BlenderNation and Blender Artists are Leaving X/Twitter
I have decided to stop posting to the X/Twitter accounts for BlenderNation and Blender Artists.
Two reasons have led me to this conclusion: First and foremost, X has become a fascist and anti-democratic instrument. Continuing to post there makes me a supporter of their policies and an accomplice in their goals.
X also recently announced that all content will be used to train their new AI – with no way to opt out. Since I share a lot of artwork from the Blender community on my sites and social media, this would mean I’d be sharing YOUR work with their AI, and I don’t want to do that.
With a combined 220k followers this is going to hurt. But after spending a lot of time looking at how this would impact my websites I realized that I was just looking for a reason to look away and comply with the fascism for traffic.
I can’t morally justify staying on X anymore, so I’m making what I believe is the right call. To prevent others from squatting and abusing the accounts, I will not delete the accounts. I’m also looking into how to delete the massive amount of posts on them, but this may take some time.
Alternatives
Fortunately, we have are alternatives! We also have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky. Personally, I think that Mastodon/the Fediverse most closely aligns with our values of freedom, open source and open data. Find us on @blendernation + @blenderartists.
Bluesky is growing quickly too, but there are some concerns about their investors – we’ll see how that plays out. You can find us there on @blendernation.com and @blenderartists.org.
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Support BlenderNation
Thank you for reading this. As I mentioned above, this is going to have an impact on the finances that help keep this site running. If BlenderNation is close to your heart, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon! 🙏
Update: comments closed Nov 27.
Good decision!
Well done Bart!
Good call. While it may hurt to leave with that many followers, it also means that there are a lot of followers who have one less reason to stay on there. Thanks for taking a stand on this.
I respect your decision a lot. It seems like the right thing to do.
You’ve done a lot for this community.
I personally don’t like X/Twitter. I call it the nag platform and rarely open it. But fascist? really?
The AI thing is inexcusable of course.
Good call and very understandable!
You forgot RSS!
That’s how I get your headlines; never touched Twitter.
Don’t worry! You can use rss with mastodon. Just use “.rss” on the end of their urls.
You don’t even need social media to keep up to date ;)
I wouldn’t have know you exist if not for X. Sorry to see you go.
Excellent!!
I left Twitter the day Elon acquired it. I am now following all of your accounts on BlueSky. Thank you for being a good, ethical person!!
Great decision!
Yeah man !
Already following you over there!
I agree with your decision and support it 100 percent!
I was just at a game industry conference and I noticed a VERY interesting trend…every single speaker had their intro slide with contact info, homepages, general linktree stuff, etc. Presenters had a mix of Threads, Linkedin, Bluesky, Instagram, etc. But NOBODY put twitter on their page. It’s become a professional liability, as if including your Twitter handle now screams “hi there, I am a ticking time bomb of HR violations and terrible work culture, never hire me.”
Great choice Bart!
Bravo !
Excellent!
This is really unfortunate. There are hundreds of millions of people there and most are not aligned with the company leadership. Also, you can opt-out of Grok and AI training from any public data on your Xwitter profile from the data privacy settings – literally turn that off.
I think this is a bad mistake for the Blender community, and if you were to hold your standards, you probably should also shut down Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
agree
Agree.
well this convinced me to quit posting on Twitter too.
It’s sad that politics has even reached here. You said that fascism reigns on X, but what do you call your actions? Did you ask the community for their opinion before making this decision? I don’t belittle your role in creating these portals, but without the community they wouldn’t exist.
Also, I suppose, social platforms have little interest in the content of Blender kind. They are more personal/commercial/political oriented.
I was about to delete my account too. It could happen anytime. I don’t like what is going on there, there is much hate too. I respect your decision and we have surely better channels where to connect.
Bravo Bart! Great decision!
Even if the Blender community does not want to get political – it is essential to keep up some core, human values.
My biggest respect!
I heard that Instagram has a platform similar to the twitter vibe with short-form posts and a similar user interface. It’s called threads and I think you’ll like it.
Hopefully more people and more people will do the same. Personally, I dont want to post on x, meta, reddit or any websites with ai.
Facebook numbers used to be important, but not anymore. When users leave, the platforms become irrelevant.
For profiles with a big following, to leave is indeed an act of courage. The obligation of having an account in this or that platform, ends up being just a fear decision.
You have made exactly the right decision to remove yourself from what will soon be the official progaganda platform for more than one megalomaniac.