Well, dA finally came under new management, new guidelines, and bylaws. An overhaul of the site was made, and when a young family friend and a friend from grad school were both encouraging me to use DeviantArt, I felt now was the time.
I opened the Instagram account firstly to give my mother's paintings a platform and because, at the time, she was actively trying to sell her art. She even had art openings in our home prior to COVID. My mom was never patient with most social media, her only accepted and tolerated one being WhatsApp. Soon, she convinced me to delete her Insta account. She just didn't want to deal with anything else online. So I looked over Instagram and realized I needed something far more mutable to DeviantArt's steadfastness.
Also known as IG, I think I unfortunately got into Instagram when it was already bought out by Facebook, and I can already see the ill effects with that takeover. However, I needed to overlook these since my main objective was to use IG's slideshow feature to make one of my comic stories a visual reality. I also created my own art-progression videos (I may go back to those, but the platform doesn't inspire too much trust).
Insta is now making it more difficult to post images vertically because of their feature-cropping. My own cellphones now have excellent filters and a crop-feature known as Scan. lso do a new feature known as 'Extract Text' I now use for my captions and Alt Text. IG tried to force its users to make their version of TikTok videos. But for months, I kept using my own videos that I then uploaded. After a while, Insta migrated all self-made videos to their Reels section, and in the meantime, they were cropping uploaded images poorly.
I figured out on the occasion I did my comic pages vertically that the Instagram platform cropped it so badly I would have to take the photo with the page's background. But when it's horizontal, the cropping isn't so much. However, I'm not being paranoid as other creatives such as the cartoonists and artists I follow on IG complained about the same thing. Even friends who tried to promote their books were going through the same. Now IG seems to be forcing us into some other feature. It's making me want to use the Share feature to also migrate to a previous social media platform, Tumblr.
We shall wait and see.
