Ah yes, I love it when one event makes me want to write an entire blog post! Who would've knew that I just needed some shitty T.O.S. to force me to write a tutorial on making sites!

What happened

If you have a Bluesky account, you may already have heard about the new guidelines that will be enforced on Oct 15th. If you have no time to read the whole thing, here's the comparison between previous TOS and the current ones:

So basically speaking, they've specified that no fictional noncon is allowed, no discussion of suicide and self harm unless it's educational. And no, I'm not going to tackle why exactly these changes are going to be net negative, others already have done that on bluesky. I will simply say that, historically, this leads to further censorship and I myself strictly believe that such art should exist. If you disagree, I recommend leaving my site.

What can you do

Now, if you're still here, wondering, what exactly can you do? Others have said that you should give them more feedback and never stop complaining and I agree on that, though I believe it won't necessarily give positive results. It's still much more productive than blackouts and "change the pfp to show them how many of us are there" events, these are too silly for me, sorry.

But please listen to me, I need you to accept the fact that the modern web is pretty much hopping between socials now, especially if you're queer, make queer art, do sex work. You stay unless it becomes completely insufferable for you (Twitter / X) and leave to other places. All social medias and sites in general are temporary. And that's why I recommend you to consider saving literally all of your work locally just in case and upload it on your own website. I will try to explain how to do it for free and will mention some other options specifically for Bluesky users

Making site on Neocities

Why exactly Neocities? Because it's a free host for personal static websites with decent enough space and fair rules for sexual content, here's a citation from their T.O.S.:

Offensive Material
You understand that information available to you through Neocities may include materials that are unedited, sexually explicit or offensive to you and that your access to such materials is at your own risk. Neocities and its affiliates hereby disclaim any responsibility for or control over such materials.

And all you have to do is to mark your site as 18+ on site settings page, the section reads as:

If your site contains objectionable (18+) content, check this box. Your site will not be removed, but it will be listed on a special browse page. We don't have an official policy on what defines 18+ content yet, but basically it's just pornography and lewd/sick/gross images. Thanks for your patience and understanding as we try to find a way to balance out the needs of everyone.

These rules are why I think that Neocities is safe for NSFW artists for now. Everything may change though, so please always check on news and updates.

If you decide that Neocities is a way to go:

The long hard way

If you want a neat looking site that is 100% up for your personal taste, you have to learn HTML, CSS, JS. In no way I've mastered these, but understanding the basics were important for me to make a site truly ment for me and me only. Here are some resources for learning:

The easier way (templates and frameworks)

But hey, you don't have to do everything from ground zero! Learning is time consuming and if you don't have much time or if your brain fries a little (understandable), you may want to use code snippets, templates, frameworks. Unless you're trying to get employed as web developer, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Everyone has already coded something, you just need to know where to search and which keywords to use. Hell, this exact site is built on templates and snippets with some of my tweaks!

Still, however, you at least need to know how the HTML structure works and not to be afraid of looking at all the code. And you also need to know how to change fonts, colors, images, etc. (CSS).

General templates

There are ordinary templates and there are generators that are more versatile to set up, i.e. you will be able to set some design elements without touching the code, here are some I know:

For other templates, just google "neocities templates" and pick what is good for you. Creators usually leave out comments explaining what a certain thing does in code.

Gallery templates

The templates I listed above are best suited for blogging format, so I'll mention how do you make galleries specifically, since this post is more oriented for artists.

Comic artists, you may want to use rarebit. It's possibly the best template for hosting comics for now.

Okay, so for galleries there's something I currently use and it's EZ Gallery, however, I want to share some piece of code that will have links to socials and some image organization. It's not the template I'm passively working on, but an even simpler version

The code that you can put on index.html:

Yes, it's a little ugly, but I hope for someone that might be helpful, LOL.

Code snippets

Your best bet is Codepen, you can easily find anything you may want for your webpage.

The easiest way

"Mem, I literally cannot look at all those codes, is there a way to not code at all?" – yes! You can use static site generators/CMS (Content Management Systems) that have a graphical interface, one of them is Publii. It claims to have similarities with WordPress (I haven't used WordPress though, so I can't confirm).

Conveniently, I also found a tutorial on YouTube about using both Publii and Neocities CLI to upload a whole directory to the site

The caveat is, generated sites are more difficult to customize, but so far this is the fastest way of setting up a site.

Setting RSS feeds

Adding RSS feeds are like subscribing to email, except well... You don't even need an email. In fact, you need literally nothing except the app or an extension to store all the feeds.

Creating RSS for your site is a good practice, as it allows others to get notifications for site updates.

Good news is, if you have a site on Neocities, you already have one, you just need to give others a link to your neocities profile, not the site itself. I mean, not vv0ltz.neocities.org, but neocities.org/site/vv0ltz. Under button "Share" you have an "RSS feed" option and if you click on it, you get redirected to the .xml page and it's URL can be added to the app for viewing RSS feeds. That's how you're "subscribing" to it.

However, this feed isn't informative. All it shows is "The site got updated" without any additional information. I have 2 additional feeds for blog posts and art updates because of this.

For creating a feed by yourself, go to PKLucky's tutorial page.

[Incomplete] Migrating Bluesky account

(Marked as incomplete because this one guides not well enough yet)

Bluesky is decentralized, or, if more correctly, is part of a protocol (ATproto) that aims for decentralization. It means that if you don't like what Bluesky does, you can put your account on another server without losing anything. If you get banned by their moderation team, it won't affect your account. However...

You shouldn't use default bluesky app and site to view content. Even if a person is on another server, if bluesky suspends them, you won't be able to see them. Zeppelin has been proven to work against this scenario.