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The big FA AUP kerfuffle
2 years ago
So I'm not going to post a hot take about the latest FA AUP update. I've been reading a lot of user journals talking about it, I understand their concern, I'm more or less at the stage of, "okay, so what's the next step?"
See the thing is that a long time ago, there was a kerfuffle here on FA, and I completely read the room wrong. I really thought at the time that there was going to be momentum to move on to other places, and at the time there was only really one contender - the bunny site. So I made my profile there, posted my stories, and set up things like blacklisting a bunch of tags and so forth. And with features like that and a search (yes IB had a search years before FA did), I thought that IB was eventually going to be where people eventually settled. It had better management as far as I could tell, much better features and the site functioned much better. And yes I thought that people valuing artistic freedom rather than not having to deal with things that made them grimace was going to win out.
Boy was I wrong. Very, very wrong.
I think I used the site in parallel to FA for about a month before logging out and not going back. It's just...that reputation for being //the// site for...//that//. And while I can and do fully partition the things people engage in for fantasy, from what they are as a person, I still never really felt comfortable when I was on the site. Or in more direct words - I don't judge you or others if you engaged in that fantasy stuff so long as it stayed as fantasy, it's just not my cup of tea, and I didn't feel comfortable being in the epicenter of it.
Eventually Weazyl came along. I made an account there (with considerably more enthusiasm) but I never really stayed because there wasn't really a mass migration like I thought there was going to be. It too seems to be a more functional site, better features and all that. At least so far though, it does not have the traffic that FA does. Want a quick comparison? My two biggest stories here have 12,350 views & 260 favs, and 53,138 views & 632 favs. On Weazyl, those stories have 120 views & 2 favs, and 343 views & 8 faves. I have more favs here than I do views there. And that's not even getting into the number of comments.
Right now there is a lot of heated discussion over where people are going to go. Some people are staying, some are leaving. The leaving is happening all over the place though - some people are using something called Subscribestar, which is something I'm not familiar with but I'll Google it later. Others are basically leaving for Patreon and Twitter (yes really). A few people mentioned going to the bunny site, and others announced their intention to go to Weazyl.
If this is going to happen, I well and truly hope it'll be a solid move to Weazyl. But that's easier said than done. People have galleries that can be hundreds or thousands strong which can be an immense logical hurdle to disincentivize moving no matter what tools you provide. And the lack of traffic/engagement, at least currently, at other sites is a big incentive to stay put. Like it or not, inertia is a thing and people create media to be viewed. The messiest, greatest tentacle story of all time doesn't do much good if a few hundred people see it in some niche site somewhere else, instead of the tens of thousands of views it'd get here. For reasons like that, I'd never delete my gallery here (tiny as it is) because those numbers mean something to the person who created those things.
There are some things I need to make sure get mirrored over to my Weazyl page, but I'm tempted to say that any future uploads might go there instead. I won't commit to it yet because I've most definitely been wrong about these things before, but I'm /tempted/.
If you'd like to discuss, feel free to drop a comment. I love comments, though my journals tend to get about...zero comments most of the time.
See the thing is that a long time ago, there was a kerfuffle here on FA, and I completely read the room wrong. I really thought at the time that there was going to be momentum to move on to other places, and at the time there was only really one contender - the bunny site. So I made my profile there, posted my stories, and set up things like blacklisting a bunch of tags and so forth. And with features like that and a search (yes IB had a search years before FA did), I thought that IB was eventually going to be where people eventually settled. It had better management as far as I could tell, much better features and the site functioned much better. And yes I thought that people valuing artistic freedom rather than not having to deal with things that made them grimace was going to win out.
Boy was I wrong. Very, very wrong.
I think I used the site in parallel to FA for about a month before logging out and not going back. It's just...that reputation for being //the// site for...//that//. And while I can and do fully partition the things people engage in for fantasy, from what they are as a person, I still never really felt comfortable when I was on the site. Or in more direct words - I don't judge you or others if you engaged in that fantasy stuff so long as it stayed as fantasy, it's just not my cup of tea, and I didn't feel comfortable being in the epicenter of it.
Eventually Weazyl came along. I made an account there (with considerably more enthusiasm) but I never really stayed because there wasn't really a mass migration like I thought there was going to be. It too seems to be a more functional site, better features and all that. At least so far though, it does not have the traffic that FA does. Want a quick comparison? My two biggest stories here have 12,350 views & 260 favs, and 53,138 views & 632 favs. On Weazyl, those stories have 120 views & 2 favs, and 343 views & 8 faves. I have more favs here than I do views there. And that's not even getting into the number of comments.
Right now there is a lot of heated discussion over where people are going to go. Some people are staying, some are leaving. The leaving is happening all over the place though - some people are using something called Subscribestar, which is something I'm not familiar with but I'll Google it later. Others are basically leaving for Patreon and Twitter (yes really). A few people mentioned going to the bunny site, and others announced their intention to go to Weazyl.
If this is going to happen, I well and truly hope it'll be a solid move to Weazyl. But that's easier said than done. People have galleries that can be hundreds or thousands strong which can be an immense logical hurdle to disincentivize moving no matter what tools you provide. And the lack of traffic/engagement, at least currently, at other sites is a big incentive to stay put. Like it or not, inertia is a thing and people create media to be viewed. The messiest, greatest tentacle story of all time doesn't do much good if a few hundred people see it in some niche site somewhere else, instead of the tens of thousands of views it'd get here. For reasons like that, I'd never delete my gallery here (tiny as it is) because those numbers mean something to the person who created those things.
There are some things I need to make sure get mirrored over to my Weazyl page, but I'm tempted to say that any future uploads might go there instead. I won't commit to it yet because I've most definitely been wrong about these things before, but I'm /tempted/.
If you'd like to discuss, feel free to drop a comment. I love comments, though my journals tend to get about...zero comments most of the time.
Inkbunny has an actual working community tagging and full blacklist feature and even a report feature for people that refuse to tag their art. So that "thing" you don't want to see is actually easier to block or not see than some of the "questionable exceptions to that thing" still allowed on FA.
The only other realistic site would be SoFurry... What used to be the "Yiffstar Story Archive" now that it is a bit more art oriented.
I didn't mention Sofurry because I honestly don't have any experience with it. From what I heard people speak of it, it sounded like a site geared primarily towards stories (which you mention it's a bit more art-oriented now), which is great in theory for someone like myself, but I stand by my decision that I'd rather be on a site geared for all because that's where the people are.
I'm curious about that Weazyl rule regarding commissions. What was the deal with that?
Basically what the rule was, if I remember correctly, is that even if you commissioned the art, only the original artist could post it in their gallery and you could not post it in yours if you were not the original artist unless you had some sort of confirmation from the original artist to weasyl that it was okay. Which would be hard to do for a commission from a long-gone artist or from someone that wasn't online or such.