more and more work is being lost every day and it really fuckin bums me out
so many artists in the last decade have gone twitter-exclusive with their work, which was always an incredibly stupid idea because twitter is dogshit for discoverability and archival and actually finding a person's art in between all the image macros in their media tab, and it destroys the quality of anything posted there ensuring nobody ever sees your work in its original detail. and of course now it's seeming like if your gallery's on twitter then pretty soon nobody will ever be able to see it again
i advocated for FA for years because, despite being a fuckin garbage website lacking crucial features, it was a stable centralized platform, where anything you posted would remain findable and viewable for years and years without algorithms or quality adulteration. i even had some hope that they were on the side of artists when they announced their policy on ai-generated images. then they decided to impose a completely pointless resolution cap, destroying one of the good things they had going; and then take a shotgun to their 2 decades of art history and banish any artists who draw cute porn. some of those people will take their galleries elsewhere but countless amounts of art are going to be lost permanently because the account owners are no longer active or won't backport their entire galleries to new sites. completely thoughtless, pointless destruction of the most extensive art museum furry has, to sate the people who want the fandom to become sanitized and marketable and "family-friendly" in every facet
more and more artists these days are moving to telegram channels as their primary and sometimes only place to post art, which first off just fucking sucks because Literally All Of Us are sick of having to join two thousand servers for every single thing these days. but it also means their work is now completely gated off and undiscoverable and its continued existence relies on the continued existence of one chat channel, and it also means (much like twitter) that their work will all be smooshed down into a 6-quality jpeg because there is no way the vast majority of them are using the "upload as file" option
so many artists just... don't seem to care about preserving their work or ensuring people years down the line will be able to find and view it. old galleries will die and they will just let it vanish into the wind. and like i get it to an extent. your older work is stuff you're usually not as proud of, it's stuff you feel no longer represents you and your art, sometimes there's stuff you have valid personal reasons not to want to keep available to the public. and backporting a whole gallery is a huge pain, i didn't import everything to my itaku because it would've taken fucking forever and been a huge hassle, and my gallery is not even that extensive because i never draw more than a half dozen times a year. but all my old stuff is still present on weasyl, and if something were to happen to that site i would at the very least toss it in a zip file and make it available somewhere. because i don't know what random old piece in my gallery might mean something to somebody, in the past or in the future, and i want them to be able to find it. because that stuff serves as a record of my journey as an artist and a person. because there's value in preserving the past. i just wish more artists would understand that and take it seriously
