remember furry life online? if you don't, a brief summary is that it was a furry art website that briefly caught on when furaffinity made a few back-to-back questionable decisions around summer 2020, most notably their dodgy record when it came to getting rid of zoophiles. it briefly picked up at the lead of a bunch of fatfur artists, and literally, for a brief moment, furry life online had the chance of the century to do what most art sites tried and failed to do--actually exceed furaffinity. all the furry life online admins had to do was to continue to enforce the pre-existing rules that people found fair, and maintain the site as a whole.
...so, instead, furry life online's owners immediately waffled about changing what they constitute as zoophilia. in addition, their age rating metrics changed overnight to include truly baffling things such as "a swear is immediately mature, 5 swears is an adult", and most infamous of all, the spine test: whether or not a character was considered a feral animal hinged entirely on the verticality of the spine, of all things. this naturally broke when it came to things like taurs or characters that are merely hunchbacks. for some godforsaken, pokemon characters were instantly treated as zoophilia no matter what. this culminated in the absolutely gobsmacking addition of the "waist test": basically, if a character's waist was too large proportional to their body, the image was immediately mature or adult, no ifs, ands, or buts.
and with one fell swoop, practically overnight, furry life online lost all of its userbase--starting with the very people who brought everyone to it, and working its way from there--meanwhile furaffinity had started to clamp down on the very issues people were leaving it over, so many users just. moved back to it. furry life online was a ghost town for approximately a year and a half before shutting down at some point in the summer of 2021. tellingly, nowhere can we find an exact date of closure. nobody even cared to say when it died.
furry life online had gone from a site that had the chance to usurp one of the greatest sites in a specific niche, and then when presented with that chance, did everything to throw it all away, shoo away the very people bringing new blood in, and vanished without a trace, forgotten, as the site it was trying to replace only asserted itself even harder in the coming years.
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this post is about cohost's (mis)handling of rising harassment against transfems.