very funny of FA to shoot themselves in the foot right after my last journal being like "don't worry guys i'm not going anywhere"

FA has had 3 things going for it for years now: the largest userbase thanks to inertia, no algorithm, and the ability to post original-quality/resolution images (albeit via a janky exploit) so naturally they decided to go ahead and knock out one of those pillars out of the blue and tout it as an upgrade no less. and the monumental lack of self-awareness to dedicate half the announcement to "hehe here's our funny parody blue checkmark feature where you can pay money for something that does nothing! :)" while simultaneously making it so now you have to pay money to still have reduced functionality compared to before (4k limit vs No Resolution Limit Whatsoever) is, honestly comedy gold

as a heads up to FA's staff though: people will be much more willing to pay you guys money if you implement fucking a single one of the basic features that this site has been lacking for the last decade or more (i.e. content filtering/blacklisting, blocking that fuckin does anything, custom thumbnails, better support for non-image media, etc) rather than making an existing feature worse and charging money for it. going "now resolution is capped, for literally no reason since there's already a filesize limit!" while search is still borderline unusable because there's no way to filter out low-effort sfm/mspaint shit or tags/artists you don't want to see is a real slap in the face

i'll still be posting here for the time being but i am gonna look into other options that are better for publicly archiving original quality work. (and maybe like, have custom thumbnails and multi-image submissions so i don't have to have a dropbox link in the description for every image with kink alts!) itaku seems kinda promising but atm it seems to constantly be under intense load that makes the site impossible to use, and people have also been getting mad at them frequently for being weird about their maturity ratings. maybe 2023 will be the year of returning to weasyl lol. ultimately FA probably will still be the place most people see my stuff and even if i have links to originals in the description i know most people probably won't bother and will just download directly from FA, which frustrates me to no end!

honestly though i'm less worried about my own art, since i rarely post and have a very small following. i'm more concerned about the impact that any fuckup FA makes will have on its userbase. good artists have been slowly leaking away over the years, mainly retreating to places like twitter where art has a finite shelf life and gets crunched into jpeg dust, or telegram channels that aren't publicly accessible and also crumple your art up into a ball and dunk it in the toilet before delivering it to viewers, and every time FA manages to make things worse it's gonna be the last straw for more people. FA and twitter have been the main hubs for furry art for some years now, and with people still leaving the latter in droves and the former now choosing to make one of the more boneheaded decisions in a long proud legacy of boneheaded decisions, i worry the furry art world is gonna be sinking into a fragmented dark age where finding new content and keeping up with artists you like is going to be a whole lot more difficult

i'd like to hope that i'm wrong, and catastrophizing over nothing, but i guess time will tell. anyway i'm getting the hell offline for a while because the neverending torrent of shit in the online space this month is really wearing down my sanity lol