We’re seeing a lot of people talking about abandoning Meta due to their upcoming policies regarding scraping of website data from business-related accounts. We totally understand how most artists will want to avoid having their website content used to train AI – it’s bad enough that everything we post to Meta is already used to train their data servers, right down to images of our faces (which are then being used by organizations like ICE to identify immigrants for deportation) ‒ to have all the stuff we intentionally don’t share on Meta also be used is egregious and offensive.
Having said that, Toronto Dark Arts Market could not have become successful without Meta’s various platforms as a means of promoting our events and our artisans. The following we’ve built here has done more for us than any amount of street postering could have, and it’s way easier on the shoulders. By which I mean, we’re not going anywhere, and our accounts will all remain.
However, to accommodate those of you moving on to other sites, we’ve arranged some alternatives…
First and foremost – we have a newsletter. You can sign up on our website and receive an email every time we update the news page on our website. This includes everything except the vendor profiles associated with each market, so; vendor calls, reminder about upcoming events, etc. Find this on our website’s Contact page.
We’re also on Bluesky, although we’ve not been especially active until now. And we’ve just created accounts on three different social sites – Eh!Social, and Hey.Cafe which are based in Canada but welcome everyone, and Gander, for Canadians only. We are @torontodarkartsmarket on all platforms, including the Meta ones, so please find us where ever you are and give us a follow or hit the Contact page on our website and follow the links.
No matter where you end up, know that we fully intend to continue our support and promotion of small, local, indie, alternative Canadian artisans, artists, and authors, and hope that you will also do the same.