Cross-posting from Side7
I saw Trezce's post on alternate art sites last week and I wanted to add my opinions on a few more sites.
Here's the original post by them if you would like to read it: https://www.side7.com/content/m2r3QgwdMp
Side7: Despite not having the most active community, the users on this site are incredibly friendly. Out of all the alternatives, this one feels the most like old-school DA to me. You can post images, journals, audio, literature, characters, and tutorials on here. You can make folders to organize your posts in. There’re groups, forums, and a point system similar to DA points. There's also a Featured Artist of the Day spot on the main page that highlights one person each day. You can post whatever type of art you like! There're a few limitations on though. You currently can't post something with multiple images at the moment, so something like comic pages would have to be their own individual post. You also can’t upload images to journals unless you put a URL to it in the dialogue box that pops up when you click insert image. There is also a storage limit (however, you can use points to get larger storage). Currently my favorite site to use both because of all the features and how nice everyone is on there.
Newgrounds: There’s a wide range of things you can do there. From games to blog posts to animations, you can post almost any forum of digital art onto the platform. The community there is also active with multiple events going on year-around so there’s always something to do. I haven’t interacted too much with the community, but I’ve had positive experiences so far. The only downside is that the site is mostly within the digital art niche, traditional artists/fine art outside of pencil and paper may have a harder time getting traction on there. For some reason photography is not allowed to be posted onto the art portal, which I’m not entirely sure why that is. Still, if you’re a digital artist, Newgrounds is a good site for you.
Sheezy.art: I’ve only been on Sheezy.art for less than a month, so I may be missing a few things, but from I’ve experienced so far:
-Easily the most customizable site on this list. You can do so much with your webpage on there, it is actually insane.
-You can only post images, journals, and literature on there atm
-It is currently in the beta stage (and as far as I know, only one person is developing the site rn so hats off to them)
-Small Pet Peeve, but if you’re searching for something, there can’t be any spaces, or it will count each word as a different hashtag
Cara: Cara’s audience is more of the professional variety, as I’ve seen many people migrate from Artstation to avoid AI scrapping and bots. Most people have been friendly, and there’s many different posts discussing techniques, career advice, artist shoutouts, etc. It doesn’t have an algorithm atm, so your feed is entirely customizable. There’s a job board, discovery tab (to discover new artists), and open talk (this site’s versions of forums). Compared to similar sites (Artstation, Instagram, etc.), I think this platform has a lot of potential as a professional portfolio site, but I do have one gripe with it. As of now, only active forums appear under the Latest tab, and it is significantly harder to track down older conversations. Otherwise, this is good platform to keep in mind if you’re looking for a professional portfolio website.
Bluesky- Bluesky is a lot more text based than the other four on this list and given that the current word cap is 300 characters it can be annoying to have to cut down what you want to say in order to post. You can post multiple images on there, but that is about it. There is a thriving art community there, and from what I’ve seen it is WAY tamer than on Twitter. That being said, I’ve mostly just seen artists either use Bluesky as a way to connect to their customer/fanbase or to post fandom works. The site (despite its best efforts), does seem to have a bit of a bot problem too although not nearly as bad as ArtStation/Twitter/Instagram/etc.