Considering "leaving behind" again... Can't really remember how many "photo" or "art" communities I have been through the last couple of years, fotolog.com, flickr.com and eventually dA then and now.... And I remember, after all, not to really stay in one place like that for all too long so far. Fotolog, sooner or later, turned into a narcissistic place for people to share headshots of themselves it seems, and asides that in terms of features never really managed to be on par with other platforms. Flickr, a very nice and friendly platform when it started, grew stranger and stranger after being acquired by Yahoo!, until they eventually decided to introduce censorship to audiences in parts of the world (including Germany where I am from...), making further activities there pretty much unacceptable. Moving on simply to "another" platform ... ?

Well... the worst thing about leaving Flickr behind actually was that leaving behind a platform rather soon shows the limits of most of these so-called "social networking" sites these days: Networks mainly are limited to the scope of the very platforms, and a lot of "networking" found an end as people left this "one" platform heading for other places just to see that the "network" won't be able to extend to there, as interaction with other "friends" in this "network" suddenly wasn't possible anymore because of the technical limitations of that very "network". From that point of view, there's a "decentralized" approach suddenly growing to be of interest: Simply use a photoblog software (like the one offered by pixelpost.org) and install it somewhere, and sign up with some photolog aggregator like photoblogs.org or [link]. Attract people to your site, same as you are visiting others as you suddenly again have an aggregation of your friends work, even though now they're not living on "the same system" anymore but just in their very different (technical) worlds. So far so good...

... but what to do with communities still of interest, for whichever reasons... like dA? Oh well. No "either-or" decision so far. Try to make the best out of it for as long as it's possible... but try not to get dependent of it that much... Let's wait and see.