Fancontent
So, with the death of… every website that had a good interface for art, artists are kind of being pushed back to having to use personal sites for hosting art.
That means, artists, it’s time to put your fanart on your fansite. It’s not going to be the engagement boom of using social media, but at least it’s all there.
A template I recommend is from kmclaude. It creates thumbnails for the images that users can then click to expand to the full size. You can add the names of the piece and a description if you wish.
If you don’t want to use that, you can simply put the images on the page and resize them however works best for you. You might want to put them in a scrollable container, you might want to make comments, it’s all up to you.
It’s best to host your images on the same host as your website, that way they’ll be easier to link and load faster.
For people who are hosting comics, you can use a similar system. However, for a more tailored layout, I recommend checking out Rarebit. The Rarebit template is intended to create a website just for a webcomic, but you can customise it enough that you’ll be able to apply it to your webcomics and keep your existing website layout.
Please note, the archive page works by calling each type of archive in order. So, if you want to remove (for example) the reverse chronological archive, you need to remove this from both archive.html:
<div class="lastfirst">
<h2>"Latest First" Order</h2>
</div>
AND this from comic_archive.js:
writeArchive("lastfirst", 1, maxpg, 0, true,true);
Fanfiction
There is an increased interest in going back to hosting fanfiction on personal websites, and you can definitely do so. You can post them the same way you would meta posts.
There is a lot more focus on fanfiction legality than other kinds of fan creation. A big reason for the previous downfall of fansites was due to legal action from copyright holders, and this is something that continues to stay in the minds of fans when posting fanfiction.
Currently, it seems that copyright holders are more willing to accept fanfiction (and other fan creations) as a positive, as they are essentially free advertising. We’re not looking at as many cease and desist calls, but there is no telling what will happen in the future. Posting to your own website rather than Archive of Our Own (Ao3) means you don’t get the legal protection that Ao3 offers. This might matter. It might never matter. It is a risk. You can decide if you think it is likely to affect the kind of content you are creating and posting.
You can, of course, also post to both sites to mitigate any concerns about only existing fans being able to find your works.
Can I Use This For NSFW (18+)
So, if you’re getting off of social media because of… everything that is currently in place to prevent the distribution of erotic art, you may be thinking this is your chance.
Whether this is true is entirely dependent on who is hosting your website.
Neocities allows erotic content as long as you mark your site as 18+ (which you can do so from your site settings).
Wordpress does not allow erotic content, and is the current parent company of Tumblr.
Any other site you may use to host, you will have to research if you are allowed to display erotic content. Do your research, and back up your website after making changes just in case.