FA+
Shop
My furry gallery recommendations
3 years ago
After FurAffinity started doing its FurAffinity thing in 2018 or so -- I signed up for many, many different galleries! I was worried about being permanently banned and did not want to lose all of my friends. I have since developed an appreciation for which galleries are good and which ones aren't. Now that Twitter is sort of doing the whole Twitter thing, maybe people are wondering where to migrate to and gosh, do I have some advice for you!
My short answer is that e621 is the best choice for a gallery (they have absolutely ridiculous features), and InkBunny is the best choice for a community (they are the least restrictive, and offer many features other galleries lack). FurAffinity has issues with heavy-handed moderation and the lack of a keyword blocklist (you will either be mentally scarred by paddington bear vomit art -- or suspended when someone discovers your paddington bear vomit art.) Newgrounds has less traffic but a surprisingly healthy furry/rule34 community.
There are a few other contenders which would be nice if they only had more traffic! I really have nothing negative to say about SoFurry or ArtConomy except that they are not popular. Why aren't they popular? Maybe you should open a SoFurry account so the world can make more sense.
If you'd like to see a more detailed breakdown you can read my notes below.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ e621
++ extraordinary keyword/filtering/sorting abilities, e.g "bowser -female -animation date:month order:random"
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ community-driven tags alleviate the burden on submitters
++ strict unambiguous tags makes it easy to filter your art
++ images are linked to other galleries
++ supports localization of dialog (japanese/english translations)
+ friendly moderators and a highly active discord
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- lacking typical community features, no journals, no watchers
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ inkbunny
++ front page of keyword-blacklisted popular images increases discoverability of new artists
+ allows most uploads (except for humans)
+ highly active community
+ robust community-driven keywords; users can suggest keywords which you can accept/reject
+ supports multi-image submissions for comics or alternate versions
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- reputation as a repository for underage material
-- neglectful moderators, often taking 6-12 months to respond to a ticket
⭐⭐⭐⭐ furaffinity
++ incredibly responsive moderation team, i have submitted many trouble tickets which are always resolved within 24 hours
++ extremely active community
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
- front page is dominated by advertisements, reminders, YCHes, commission notices
- no keyword blocklist
-- suspends you for linking to other galleries
⭐⭐⭐⭐ newgrounds
++ you can still play monster mind on newgrounds via the newgrounds player
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
+ surprisingly active furry/rule34 community
+ lenient takedown policy; offending art is deleted but there is no further punishment
- their brutally honest five-star rating system is a real blow to morale
⭐⭐⭐ twitter
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ extremely active community, especially for images which go viral
- strict character limit on text posts
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- no keywords, cannot search images by content
-- cannot block offensive content by keyword/subject matter. god help you if you enjoy a furry artist who also posts RL nudes
-- overall abysmal browsing experience, worst than all other gallery sites including buggy sites still in beta
⭐⭐⭐ furrynetwork
- cannot reupload submissions
- dead community
⭐⭐⭐ pixiv
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
+ responsive moderators
-- terrible keywords; many ambiguous/conflicting keywords and a ten keyword limit
-- lacking standard community features, no journals, no social links
-- all NSFW images must be censored
-- charges a monthly fee for keyword blocklists
-- charges a monthly fee to sort search results
⭐⭐⭐ sofurry
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- dead community
⭐⭐ deviantart
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
- no NSFW material
⭐⭐ itaku
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
- cannot reupload submissions
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
-- just opened in 2020; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community
⭐⭐ artconomy
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
-- just opened in 2018; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community
⭐ pillowfort
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
- other users' NSFW material is blocked by default, but this is not made clear through their UI
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- everything is broken; attempting to view notifications or search for art results in long wait times or errors
-- completely dead community
⭐ weasyl
-- bans/suspends users with no reasons given, not even specifying which characters violated a rule
-- absurdly unresponsive moderators who have literally never responded to a single ticket or inquiry
-- completely dead community
My short answer is that e621 is the best choice for a gallery (they have absolutely ridiculous features), and InkBunny is the best choice for a community (they are the least restrictive, and offer many features other galleries lack). FurAffinity has issues with heavy-handed moderation and the lack of a keyword blocklist (you will either be mentally scarred by paddington bear vomit art -- or suspended when someone discovers your paddington bear vomit art.) Newgrounds has less traffic but a surprisingly healthy furry/rule34 community.
There are a few other contenders which would be nice if they only had more traffic! I really have nothing negative to say about SoFurry or ArtConomy except that they are not popular. Why aren't they popular? Maybe you should open a SoFurry account so the world can make more sense.
