Kirke.social: how to create a safe place for artists in the era of digital giants

Kirke.social is a new social network marketplace, still in its beta phase, for entertainment communities of fandoms (the collective community that are fans of a certain book, artist or media), where you can join as a fan or as an artist that can post their art and sell commissions. 

The platform is free for fans and invitation-only for artists, which means that you need to be formally invited through a code, either by the Kirke team or another legitimate artist that is already a member. Why? So the community remains scammer and AI free. 

I got my hands on an invitation a few months back and I have been following the community on TikTok, Discord and the platform itself. The growth and interest in such a place has been positive, with a lot of new members joining daily and being heavily active and interactive with the platform and their socials.

This is why I got in touch with the founder of Kirke, Valentina Todeschi, who told us more about the art community, their wants and needs and what does the marketplace has to offer for them, and for us. 

„As a fan, you can join and follow your favorite artists and collect them in digital cards by following, but soon there are gonna be much more features, like comments, that are on their way. And as an artist, you can use it to set your portfolio, meet new friends, and pretty recently also to sell your commissions,” explains Valentina. 

On the platform, you can set your interactive commission sheet, which is very useful because a lot of artists struggle with having a clean, complete space where they can showcase their prices and art. 

This is not completely new, as there are other platforms with interactive commissions, such as Fivver, VGen or even Deviant.Art, all places commonly known within the art communities. However, Valentina explains that these platforms are now filled with artificial intelligence or, if they have an anti-AI stance, like VGen, they are very hard to join.

For example, the VGen procedure for allowing artists inside their platform and verifying them as proper sellers is tedious and requires you to already have a solid platform and enough followers to certify your authenticity. And although this can be a good thing, the algorithms on other platforms don't always allow artists to reach the required numbers to achieve such a thing. 

„About VGen, we were actually working in parallel. They got to launch before us. And that's good for all the artists who got supported by them. The problem is that we feel it's still too exclusive. There you can join if you can provide an economic value, which is not our mindset. Because you need to be verified, you need to do a certain amount of sales. That's not a requirement for us, because that means only if you can bring money to our platform, you can do money yourself. That's not how we see our place,” says Valentina. 

The process, as explained by the founder, is easy: the fans send the commission request, the artist sees it and accepts or rejects it. If the artist accepts, they set the final pricing, depending on the complexity, and the final delivery date. After that, the fan receives the quotation and all this information, and pays to activate the commission and let the artist know they can start it safely. All the payment is upfront and Kirke freezes it until the moment the artist delivers the commission.

„Right now the commission tool is free for the artists because we don't want anything to stop them from being safe from scammers. We only get 5% from the buyer because of the service of putting them in touch with the artist and the dashboard with the storage of the commission and the protection.”

The team plans to include PayPal in the options for the transaction, but as of the time this interview was taken, they are using Stripe, a similar platform. 

”With Stripe, if the artist breaks the deadline set, then the commissioner can ask for a refund. There are scammers on both sides. It's rare with artists because we all know each other almost one by one. And there is the verification process, but when you're spending up to $400 of money online, it's good to know that you can have them back if you get ghosted.”

Although the marketplace side of the platform seems like it would be the most important feature of Kirke, their priority is creating a safe and healthy community where people with similar hobbies can spend time together and interact freely.

„We feel that everything is getting quite transactional on every platform. And it's always about the money and how much money you can make, how much money you can bring. But you don't need to be a buyer to join this community. You don't have to be a seller to join, either. Because we feel the lack of a place where to have fun. The monetization tool is just because we want to support the artists in every way possible due to all the AI problems and the scam problems.”

Valentina says people have been calling Kirke.social their „cozy place”, joining their Discord and even streaming their drawing process. She says the team is very thankful for their active community and dedicated moderators that supervise the chats, because their platform is just a container, and the key difference is the people they put in it. 

When asked about her message towards the artists, Valentina is encouraging them to stay positive and keep doing what they love. 

„We think that the time of independence and of niches is coming. Because the mainstream is saturated with stories already told and the artists are actually the ones able to know what their audience is gonna like. We think the highest quality will come from you and not from the next billion dollars project.”