Am I misunderstanding this? Has their website also been suspended?
I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow and maybe even lead some of the other artists to join as well.
The dedicated fanbase, sure. But not people who don't actively seek out sexy raccoons, although they might read the comic if it shows up in their feed when they're bored. So not being able to post on popular platforms costs them a customer-acquisition funnel.
The usual solution is to put conspicuous censorship markers over everything the platform finds objectionable and then let the audience know where they can buy the uncensored edition.
That's my thought too. As the comic illustrates, artists have had to community hop before. It feels like there's some potential for a good match, despite occasional technical challenges like instances winding down.
That happened for Twitter and then defederation happened. The benevolent dictator of Mastodon did NOT stand up for freedom of speech for art, and that headshot Mastodon dead.
Same almost happened with Bluesky later at much smaller scale due to skepticism and again moderation happened.
I literally can't make out what you're trying to allude to.
Mastodon isn't the entirety of the Fediverse and is decentralized, so artists can just start create their own instance if they really need to. But, there are actually already multiple art related instances, like mastodon.art.
> If only every third NSFW-artist from tumble migrated into the fediverse, the audience would follow
... and at least a fair few fediverse instances, especially ones based in Europe, would defederate with NSFW friendly instances in order to stay compliant with relevant laws.
Federation between instances is nice, but it's not necessary for the Fediverse to deliver freedom from Big Tech censorship.
Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.
It also reduces the impact if you lose an account: Since they are all single-purpose, you can easily create a new one replacing the one you lost.
Federation was supposed to be the key to ActivityPub revolution until Mastodon blew up and got flooded by legitimate non-Western contents. Then everything became "optional" and "discretion" became important. That also caused stats fetch from Misskey instances to mysteriously stop functioning, despite the main Misskey.io instance now having 4.25x more posts from just 15% less users compared to the official mastodon.social instance and therefore must be a very important part of the Fediverse.
(or 20x more statuses and 2.5x more users relative to baraag, FWIW)
Or you could use Nostr, where there is no “account” and you simply republish all your content at whatever relays allow it. If your identity is banned from one relay, people can still get your content from others, and the identity never needs to change.
But, in the comic it says "We still have our website" and the address in the panel is electricraccoon.com, but I think that if I open that site it says:
> La tienda en línea ha sido suspendida momentáneamente
> Si es tuya y quieres reactivarla, entra a tu Administrador
Nube.
> ---
> The online store has been momentarily suspended
> If it's yours and you want to reactivate it, go to your Cloud Manager.
Edit: I'm assuming they were using some kind of site builder with ecommerce functionality, I know that some small creators use their site at least in part for merch, sometimes entirely.
The author bio at the bottom says "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here"." Which are up https://electricbonescomic.comhttps://www.alwaysraininghere.com I think they just decided to blow their self-promotion opportunity for an inside joke.
Ah, thank you! I thought I must be doing something wrong, and even clicked the contributor link at the bottom, but couldn't find it. Oddly, I seem to see a different bio and no links on the page.
> "Hazel (the artist) and Bell (the writer) are an English-speaking duo behind the webcomics "Electric Bones" and "Always Raining Here". "Always Raining Here" is a Canadian slice of life romance published in 2025 by First Second books and is now available in bookstores across Canada. Hazel and Bell have been working together since 2011, with a focus on telling stories set in their home province of British Columbia."
It's not. You see the same bio, which is why your quote begins with the exact text that yorwba provided.
The comics have dedicated sites; the artists' website is https://hazelbell.ca/ . None of those sites appear to have any problems.
You should be aware, if you weren't already, that you can find the websites associated with artworks or people by searching for them; it isn't necessary to follow links that may or may not appear on an unaffiliated website.
iirc when I was dealing with reviewing traffic and AI scraping bots recently, I noticed something about Meta's: When a user links to a page, the bots that grab oembed data to generate the link preview are using the same User Agent string as the Meta AI crawlers that scrape content.
For context, oembed data about your page could be seen as information you're basically happy to share, so other sites can create things like previews.
That's not necessary, there are other companies that just use different UA strings for the different tasks. They appear to deliberately make it so that if you have nothing to do with Meta and block their content scrapers, you also break basic functionality for people who happen to share a link to your site in their products.
