Some of you might have heard that a lot of people have been leaving Twitter recently. People had been unhappy with the direction (and current state, let's be real) of the platform for a while, but Elon Musk made a number of big decisions in the past few months that were the final straw for a lot of people, like removing the ability to properly block people on a platform that had a pretty big problem with harassment already.

The two big competitors in that space are Threads and Bluesky, and it appears Bluesky is where a lot of artists have settled on, which includes people from Newgrounds. Now Bluesky has a couple of neat features that I haven't seen anywhere else - custom feeds and "starter packs" (a list of people you can follow à la carte, or all at once) and I got to work on making starter packs for Newgrounds: 

Newgrounds pack 1 (full)

Newgrounds pack 2 (full)

Newgrounds pack 3

I really like this feature! It makes it a lot easier for people to find each other and for artists to rebuild their audience. There are only 150 slots though, and the first one filled up pretty quickly. 

My plan initially after the first one got full was to split them up for each portal, but that didn't work out for a number of reasons. Right from the jump you have the issue of where to put people. Most people have a single "thing" they do - they're artists, or musicians - but plenty of people don't. Most animators also have a gallery full of still images, game devs also usually make art or music, etc. Putting people into multiple packs didn't really feel fair for people who were only put in one. The other issue was that I didn't know what to do with the original pack if I ever finished working on the other ones, as people were still finding and using it.

In the end I decided to just put everyone together so you get a bit of a grab bag of everything: music, art, animation - a bit like on Newgrounds itself. 

The packs are SFW. There are a few people in there who make suggestive art, but nothing too explicit. It's not a guarantee that your timeline will never have porn posted or retweeted to it, but it's not the focus of these artist's work. I don't have an issue with NSFW content or content creators, but a lot of people do, so I didn't want to spring something on people they may not have signed up for. I don't have any plans currently to make a NSFW pack. 

Yesterday Newgrounds announced that if you're a Supporter, you can get Newgrounds in your handle on Bluesky.

This also works as a method of verification, because people can nab your username and pretend to be you, but they can't do it with your Newgrounds url. This isn't an issue for most people, but it might be if you're, for example, a FNF developer.

Lastly, @GENC is currently running a fundraiser for his dad: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-genczilla

He's a great guy and crazy talented, and he's working hard as hell to meet his goal. If you have a few dollars to spare, it helps out so much.