Silver Eagle

@SilverEagle

Web Dev, FOSS, Birb

He/they
fursona.directory/@SilverEagle

He/🥚/They, 36, Furry, LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈, Leftist, Open-source Software Developer and Disability/Accessibility Advocate.

Silver Eagle @SilverEagle11/18/2022, 9:17 AM

An exodus...to FurAffinity?!

I've seen a fair number of people in the furry fandom saying they're retreating back to their old standby, FurAffinity, in the wake of what's happening over at Twitter.

Can I...sigh...can I respectfully ask that we don't?

First of all, yes, I realize I have a bias here. Back in 2015, I worked my ass off for months to rewrite FA's code to a more modern version, only for it to all be discarded in the end after a brief payment dispute with their then-parent company, IMVU.

In any case, there are SO many reasons why FA should not be your site of choice moving forward:

It's not just centralized, but locked in: FA intentionally has NO way to bulk export your profile there, limits any programmatic scraping of your own account, and refuses to build any API. This is all designed to keep you from being able to easily leave.
It's not secure: if you were worried by the exodus of Twitter's InfoSec team, you should know FA never had one to begin with. They depend largely on a single developer whose code knowledge is at least 15 years old. There have been many leaks of data, passwords, etc...and everyone who's seen the code (myself included) says it's a nightmare.
It probably doesn't match your value structure: FA's content moderation team has been embroiled in several controversies, many of which suggest they're sympathetic to (or at least not rushing to ban) the right-wing part of the fandom that actively wants to harm LGBTQ+ folks.
Everything that made Twitter fail in two weeks is the story of FA's whole existence: FA is run by a single overconfident, underskilled and insecure guy who keeps those loyal to him in his inner circle, regardless of their competence. The culture is toxic at best, and has chewed up and spit out dozens of talented, passionate folks who really wanted to help the fandom.

I know some of you hate the idea of Mastodon or Cohost. I don't know why, but please don't make FA the only place I can find you or your content. 💖

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in reply to @SilverEagle's post:

Calyo Delphi @dragon-architect11/19/2022, 4:59 AM

Part of the problem, unfortunately, and this goes especially for artists (like me), is that we're forced to push our content where it gets the views and the feedback.

And FurAffinity is pretty much the de facto place to do it for furries. :/

Neither SoFurry nor Weasyl nor InkBunny (yes, I'm going there) have anywhere near the traffic and visibility that FurAffinity has. And writers like me who don't have the spoons to actively maintain multiple galleries on multiple sites each with their own differences and idiosyncracies regarding how I can upload my stories and format the descriptions and and and and....... I'm sorry but I just don't have the spoons for it.

I put my stories where they get the most visibility, and that's all I have the energy for to maintain.

Silver Eagle @SilverEagle11/19/2022, 5:08 AM

I'm not sure if it's still a thing, but I do know that there were, at one point, services like Postybirb that help abstract out that logic for you, so you still only post to one place, but it gets distributed out to many.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that is a critical failing of FA's: they have no interoperability of their own. The only way you can post once and have it also hit FA is if a service can push to it as well as the others. This is, of course, intentional on their part.

I get why you'd continue to use it, certainly. There is a "network effect" that it has that is undeniable. And to some extent I get how you would only have the "spoons" to post in one place. Principles matter to me a lot, though, and on principle alone, having all of your eggs in the FA basket is probably not a good idea for lots of reasons. There have been so, so many people hurt by FA's actions, and it worries me that many artists won't understand the severity of that danger until it actively happens to them.

Calyo Delphi @dragon-architect11/19/2022, 2:46 PM

I do know about Postybirb, but my big problem with it, and the reason I won't use it, is two-fold:

Afaik, it does not support stories. At all. Like, literally not at all. It HAS to support stories, otherwise it's useful for nothing but posting up art I've commissioned or received as gifts. Which makes it not useful to me at all.
It doesn't seem to support longer descriptions, at least in the way that I've seen people using it. It almost encourages short, terse descriptions that add little to nothing of substance to the art it's used to syndicate. This rubs me the wrong way.

As for alternative furry sites, they don't get a clean pass from me, either.

SoFurry's design does not allow me to upload my stories as PDFs. (Granted, NO site lets me upload as epub, and I would much prefer to upload as epub for maximal accessibility). I like to include stuff like an SVG cover with the title and tag list so people know what to expect when they turn the cover. I like my stories to be downloadable and consumable offline. SoFurry literally can not accommodate that by design.

And then there's Weasyl's over-complicated five-tier content rating system that their moderators are unnecessarily asinine about. One of my mates literally got threatened with a suspension for erring on the safe side and rating one of hir stories as more explicit than the moderator thought it should be. I'm not going to put up with that!

InkBunny has a rap sheet a mile long, and only people who've lived under a rock or put their fingers in their ears and sung loudly don't know about the problems most have with that site.

All of this is why I want to build my own website that accommodates my needs, but it's a painfully slow process now as feature creep has necessitated that I build my own CMS engine to back it all up. It's a challenge that I'm excited to embark on, but the adhd executive dysfunction executive is like "NUUUUUUUUUU!!!"

Arilin Thorferra @arilin11/27/2022, 10:00 PM

I like the idea of Cohost (I mean, I'm here, hi!), but as far as I can tell it's almost as locked in as FA is: no APIs, no export, no import, and while there does seem to be per-user RSS feeds, they're virtually undiscoverable. (There's no visible link and they don't even put the correct meta tag in a header, so an RSS reader can't find them; I only found out a few minutes ago because it was mentioned in a support ticket.)

I'm not advocating for Fur Affinity here, to be sure. I'm just not sure why people are latching on to Cohost as quickly as they are. Personally I don't like the UX design, but that may just be a "me" thing. The "isn't this just another proprietary silo" concern doesn't feel like just a me thing, though, and I'm a little bemused that nobody else seems concerned about it, perhaps because it's a proprietary silo that's clearly a labor of love from a tiny team.