Incredible, 4000 Followers and Counting!

Here we are. I actually crossed 4,000 followers. I still cannot quite believe it. Anyone who read the earlier milestone pieces knows how stunned I have always been by this completely unexpected run of attention. That has not changed.

Getting here has been pretty rocky of late. In the last almost four months a few strange things happened. But lets start with March. Then I got a first image featured. It came as a surprise, and I tasted blood. That is how it feels when something hooks you. The letdown came right behind it. I slowly figured out that the platform, in its present form, has a core problem: visibility for any single piece of work.

A lot of you know what came next. Late April and early May I was part of a small group of users who spoke up about how one-sided the frontpage features had become. Early May I ran the experiment that still gets mentioned sometimes. I got an image featured in just three hours by making it a cross-section of everything that was featured at the time.

And then, only short time after, something happened that I did not expect. I became part of the problem. From mid-May on I had not only Justin's attention but his favor. Features started coming down one after another, and most of you know what that does. Among other things, the follower count explodes if you are still a newbie. More than one person told me the milestone I hit today would not be far off.

In the 2k celebration piece, I already said I did not think that pace would last. I was right. Mid-July there was a pause of nearly two weeks when the features, unlike before (up to 15 new picks a day), barely got replaced. Early August the whole idea was rebuilt. Together with the new "New and upcoming creators" block, a lot more Curated Collections moved onto the frontpage. For about a month now that even includes my "Whispers and Wickedness" collection. Those collections now feed a job bot that, about four times a day, draws a random sample from them and picks a few images that meet set criteria for the features.

Shortly after that bot went live, Justin also took another suggestion of mine and put it in place. Under ordinary conditions no artist has more than two images featured at the same time. The only exceptions are when Justin or Ellie happen to pick one more image on their own, on top of the bot's selection. The results are, in a way, excellent. The frontpage is more varied than it has probably ever been. An old problem comes back with that, though: the perverse incentive to bot your own reactions in order to raise your odds of getting featured, because more popular images in the collections have higher odds to get selected as a feature. In principle, though, the frontpage is now a thoroughly democratic machine.

If that smells like a racket because a lot of curators also drop their own images into their collections, here are two things to keep in mind. First, that is legitimate up to a point, and I do it myself with pieces I think really landed. Second, the bot never picks the curator's own image out of that curator's collection. When "we" still get a feature now and then, it is mostly from other people's collections, and from the fact that Ellie and Justin still pick work themselves from time to time.

Anyway. I like this change. I have said so in plenty of places and I will say it again here. I am no longer part of the problem. I am part of the solution, because I now have my own collection featured on the frontpage.

Once the frontpage stopped getting flooded with my work, the new-follower pace dropped hard. It is back around the growth I saw in early May. That is why today's milestone took a little longer. Fine. It is here, and I am frankly delighted.

What else happened in that stretch? At the 2k celebration I was given a lot of buzz. I put all of it back into circulation shortly afterward as a bounty, to promote my Crystal-Shades LoRA. Net result: pretty lousy. With Krea 2 on the rise, ZIT started sliding into oblivion, and I probably will not get far with my two ZIT LoRAs. So I started teaching myself how to train my own LoRAs here with AI Toolkit and RunPod. I do not have anything ready to publish yet. But that will change soon enough. Then I will see which ideas I want to build that do not already have a thousand solutions sitting around.

And yes. Krea 2 happened. It knocked my whole way of working sideways and pointed it somewhere new. First, I finally have switched to ComfyUI for good. Yes, you can make very good images on 6 GB GPUs. It simply takes a little bit more time than on an RTX 50x0. You can see that in my galleries. I run xFormers, Sage Attention 2, and a workflow I have since refined a lot. I published an early form of it here a few months ago, more or less in the same week when Krea 2 was published. Second, Krea 2 has become the all-round model for me, period. I even have a lean workflow of my own that keeps identity stable across images, which in principle lets me build the datasets I would need for original characters.

Gone are the days when I ran a picture by hand through four different checkpoints and img2img passes in SD reForge until I had wrung the most absurd effects out of it. Gone are the grinding experiments with Regional Prompting and ControlNet until I dropped. Now I build the prompt ideas, then I tell Uncle Grok to turn them into a clean JSON prompt with bbox positioning, and Krea usually gives me exactly what I asked for. For the rare cases that will not land, I designed an img2img workflow that stands in for the old ControlNet days.

There is even more. I now write my own custom nodes for post-processing, with some help from AI. The Fancy Frames you have started seeing around a few of my images are one example.

As usual I want to use the occasion to thank a lot of users who have walked this stretch with me and still do. First among them are the many other curators who keep finding something they like in my pictures and putting those pictures in their collections. There is Justin, who cleared so much of the path to this kind of attention, and Ellie, who does a first-rate job as community manager. Even when we do not always see it, both of them pay close attention to the criticism and the suggestions that come out of this community. They take a lot of those notes and they act on them.

Then there are the real users who decided to follow me and who like the work. I almost have to mention the bot accounts too, the ones that kick off at 2:07 in the morning and like a lot of people's images into the stratosphere. That has been a real new problem since the end of August, because it warps how the work is seen. I will report and block those bots, one after another. And after this celebration is over, I will report the hundreds of bots that "follow me" as well. They are easy money, honestly.

In any case, a sincere thank you as well to everyone who read this piece to the end.

May this keep going for a long time.