Traditionally, one example is software that supports theming. Site owners who wanted to customize the look of something without getting their hands too dirty writing a whole new theme may duplicate and heavily modify the CSS from an existing one.
For applications people spend a expected to spend a lot of time in, the user may even be able to select the theme.
But, things like CSS custom properties have eaten into some of the basic use cases like palette swaps, assuming they're supported in the default theme.
> Pictures speak a thousand words and serve as a great intro to a blog post.
If pictures are so important, why would "nobody... take the time to hand draw a piece of art" or find a one of the many free stock photos? When I was actively blogging, I would doodle quick images to include all the time for this precise reason.
- Doesn't come across as consistent: You said pictures "serve as a great intro," making them a valuable addition, but simultaneously "nobody" is going to take the time to draw them? Why wouldn't an author take the time if pictures are such a great addition to their piece?
- It's also not true: you said "nobody" does this. I'm telling you I have. Here's another example[0] in this very thread of somebody who does the thing you're claiming "nobody" does.
Aside from that, the amount of time it took to write the post isn't even necessarily relevant. I think for many it's about trying to fully express an idea, presentation, enjoyment, clarity, compulsion, polish, [display in search results], or 100 other things.
People did it before and they do it now. Everybody doesn't do it, but it's not true that "nobody" does it. That could be part of why people's brains are honing in on it as a heuristic.
These statements are factually untrue or overly broad to the extent of being nonsensical. Hopefully, you can see how that would come off as incredibly disingenuous. [E.g. what did they autotune? What did they Photoshop? Probably some creative work that they or somebody else made.]
[Edit: Further, these don't really line up with what the comment you're responding to is saying. If all you did was write a prompt for an image, it gives the impression that you may have done the same for the text. At that point, if I care about what the AI has to say, I can just write a prompt to an AI myself.]
> What did they Photoshop? Probably some creative work that they or somebody else made.... If all you did was write a prompt for an image
Most serious AI artist are not just writing a prompt for an image. They usually have their own process and can describe it in the same detail any trad artist would.
But to your point about Photoshop/autotune, the basis of most AI artwork pipelines is some other creative work, like a reference image, just like you're imaging is the basis for those other examples. So the argument isn't disingenuous, you're just not familiar with how AI artists work.
For example, if an AI artist wants an exact composition for a scene, they can first create that composition by taking a photograph, or arranging it in a 3D editor like blender. Then they can use AI to "fill in" some elements of it.
I don't see that as any different from an artist using autotune to make their voice sound different.
Moreover, what about the synth example? What goes into synth music is connecting a bunch of wires and adjusting a bunch of knobs to tune the generated output of the machine. That's the same mechanical process as AI art.
I use AI all the time and do some paid work as an artist. Although I don't use AI directly in my own work, I am very familiar with the workflows in 2D, 3D, and video.
> you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
The topic is "AI-generated images" in blog posts. Which, no, most of those aren't being generated with any of the more sophisticated techniques you're listing. And if they are, they're less likely to be the images people are complaining about and that are being discussed here.
People are complaining that search engines are overwhelmed by AI-generated writing and images. Several people in this thread are stating that they click-off when they see it. It may be developing similar to banner ad blindness, where people saw the pattern of spam and low quality output and developed a reflexively mental filter and stronger dislike of them. What number of potential readers is an acceptable loss? Most blogs are small, so probably not many. But even worse, as many have said here, it also harms their perception of the blog.
Outside of the many outright spam blogs generating tons of images, a lot of people creating the "AI-looking" art that people say looks "bad" or "obvious" are actually also putting time and energy into it too. Those things don't automatically equal quality or trust. In some cases they consider themselves the serious AI artists. These creators don't always know that their images "look like AI," which is part of why it's becoming a perceived quality signal. They'll say it doesn't, but people mistake some of my pieces (not AI) as AI. Art is in the eye of the beholder. (Incidentally, if you're reading this, ensure you're actually getting meaningful, critical critique and feedback. That's something that's an important cultural component in many creative communities.)
I take issue with how poorly phrased the comment's arguments are. Saying that people "didn't create anything if they used Photoshop", they didn't create with whatever "synth" is supposed to be, or that scientific research isn't real because of calculators are bad comparisons and inaccurate.
