Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure

[Stella Aster via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

In my local community, Instagram is the predominant platform for artists 
of all kinds.

What are the affects and capacities that social media platforms like 
Instagram provide for artists and audiences?

- Publishing, somewhere to publicly post content, perhaps about one's 
practice

- Discovering, of other peoples things, by a number of mechanisms including:

- Identifying, in the form of usernames to provide direct access to profiles

- Searching, in profile name, description, post descriptions, etc. but 
perhaps also by geolocation, tags, etc.

- Recommending, in the form of one or more algorithmic feeds

- Responding, in the forms of comments (linked, structured publishing) 
and reactions

- Collecting, by being able to bookmark and save favourite posts to lists

- all tied together with a cohesive user interface design.

Interestingly the Web provides a different and overlapping set of 
affects/capacities:

- Publishing

- Discovering through:

- Identifying, in the form of URLs, although mostly people just remember 
domains, if at all

- Linking, from one page to another

- Searching in the form of search engines, which isn't a core part of 
the technology, but an old and established part of the infrastructure 
since the early days

- with no unified or simple interface for publishing

- and where the interface design from one page to the next can vary 
widely, for good and for bad.

Within our media ecology, some of these affects/capacities are also 
facilitated by humans in particular roles. Critics  sort through, 
select, and re/present other people's things, according to their 
particular taste, which supports bringing an audience to those things. 
There has been a lot of discourse recently about AI slop and how this is 
capital automation of human culture production, i.e. "if we can get the 
machines to make the art we are no longer accountable to artists", both 
financially and ethically. The recommendation engine was the vanguard of 
the generative AI. Just as generative AI is an assault on artists of all 
kinds, recommendation engines are assaults on social artists including 
critics, those of us whose materials are preexisting social and cultural 
artefacts and the people, relations, and social worlds who produce them.

I think the main reason social media platforms like Instagram are 
popular is that they make publishing simple and easy (they're not the 
same, and doing both is difficult, especially for a global multicultural 
intergenerational user base). The Web was never designed with "how can 
my grandma publish photos of her cats?" in mind, and so if you want to 
just publish "on the Web", you already need to know so much, and then 
choose from one of a bunch of options, or pay for a website builder 
service, which quickly turns into an expensive walled garden. Or you can 
just set up an Instagram.

I like that there are services out there now focusing on simple 
experiences for publishing on the Web. I've been using bearblog.dev for 
my monthly updates (https://asterisms.bearblog.dev/ if you're 
interested!). In fact now that I think about it, with WriteFreely, you 
could set up a website where everyone can have their own very simple 
blog: https://writefreely.org/features/community-building But that's 
designed more for writing.

There is Pixelfed, which is the closest I've seen to a Fediverse 
Instagram, and again you could host a node for a community. I was 
thinking of that for a local art community, but I imagine people might 
be concerned with discovery, lack of existing network, and duplicating 
work onto another platform. I would love a way to scrape Instagram 
profiles into a Pixelfed instance, that would give me enough motivation 
to actually set up a local art Pixelfed I think. But then again, maybe 
that is the young technologist in me, always eager to solve problems 
with my keyboard, when perhaps I should just start with some 
conversations, and be relational about it.

Hope my musings are useful. Please keep us up to date with your progress ☺️

Stella ✨

On 22/06/2026 09:00, tt.garnet282--- via nettime-l wrote:

Hello Nettime community,

I am currently reflecting on the material conditions of digital artists in the age of generative AI and platform capitalism. Specifically, I am looking for alternative network protocols to host and give visibility to a personal artistic portfolio while actively evading automated scraping bots and mass commercial servers (M, A, G, A, etc.).While tools like Glaze or Nightshade offer data-poisoning defenses at the file level, I am interested in exploring infrastructural resistance. I have been looking into the "Small Web" and decentralized alternatives (p2p, Gemini, Gopher, etc.).

Does anyone have a similar experience?, Do you know any appropriate network for this?, What other protocols or low-tech alternative networks are artists currently deploying to reclaim control over their digital spaces?, What do you think? I look forward to hearing your insights, projects, and critical perspectives. Thank you very much!

Best regards,

jfgg

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