It's another complaint about the new update - but wait don't close yet, this isn't going to be about the visual design of the new site, I don't have strong opinions on that.

This is a complaint about site functionality and a trend that's slowly pushing me away from recommending FA as my "main" gallery.

I really have enjoyed all the dunking FA has been doing on Twitter, the state of the bird platform is a highly entertaining comedy of errors and I think the mockery is rightly deserved - but it feels a bit hypocritical to use that momentum to turn around and slap a price on a feature that's been pretty key to some demographics of FA's artist base.

I'm specifically talking about the new megapixel limit.

If you didn't know, prior to this latest update, there was a 1280x1280 image size limit on posts. This limitation is pretty famous on FA because it's not actually real - or it wasn't anyway. If you edited your image and reuploaded the file it would bypass the limit and upload the full res. This feature has existed on the website since I've been here, and it's pretty well known to people that regularly post in resolutions that exceed the limitation.

It seems extremely disingenuous to pretend you are doubling the resolution on the site when the site hasn't really had an image resolution limitation for as long as I can remember. The 1280x1280 check seems like it was there largely to prevent new users who didn't already know about this fake limit from uploading the contents of their digital cameras onto FA without realizing how large digital photos are.

The details of the new limit might be complicated to people that don't understand image sizes (which is probably most artists, I don’t know a single person that measures anything in megapixels), so I'll try to keep it simple and short:

This old stated limit was doubled from 1280x1280 to 3.7 megapixels. This is both a change in the limit size as well as the limit format, but for simplicity this size is about 1920x1920. However, with megapixels if one size is smaller, the other can be bigger.

This limit is actually fine for the majority of artists on the site, most of my images are fine, I rarely exceed this size when posting myself.

The issue is, I definitely do exceed it, and my most popular works almost all exceed it. TF art in general is hit really hard by this change. Because of the way most TF artists format sequences we now have to break up the standard tall/long formats into individual images because they will definitely run up against the new 3.7mp limit.

It's a very personal complaint and I understand that we can and will use workarounds and split images up but one of the reasons I liked FA was that I could drop sequences in viewable resolutions in one long image. Some other sites do force you to break these things up and post images in ways other than you intended them to be viewed. I enjoyed FA being my main site because I could direct people here for the way I intended this stuff to be viewed. Twitter does force you to break stuff up and it's largely considered a horrible website for artists to exclusively curate their galleries (mostly for other reasons, admittedly).

FA's a gallery site with a huge artist focus, they banned AI art because it took the focus away from artists, they still use a gallery system which most social media has abandoned despite it being objectively better for displaying art, their notification system seems simple but every other social media site fails so hard at making this stuff easy to parse for artists to quickly filter through important and unimportant notices, and they tend to be pretty good about this stuff. FA is usually fairly artist focused with the way it does web-design.

This change feels anti-artist to me. In the future if I make another DCBK image, I won't be able to post it here. At least not how it's posted now, how I created it and made it to be viewed.

But just get FA+, right?

Well, that's the thing, I couldn't post DCBK with FA+ either. DCBK would have to be split into at least 5 parts under the new limits, and under FA+ it would still have to be chopped in half.

A lot of my sequences would need to be cut up to fit onto FA today, art I created to be viewed as long single images. I'm not the only one that has this issue, lots of TF artists use this format for a majority of their sequential art - it’s basically the TF artist format. My friend Koopacap says he would have to change most of his art because almost all of it breaks the new format limitation, and since he only posts to FA and Twitter it means he is just going to have to change the way he formats his art. He’ll just avoid posting sequences or make all of his sequences shorter.

This feels highly anti-artist in design, which is why I'm complaining about it, FA hasn't usually done this sort of stuff. From now on I'll need to break up sequences and put a link in the description that says "Because of the posting limitation on FA I had to break this up, feel free to check it out on [this other free furry website that doesn't have image size limitations, this could literally be anywhere because none of the other furry sites I post to have this limit].”

I still like FA, but soon I won’t be able to tell people it’s the best place to view my work.

This change would honestly not hurt so bad if the long-form browsing on FA wasn't so inconvenient. Navigating comics requires a description hack that artists have to manually comment into every post, and is still an extremely bad way to navigate comic pages. Hell, the popularity of the current sequence style may have evolved from this horrible sequence/comic navigation problem. You could post individual steps but why not learn how to do big single comic pages and so people don’t miss pages, because the site doesn't support comics or long form browsing at all.

I don't know what the solution is, I just felt I had an issue with this change. It's not very realistic to expect a site to cater to my niche style of presenting art, and I don't expect this to alter any plans, but I wanted to say something.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

EDIT: Final thought, this wouldn't feel so bad if the actual storage issue, file sizes, was the target. If storage space was the issue and supporting FA+ was supporting the servers, I could get behind that. This is image dimension limits though. The file size limits are the same. The images are the same size as they were on the server, this doesn't feel like saving servers to me.

It feels like FA+ needed something to carve out of what we had previously and sell it back to us. That feels just as scummy to me and Elon and this twitter blue checkmark status. That's why this all feels so hypocritical.