I love email, recently started subscribing to artists' and illustrators' (non-substack) newsletters and it's a great way to stay informed if they otherwise only have fascist social media accounts. The newsletters somehow also feel more personal than meny social media posts.
I understand the struggle. I do. I still have an "Under construction" page on the domain I bought like a decade ago because I want a decent artist portfolio site and Wordpress is not the super easy dream they all claimed so I've nuked it like a dozen times. (And tried Grav, and Hugo, and...)
But seriously WHY do so many great artists like, even ones who could afford hosting a dedicated page, ONLY have an Instagram?! (And now a TikTok ugh). One AI-decided account ban or rebrand or algorithm change or whatever and their entire portfolio and audience are just gone.
It's really sad that there aren't more non-developer targeted FOSS projects for just getting a halfway decent page going.
All those sites like Wix or Square charge a ridiculous amount and still give you a bloated mess that doesn't function unless people allow tons of chonky JavaScript.
Ooof, so much this. Artists only having Insta is only topped by antifascist (and similar: eco, anti-racism etc.) groups only posting on Insta and FB but nowhere else +___+
I also loathe that even if artists have a website chances are above 90% that they're Squarespace so they don't have RSS feeds meaning I'll never see new cool stuff that they might post since I'll never remember going to their site again, but if it would just pop up in my feed reader that would be just too cool, I guess.
Not sure if it would really be an alternative to Insta/Squarespace for creative people but I loooove https://neocities.org/browse (do they have RSS feeds? I need to check).