The author may be trying to make a point similar to the photography one mentioned elsewhere or something like "Well if AI generated art isn't art, art must not exist?" I'm literally confused by the post and honestly can't make out the point with how hyperbolic and outright wrong it is. It just reads as mud-slinging to me.
> What about the synth example
Does "synth" mean synthesized music? What about it? A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played. The use of something like an arpeggiator is predictable and deliberate choice (I'm not going to go into the artistic integrity tier list of every synthesizer module.) Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.
Comparisons like these are unconvincing, which is part of why the other comment isn't good.
For some group of users, images they perceive as "AI" now carry a spam association. So, is your music actually rising above the cacophony? Do people even see your banner ad? Do they instantly get a bad taste in their mouth?
Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away. And, if it's commercial setting and I'm your competitor, I'm going to view that as potential opening for differentiation.
> The topic is "AI-generated images" in blog posts. Which, no, most of those aren't being generated with any of the more sophisticated techniques you're listing. And if they are, they're less likely to be the images people are complaining about and that are being discussed here.
The person you originally replied to scoped their comment to "decent usage", which to me implied some more process than just prompting.
> Does "synth" mean synthesized music?
Yes.
> A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played.
Generally but not always. There's plenty of synthetic music that leverage stochastic components. The stochasticity is a useful design constraint and is part of the artform. There's nothing that says art has to be deterministic or that the artist can't leverage nondeterminism in their artwork.
> Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.
There's also a whole genre of synthetic music called "Live Coding" which is typing programs to create synthetic music in front of an audience. There's also nothing that says art is only about making low level decisions.
> Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away.
It all depends on who you're looking to attract. The people I've met in AI focused communities have been awesome, always looking to experiment, try new things. The people against them I find very conservative and resistant to change (not saying this is you, or that it's necessarily bad). Which is fine if that's your audience, you have to know your readership. It's sort of like the difference between startup culture and enterprise culture. One is known for being nimble and innovative, the other for being reliable and capable. Positive signals to one are anti signals to the other. Threats like "I and people I know and the people in this thread won't frequent your blog" are met with shrugs, because that just means you're not the target audience.
> One, fans here actually get to make anime in the US. Instead of needing to fly to Japan, speak Japanese, and preferably be Japanese to break into the industry.
Does this come off as wildly tone deaf to anybody else? "We love your product and what you do, but could we get it without associating with or paying you in any way?"
> ...Smaller and faster means more financially feasible so we can give better wages for artists and enable a new industry to thrive in the US.
I've been in Asia this week, speaking to artists and creators. The traditional systems do create challenges, but this just sounds like a U.S. AI-based company giving itself carte blanche to steal the cultural output of another country, wrap it up in and U.S. style business, and eventually push existing artists or long standing studios out of the space.
No, I don't think I want a smaller team of artists and animation professionals doing art and animation. That feels like a very sloppy outlook to me.
[Edit: While I'm sure the process is interesting for some, the introduction especially just leaves me wondering who thought this writing sounded good? Maybe the target market for this is AI investors or people who aren't actually interested in the artistic part of things, and that's why I find it such a turn-off.
E.g. "We could license good music," implying their music is bad? Maybe it would be less jarring if they didn't specifically call out the importance of writing?]
- Shutting down accounts with almost no way to recover them and nobody to talk to.
- Going back on promises of unlimited storage when you buy their products, then constantly nagging you about storage space.
- The worsening quality of search results.
- Cramming incorrect AI answers into the top of their search results, or pushing it in other products.
- Using their control over Chrome to try and end ad blocking.
- The wholesale enshittification and lobotomization of YouTube.
- They have $1800 phones they're putting restrictions around being able to run your own code on.
- The fact that when you search an app in the Play store, the first result is an ad for some other app.
- Their UIs is just death by 10,000 papercuts in general.
- Their engagement in politics, not just lobbying but a donation of $1 million to the inauguration fund for a wildly unpopular president.
[Modern] Google is a big company, with a lot of users, and more than enough problems for those users to eventually stumble into at least one thing that leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
I was initially going to check and see if they had any presence on the Fediverse. While it doesn't solve the payment processor issues at the moment, I think web comics could find an audience there with less threat of censorship, albeit a smaller one.
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