If you'd like to see a more detailed breakdown you can read my notes below.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ e621
++ extraordinary keyword/filtering/sorting abilities, e.g "bowser -female -animation date:month order:random"
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ community-driven tags alleviate the burden on submitters
++ strict unambiguous tags makes it easy to filter your art
++ images are linked to other galleries
++ supports localization of dialog (japanese/english translations)
+ friendly moderators and a highly active discord
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- lacking typical community features, no journals, no watchers
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ inkbunny
++ front page of keyword-blacklisted popular images increases discoverability of new artists
+ allows most uploads (except for humans)
+ highly active community
+ robust community-driven keywords; users can suggest keywords which you can accept/reject
+ supports multi-image submissions for comics or alternate versions
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- reputation as a repository for underage material
-- neglectful moderators, often taking 6-12 months to respond to a ticket
⭐⭐⭐⭐ furaffinity
++ incredibly responsive moderation team, i have submitted many trouble tickets which are always resolved within 24 hours
++ extremely active community
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
- front page is dominated by advertisements, reminders, YCHes, commission notices
- no keyword blocklist
-- suspends you for linking to other galleries
⭐⭐⭐⭐ newgrounds
++ you can still play monster mind on newgrounds via the newgrounds player
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
+ surprisingly active furry/rule34 community
+ lenient takedown policy; offending art is deleted but there is no further punishment
- their brutally honest five-star rating system is a real blow to morale
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ extremely active community, especially for images which go viral
- strict character limit on text posts
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- no keywords, cannot search images by content
-- cannot block offensive content by keyword/subject matter. god help you if you enjoy a furry artist who also posts RL nudes
-- overall abysmal browsing experience, worst than all other gallery sites including buggy sites still in beta
⭐⭐⭐ furrynetwork
- cannot reupload submissions
- dead community
⭐⭐⭐ pixiv
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
+ responsive moderators
-- terrible keywords; many ambiguous/conflicting keywords and a ten keyword limit
-- lacking standard community features, no journals, no social links
-- all NSFW images must be censored
-- charges a monthly fee for keyword blocklists
-- charges a monthly fee to sort search results
⭐⭐⭐ sofurry
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- dead community
⭐⭐ deviantart
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
- no NSFW material
⭐⭐ itaku
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
- cannot reupload submissions
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
-- just opened in 2020; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community
⭐⭐ artconomy
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
-- just opened in 2018; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community
⭐ pillowfort
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
- other users' NSFW material is blocked by default, but this is not made clear through their UI
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- everything is broken; attempting to view notifications or search for art results in long wait times or errors
-- completely dead community
⭐ weasyl
-- bans/suspends users with no reasons given, not even specifying which characters violated a rule
-- absurdly unresponsive moderators who have literally never responded to a single ticket or inquiry
-- completely dead community
First, it's designed for the kind of people who posted large masses of context-free images to the furry art newsgroups back in the day. This means that the tagging rules are almost all based on ignoring anything outside of that one image, (resulting in things like most images of chakats being tagged "female" because you can't use the "herm" tag unless it's all visible in that image).
Second, it has a boatload of image detail tags that are pretty much useless for anything but trying to find a specific image. Except that their use is so inconsistent, (they often are omitted even when they apply to the main subject but they also are often used because they apply to some minor detail in the background).
I was told my submission contained underage content (which it didn't) and then was told that the moderator made a mistake and assumed I uploaded the same image to both sites. ...That's strange... What's the story there? They were on FurAffinity and saw a picture, "Hey! There's an empty gap at the top of the page here!" and went to other sites, and then clicked back to FA to ban me?
They unsuspended me citing administrator error, they didn't realize the pictures were different. But, it's clear they have a script which detects when you're linking offsite and alerts administrators. I no longer link to other sites.
Pixiv is fine! I'm not mad at them for running their site this way. But other sites have more to offer
The point about "popular artists" is difficult for me to consider fairly since I watch whoever's art I like. When you follow someone, you get a pane appear with "Similar artists" with some of their pieces shown to see if you wanna follow them as well. Maybe that shows most popular artists of the type you just followed?
I do know tho they have their own monetization systems - Fanbox which is a patreon-like option and Skeb which is like a commission board? Another part I can't judge to a full extent since I don't make a living off of art and even here I get commissioned like once a year (I do not actively advertise either lol).
The more aggressive "Sorry, you can't reupload images unless you pay us $5" "Sorry, you can't sort your search results unless you pay us $5" is frustrating and baffling. It doesn't feel like a gallery site, it feels like I'm playing Clash Of Clans or one of those bullshit mobile games. Or even just more basic stuff like -- I'll look at my pictures and see a comment someone left 4 years ago and I'm like, huh!! Sure would be cool if there was a place which told you when you got new comments, so you could reply to them... I don't know if it's absent or if it just costs money but either way man, Pixiv is just lacking a lot of absurdly basic features for me
Totally agree on the different audience though, and I get a weird sense of pride censoring my art and translating the tags. It helps me remember my katakana!
