on the principles of owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, to publish on your own site (optionally syndicate elsewhere), and own your data.
They use things like the h-formats and RSS.
Hmm, developing back-end techs without a functional showcase app/implementation is going to fail. People use (web-)apps, not protocols.
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I’m just starting to learn about it myself, and I’d also like to see examples. I suspect part of the reason there are few examples is that the indiweb is sort of “invisible” in the sense that it just allows you to syndicate your content as you see fit, so there is not much to actually see. This has a bit more information: Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine
I’ll share more concrete data/examples if I can find them.
Thank you for the nice input. Maybe I was a bit unclear about the question and maybe because I didn’t really think about it 
But I like your input. Maybe I can clarify a bit: I don’t want to use instagram mainly because of privacy concerns. I used it mainly for getting in touch with other photographers to get inspired and see their work. So that’s basically it 
. I would say that it Instagram is propably the easiest way to get in touch with customers. At least if you’re doing weddings or journalism/documentary. But I’m not working professional anyway at the moment so I can look for alternatives.
@betazoid thanks, I wanted to check mastodon anyway some time soon and maybe also pixelfed.
@beachbum thank you for your extensive answer. And also for your suggestion nice photographers at tumblr. Enjoyed it.I just deleted my website because I was fed up with it for some reason and tried to program something new but never had the time to do it. So I but some extrapressure on my self by deleting the old one . Had a quick look at ello and from the landingpage I could think that it’s maybe a good place to get inspiration. Looks quite professioal to me. MeWe looks also worth a try.
@anon41087856 Oh yes, my question was not really precise . I have to admit that.
So I used instagram to see other work and show some of my projects. But with no professional interest.
Maybe, but all photographers I know are using instagram as a second platform besides their website. But this can be limited to germany or documentary photography/wedding. I don’t know. Propably the instagram bubble i was livin’ in
Really nice dream and a good idea indeed. Independence and money. I would love it Thank you for your input.
But thank you @mbs this is really interesting and i’ll definately have a look at it before building my own website.
So, there’s a lot to look at. Thank you all
wapitifass
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I use Smugmug, but I don’t ‘present’ my photos, just share them with the family. A nice feature is that they provide an HTML slideshow that I can embed in our family blog. With a higher level subscription, one could sell photos, or even run a studio, where an assistant could have different permissions from a photographer. They provide many looks, and are rather customisable (I just use one of the defaults). Storage is unlimited, max. photo size is 200 MB/image. https://www.smugmug.com/features
So, a webring? How 1990’s!
The frustrating part is that all of the components exist to wire this up and have been available for years. RSS is not dead, the “social” companies just don’t want you using it so you’ll stay on their platforms and see more ads.
Honestly, at the moment I’d love to see a resurgence of RSS readers and leveraging existing tech to build your own experience. Wire the thing up to discourse here for commenting/messaging and you’ve got your very own community. (GitLab hosted pages means you can deploy and serve for free even.)
Wrap the whole thing up in a fancy-schmancy Web 3.0/4.0/5.0/∞.0 interface.
At the basest level, I think personal/professional websites are the safest future-proof bet. Drive everyone towards your website that you control entirely and are not dependent on some “service” to stay alive. No matter how risqué @beachbum or @anon41087856 work may be, they only have to answer to themselves for content and can control the entire experience for end-users however they’d like.
Discovery is the bigger problem to solve in this scenario (and things like activitypub/mastodon/pixelfed/etc can help alleviate this somewhat).
@paperdigits and I were actually thinking about starting some curated showcase posts at some point to help with discovery and new people to follow or check out.
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