exposur.es

exposur.es is a safe haven for artists to share their artwork unimpeded by censorship and liberated from exploitative corporations.

We've witnessed the prude, draconian, reactionary tech executives censor and outright ban us for our openness in discussing our sexualities & ideologies, presenting our gender expressions, engaging in sex work or supporting those who do, and in sharing our artwork of our nude bodies, all while posts that appeal to the cishet man's gaze are elevated to the top of the Discover feed. It's worn our souls down—deflating our spirit to create and share our work—leading some to tragically abandon creating altogether.

exposur.es aims to be a safe haven for artists to share their work unimpeded by censorship, liberated from exploitative corporations, and protected from artwork theft by artificial intelligence scraping.

exposur.es is built on Pixelfed—a photo-sharing social media platform built with ActivityPub. We can think of it as an ethical dupe to Instagram because it offers most of the same features (e.g. grid posts, stories, DMs, likes, comments) without the exploitation of our data & viewing habits, the manipulative algorithm steering our thinking, and, most crucially, the censorship. The ActivityPub integration allows it to be compatible with Mastodon, Lemmy, and Wordpress. Imagine being able to receive comments on your Instagram posts from Reddit users and being able to follow Twitter users all from the same account. That's how ActivityPub works. It also offers features like private posts for public accounts, a groups feature, and a TikTok dupe called Loops that will be available soon.

The best part about Pixelfed is, if, for whatever reason, you decide you want to leave exposur.es for another instance (maybe one with just you & your friends!), you can take your posts and followers with you—no more starting over!

The aim of exposur.es is for everyone that's a member to take part in collective stewardship of the platform, instead of anyone claiming 'ownership' or being 'in charge'. Think of it like a digital garden—we're cultivating it together by putting in what we can and taking what we need.

With the long-term goals of developing a gallery-esque, portfolio-focused ActivityPub platform (in contrast to the social media approach of Pixelfed) that let's our artwork shine and hosting on locally-managed, solar-powered hardware, exposur.es will be a platform entirely managed & supported by the community of artists that uses it and their audiences.

Here's to liberating our art! ❤️‍🔥