Altough there's some things missing here and there, such as "No multi-uploading images. Everything must be one by one" for some such as FA. Not counting Postybirb, for example, I dont use it, yet.
And also specifically for e621 "The community can be a bit...harsh" as in, my first days on e621 people disliked the hell out of my stuff cause 'ferals with humanoid penises?" and such, but I never paid much attention to that. And that can really happen anywhere, but e621 seems to be more frequent with it.
I remembered e621 being harsh towards me as well, and the same was true for Newgrounds. "IF YOUR ART IS GAY, PUT GAY IN THE TITLE!!! WTFFF" i was like. wow! okay! newgrounds!! but they mellowed out, and honestly the people who are rude towards me on e621 get downvoted into oblivion which feels good. (I even got downvoted into oblivion once when I was self deprecating about my own art!! I was so conflicted but it felt good for them to stick up for me 😅)
And yeah, same. But well, my old art has positive votes so I'm still okay with the website, but I kinda refuse to upload anything myself, but I dont mind others doing so.
I really hope to see Itaku take off. I just got started on there so I haven't had the chance to fully try out everything it offers (or alternatively, run into issues that may exist), but at first glance it seems pretty awesome with a lot of artist-oriented features I haven't seen anywhere else. There's not much activity on there right now but perhaps as more artists move there that'll change. :>
I hope nobody interprets the low scores for Itaku or ArtConomy as me saying "These sites suck!!" It is just -- I have been active on ArtConomy for two months, I have one watcher. It's not really a subjective thing, there is just nobody using the site
Fingers crossed we'll start seeing more people on Itaku. For now, you've got one more follower on there 👌✨
Honestly I just went through e621 and found all of my art tagged as "cub" and removed a lot of it from FA. It's hard as an artist to be impartial about how our art is perceived by a layperson. I'm kind of glad e621 just says "nah looks like cub" and I can be done with it. Helps me out but to each their own
I am pretty easy to please as far as galleries. I want to like -- glance through 30-40 thumbnails of someone's art and be like "Ooh Birdo!" ...Then I want to search to find their other Birdo art. And maybe they'll have a Birdo comic and I'll want to go back to page 1 of it and read the whole thing. These are all like -- pretty elementary things you either literally can't do on Twitter, or you technically can but it requires 45 minutes of scrolling. August 2022... July 2022... June 2022... Oh there's one, I found it!! Okay, May 2022... (sigh)
I think that Twitter/Tumblr is great if you perceive your art as like -- a kleenex that you sneeze into and then throw into the garbage? But I sort of have just BARELY more pride than that. Not much but... a little more!
on the topic of e6 another note I'm surprised I haven't received flack for commenting "we should shame this character for having a cut dick" on a SPH focused pic
Yeah I wanna say like... the first 30-60 days that Tumblr shut down, Newgrounds was really hostile towards me -- all my pictures were rated like 1.5/5 with people complaining about my gay art, and how I'm obligated to put "WARNING: GAY" in the title in all caps so they don't click it by mistake
Since then it's just been incredibly welcoming, I get a few comments every week and they're all very polite or at worst -- memey, which I get a kick out of 😀 i like jokes! I just don't love homophobia
...are you sure they didn't add it until recently??
Maybe umm, I don't know! Sorry I guess we just remember differently. At least we can (I hope) agree how the site works now
As though having 80% of people look at their gallery and say "dude that looks orange" and the artist is like "no i drew it! it's red! RED!!!" somehow, that's a feature to them. In a way I get it -- the idea of ownership, control, and having the final say. ...But man, there's one of me and 20,000 of you guys. If I say this dude is red and 20,000 of you think it's orange, I'll trust your judgment over my own. I'm a dumbass, I don't always know what I drew
On SoFurry, I receive 0-1 comments per week. Most of my pictures get about 50 views and 3 favorites. If they are REALLY popular, they get about 80 views and 7 favorites.
On NewGrounds, I receive 5 comments per week. Most of my pictures get about 200 views and 7 favorites. If they are REALLY popular, they get about 500 views and 13 favorites.
On FurAffinity, I receive 50 comments per week. Most of my pictures get about 500 views and 120 favorites. If they are REALLY popular, they get about 1,000 views and 250 favorites.
