Many digital artists have always been very very protective about how much they allow others to share their work. That’s reasonable: when you make something available online, it might end up being used in ways you wouldn’t approve of. And of course, pride plays a role too. It’s possible that you don’t want you work to be devoid of context, such as an easy way to find your online space (like your account on a social media platform, or anything that clearly shows your autorship). It pains me every time I see someone on Discord uploading a drawing that they didn’t make, without even providing the name of the artist. I think, however, that there are more ways than the obvious ones to share what you’ve liked while being respectful to its creator. And they can be applied on static sites like Neocities’, too.

Automatic previews are your friends

So, how should we do it? If possible, simply by sharing links, of course! Here’s the thing: if the link you pasted leads to any halfway decently designed platform while you’re sending it on another halfway decently designed platform, a “preview” will be generated. That’s thanks to the Twitter Cards and Open Graph protocols. If the HTML of a shared page contains the proper meta tags, a client like Telegram, Bluesky or anything else can use the already specified information to display it on screen, like the title, the image, or even a media player if you shared audio or video (although this is very unusual).

On a side note, Neocities injects its own OpenGraph tags if they haven’t been included on the page by its owner, including a screenshot on the fly, but only if the requester is a bot. And sites like Instagram and X don’t share theirs at all with certain platforms or might be picky about it. There are a few obvious reasons for this (content flagged as spam or NSFW) but in many cases no one seems to know why. Forget about sharing Instagrams posts on Telegram, it will never work!

If you see an artist you like on Neocities, consider telling them to properly support Twitter Cards and OpenGraph if they’re okay with it.

What about rendering them on my static site?

But alas, X Cards and Open Graph don’t work everywhere we paste a link on, even when the necessary tags are included in the page we want to share. Neocities will serve the HTML files exactly as they were uploaded, hence the static in static web hosting. But this made me realize I don’t need to depend on those protocols.

You see, there’s nothing special about how a client renders those HTML tags into something graphical. When it happens on somewhere like Bluesky, Bluesky simply requests the page, checks the tags, and if it’s possible it builds the HTML structure with the necessary details. You can do this manually, any way you want. Or you could do something very similar, without using protocols made for machines.

My favorites section was built around that concept. I wanted to share the art I loved, with no ornamental purpose, and in a way that motivates people to take the extra step to check out the original source. So I made what’s basically a grid of low-resolution thumbnails that link to wherever any of the “original” versions are (an artist might post their artwork on several places.) I think more people should do exactly this.

Keep in mind, however, that some artists don’t want their work to “escape” the platform they post on at all. On Bluesky, some of them have opted to disable the option for their content to be visible unless you’re logged in, which disables the protocols that made the previews I’ve mentioned possible. If it’s obvious they want to keep this level of control on their art, respect their wishes.

At the end of the day, there are no hard rules that indicate how we should share digital art. Unless we solely rely on copyright laws, of course, that make even the fanart you like, illegal. What a disaster.