Since a lot of community artists lean on Twitter as a primary outlet, has there been any discussion about how to handle it if the service goes down?
Not just “where will the artists go, how will their followers find them?”
I don’t know whether there has been discussion, but that doesn’t sound like something pertaining to how Derpibooru operates. Maybe ask in
Art Chat?
On the Derpibooru side of things, users can search for posts under an artist tag and exclude ones with “*twitter.com*” in the source field, potentially finding links to other places the artists posts. And, for artist tags that have links in their descriptions, those can get updated as people find them.
but also just “how do we automate tagging all these images with Dead Source?”
Like TSP said, it’s doable. But the site has never auto-tagged Dead Source as far as I know. No automated process visits source links and waits for a 404, for example. And besides, if Twitter dies, I think it’s something people will know about and can figure that a link reading “twitter.com” won’t work.
Of course, I do understand the value of accurate tagging, but also consider that artists may already upload to multiple sites and would have alternate sources as links in the description - it would be better, then, to swap out the source link to to the other, still-working one instead of leaving it as Twitter and tagging it dead. Also possible would be to see if it’s on archive.org - so yeah, auto-tagging a dead website as “dead source” doesn’t seem productive, to me.