I am not trying to be mean or bash SoFurry for not having a community or anything like that -- but objectively, getting a comment every 2 weeks is less than I experience at InkBunny, FurAffinity, e621, Twitter, Newgrounds, or surprisingly even Pixiv. (I have a few Pixiv followers who leave little emoji comments on my pictures sometimes.)
e621 is fantastic for being the most thorough and comprehensive art database around, but it has next to zero way of letting you discern yourself as anything more than a name credited in an image.
The unfortunate thing is that making the perfect art gallery site is only half the equation, the other half is actually convincing people to start using it!! Which always falls into a catch 22 where you need people to start using it, but people won't start using it until there's enough people using it...!
-NFT support
-AI art spam
-Stole every users art to feed to an AI
-Suggested they'll be doing web3 crap
-Poor management
-Artists leaving on mass.
E6 is the best to search for art with the very indepth tagging and blacklist system and leave shiposty comments, but the moderation is very hit-or-miss (I recall reporting a comment where the mod said it was fine, only to have another mod look at it and perma ban the person for it). There's also been A LOT of drama about character tagging (trans vs intersex, dubious age and things like that) and some other brain-melting situations.
FA is the best for following artists you already know and get into contact with them (journals, commissions, etc.) Searching / browsing however ? TERRIBLE. Tagging is basically non-existent and you can't filter out tags for stuff you don't want to see. Also still no video support, even after flash died almost 2 years ago, the only way to post animated stuff with audio ... for silent stuff there's still .GIFs but even then that file format is fairly bad when it comes to quality, and you have to either re-upload a gif for it to be animated or use a browser extension to do that for you (learned that the hard way)
Pixiv I only really used for a select few artists, but while it has better tagging than FA, it is hosted in Japan and because of that requires my most hated thing in anything lewd : censorship !
The last one is Twitter but frankly, just don't use it, have an account to look at nsfw stuff you can find from the other websites I talked about above and leave that dumpster-fire alone. And for the surprisingly high amount of artists that only post on there, have a browser plugin that can download all their uploads. Done, don't touch that website again for the hour to prevent infections.
It's baffling that artists would choose to ONLY post to twitter -- but i guess it makes sense if you view tags as a weapon, or the search tool as a vulnerability. If your goal is for your gallery to be something where like -- you can dig back and find what you want, if you know EXACTLY where it is, but it's completely unsearchable and useless, then Twitter is probably great!
But E6 have an arbitrary "You're art isn't good enough" rule.
Had some of my relatively recent works not approved for the site because a mod didn't think it was up to their quality standard
While art from literally 8-10 years ago of mine is still up.
It doesn't help that it seems like most of the community is for female stuff, so if you're like me and not interested in girls, you're gonna have a hard time finding what you're into.
i actually meant to put a minus for newgrounds because of their 12 keyword limit -- i recorded it in the original version of the spreadsheet but OpenOffice Calc crashed three times (!?) and I forgot to add it when rewriting the spreadsheet in Google Sheets
most of the community is for female human stuff, so i have literally never found any porn on newgrounds which i liked :( but -- a few people have found mine!!
- e621: When I find an artist I really like, I usually like to see *all* of their stuff (and not just what's been curated and deemed as "good enough for e6"), but not everything actually ends up here (and it feels like old stuff sometimes just gets deleted by random, and there also isn't a publicly browsable archive of deleted stuff like there is for FA on g6jy5jkx466lrqojcngbnksugrcfxsl562bzuikrka5rv7srgguqbjid.onion/fa/ ).
- e621: There really needs to be a system for watching queries and having a screen where all new posts from queries you watch automatically show up, so you can not only watch your favorite artists, but even your favorite subjects, too
- twitter: It's not just horrible for searching, but also for using the service anonymously. It's impossible to view NSFW without an account (understandable), but it's also impossible to *create* an account without giving them your phone number (and that's something I've never given any website ever, be it NSFW, SFW, or whatever, so that's out of the question for me due to privacy concerns)
- Pixiv: doesn't allow browsing via TOR for at least 5 years now; always gives 403
- sofurry: also doesn't allow browsing via TOR (actually works for account-pages (probably because those are sub-domains), but not for the main page, so no way to login/register or browse normally, which also means SFW-only for me)
- weasyl: I really don't understand this site: I'm able to create an account and start following people (it says so on my profile), but when I click on "inbox" I'm told "Your account has to be verified to do that" (so either weasyl doesn't have a watch system like FA and IB, or I'm misunderstanding what "following" is *meant* to do, or I'm just not allowed to see when people I'm following upload stuff??? How does that make sense?)
On a more positive note:
- Inkbunny: Since you can easily blacklist certain keywords site-wide, combined with the community-driven keywords, it's fairly easy to stay clear of... *the stigma*
Edit: Oh boy: I just noticed this thread is *old* -- sorry for the necromancy; though this was posted recented due to the current on-going crisis (oops)