Conceptart has been down for a while, deviantart is practically dead it seems, forums as a concept seem to be fossils and most active artists are on twitter, ig or facebook, but I can't personally stand any of those. Twitter would be better than anything owned by facebook but even then you can't really control your profile layout or just about anything else, let alone keep your data from being mined and sold by the site owners. I miss the days of forums and personal websites.

Somehow, tumblr of all places seems to be the last semi-anonymous, free and networked site where you can code your own blog layout but still have the social media aspect of not being isolated on your own site. And even that's on a shaky ground after the nsfw ban and now it's been sold, which leaves the future uncertain (though I doubt they'll fuck it up more than yahoo managed to, the user numbers have still plummeted).

Are there any community sites that you frequent where you can connect to other artists, that have sizable and active user base? Sites like artstation seem pretty impersonal and mostly gallery-oriented and require phone numbers or facebook connections (ugh). I'm looking for some sweetspot between exposure to a community that's not just running numbers like how many likes you get, something like deviantart and conceptart were in their heyday. Maybe that's just a pipedream these days or I'm just wearing nostalgia goggles, but I hope we make it back to whatever the hell we had before the modern social media hell.