DeviantArt sucks and has made decisions recently that have driven me away from using it. These mostly have to do with the inclusion and integration of AI with the rest of the site. By default, all uploaded content to DeviantArt is automatically included in an AI image generation reference pool. This is opt-in by default and you would not know about it if you weren't paying attention to the content upload system. You can supposedly opt-out of this but with DA being closed-source there's no way to know if this toggle actually does anything. AI generated images have also been accounting for something like 80-90% of art contest submissions lately and have completely flooded the site in general. In short, if you an Artificial Intelligence you an opp.

DeviantArt also has a horrible online reputation of being home to the worst fetish art imaginable and it's reputation is deserved, it's absolutely everywhere and you can't click on the DA home page without being flashbanged by some kind of inflation vore fetish art. I have had people interested in my stuff but outright refuse to go to DeviantArt because of it's reputation and I do not blame them at all for it. By being on DA, I am lumping myself into that group of artists even if I don't make any of that kind of stuff myself. It is worth it for me to break away from there even if it's more work. No shame to the fetish artists, it's valid art but I don't want to immediately be labeled as a furry vore inflation fetish artist because of my DeviantArt link.

This site exists mostly so I have personal security for displaying my hobby. I have never liked having to rely on a 3rd party portfolio site to host my stuff and all the popular ones like DA, Artstation and Newgrounds all have their own problems. DA was just the least worst one for a while. While neocities counts as hosting my stuff on a 3rd party website, I write and control the source code to my specific neocities domain. This means if neocities ever goes under I will still have the source code for the site and can just rehost it on another hosting service or get my own domain, all with zero changes because there is no neocities-specific formatting or requirements.

I have no prior experience building a website and I am building this site in pure HTML and CSS using tutorials and docs online, so some things my look strange or be buggy in places. There is no javascript anywhere on this site because I am way too lazy to learn how to become a webdev neckbeard. The positive to this is that navigating the site should be nearly instantaneous compared to the average modern website and the site should work fine in an FSF-adherent browser like GNU IceCat or Dillo.

I will still be posting on DA but this will be my primary site.