The Philosophy Behind MyArtverse

It's been several weeks since I last pushed changes to the project—and now it's been making some progress this year as Jason and I work on and off periodically. So I'll go more on how the usual commissioning process by artists, and the philosophy behind the platform!

What is MyArtverse?

MyArtverse is an art-driven platform, where users can commission from an artist, buy or bid on an "adoptable", and more. Our mission is to streamline the process of commissioning a digital art piece as frictionless as possible.

It's a passionate project that both Jason and I, as well as other contributors, have been working on since March 2022, and we have recruited new people ever since! It was initially a way to store characters and their artworks, photos from conventions, ref sheets, etc.

Why the name change?

Long story short, we had to change the name from "MyFursona" to "MyArtverse" at the beginning of this year. When Jason got a message back from Kovu, we knew we needed to change the name of our platform to something else.

I proposed the names "Artverse", "Artcade", and "OCverse"; with the last one already taken from a small Japanese company. I had to google these names just as a good measure that they were not taken or had some level of recognition. For Artverse in particular, it was an abandoned NFT project that was active until 2022 on X. Since it was abandoned, I'd figured to use the "Artverse" name as a suitable replacement. I brought these names to Jason and chose the "Artverse" name.

You may ask, "But why is it called MyArtverse?"; Jason wanted to preserve the "My" prefix during the initial development of the project and to keep the "MySpace" namesake, so he kept it in. But it's close enough to be indistinguishable from Kovu's MyFursona project back in 2008. Though, I highly doubt that the name won't be around for a while and the average consumers would point out about the name and we'll end up simplifying it, but I digress.

A common process when commissioning art

Just to give a better understanding of how you would commission an artist, here's a generalized process: if you want to commission an artist, you retroactively look for art commissions or usually stumble upon them on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, or even Etsy!

The first thing you'll do is to check if they're open for commissions at this time—and if they are open, awesome! Next, you look at their listings and their guidelines for commissioning a specific art piece, it's commonly referred to as "terms of service" and is usually stated on the listing's description, or a link from a Caard website or a price sheet if you're on places such as X, DeviantArt, and FurAffinity. If you search for their social links or a Linktree, you might even find a Trello board where they organize ongoing commission queues.

Once you decide on what type of art piece you want to commission, you either reach them out through DMs, some artists may be explicit on what platforms you'll be reaching them out from (i.e. Telegram or Discord). If the payment is settled, the wait window may vary from artist to artist, but an average wait window is from several hours to a few days. You're all done once the artist gives you the final product!

A YouTuber and Twitch streamer, BetaEtaDelota, made a detailed video that tackles the basics and etiquette when commissioning an artist:

MyArtverse's philosophy

As mentioned from the beginning, MyArtverse's mission is to make the process of not just commissioning art but to manage character adoptions as minimal and frictionless as possible.

The general idea of MyArtverse is to take the burden of maintaining a lot of third-party services and tools such as Trello and Caard and consolidate them into one platform that streamlines the entire process.

We also want to give artists a lot of freedom and make a simple site generator like Caard, Wix, or Weebly along with it! And to include a Kanban-like board feature like Trello to manage commissions and trades—which is being delivered through a modern user interface. For developers, we're also providing a flexible API as well!

The project is open source too! We want to have a level of transparency and not become a proprietary project and keep the whole source code to ourselves behind closed doors. We want to have our code open to the public for other intrigued developers to contribute and grow on top of other people's fixes and track issues.

We also want to keep our codebase a certain level of freedom. Previously, the website was initially under the MIT license but I changed it to the Apache 2.0 license to be more strict on what changes are proposed before they are approved and cover a patent and copyright grant on our code.

Comparisons

There are platforms like commiss.io that accomplish this already, but compared to MyArtverse, it's a bit lackluster and only focuses on the commissioning aspect. A good example is Itaku, which was launched in 2017 until it got traction last year and has a growing user base, which also has a commissioning feature.

But the one thing I noticed about most furry sites I've come across is the outdated UI, be it utilizing something like Bootstrap or pure CSS, and the use of dated technologies like PHP and Ruby on Rails—for the record, I'm not saying that these technologies themselves are bad! But I'm specifically pointing out the older version such as PHP 5, which is still being used on some legacy sites, that now pose a security vulnerability.

While some might argue that it's all about the "experience" and all that, I think a clean, snazzy UI should be paired with user experience as well! One example that executes modern UI is FurTrack! Launched in 2019, FurTrack has a modern and decent UI that's more pleasing to the eye compared to the more popular furry websites.

Conclusion

The whole gist of MyArtverse is that we make the process of commissioning an artist a breeze! But despite the sheer size of the project, this is still a hobby project, as we periodically go on and off working on it. The funding for this project is held off until we have a working end product.

We'll focus mainly on the commissioning part of the project first as a test drive, and if it succeeds, we'll continue to implement more promising features before we finally release it to the public!