BlenderNation and Blender Artists are Leaving X/Twitter By Bart on November 20, 2024 BlenderNation 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 cant 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.AlternativesFortunately, 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.Finally, we have a newsletter! Sign up to get a daily overview of our latest posts.Support BlenderNationThank 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!