The Importance of Building a Website for Yourself

An artist website not only allows you to connect with others, but it also allows others to connect with how you self-define.

In Fall of 2022, we started seeing celebrities, news reporters, and other public figures leave Twitter en masse. After the social media site experienced a change in leadership, we saw many of these public figures take large followings and advertisers that funded the social site with them. Many migrated to other popular sites and some just gave up social media platforms altogether. A result of this is that some artists who had once been verified on Twitter, had large followings, or their work supported by advertisers on Twitter had to start from scratch in building a following.

As an artist myself, one of the most stressful situations I can think of is waking up one day to see a space that I used as my artistic platform and point of connection gone, and to see my work being mocked in a loop of quote retweets. For the sake of some stability in sharing my artistic practices, I always make sure to keep my artist website up-to-date, even as I venture into other avenues of sharing my work. Because we don’t know the future a social media site may hold, in this ever-changing internet landscape, I like to have a backup plan when possible. The mass exodus from Twitter is one example of why having your own website is so important as an artist. That being said, in order to understand this mass exodus from popular social media site “Twitter,” we must contextualize its buyout and the uproar surrounding it.