Heya,

So, just an FYI, I actually DO follow you on those less toxic sites and I can fully agree with the way you've been handling things here. Namely because if I get back to posting my own work I fully plan to do it on other sites and to not post here going forward even though its BY FAR my biggest following because I don't want to feed the beast that wants me gone.

I noticed you said you plan to remove your old things from your old galleries: does that mean you're planning to make them available on less terrible alternatives? My biggest issue with that is... there are lots of old works by you that I rather enjoy and I'd rather not lose them just because FA wants to be dumb with their rule-set.

Funny you should ask about that, I've had someone else asking me to archive my work on here, quite a lot of people in other spaces really interested in getting an "archive" out of me... And they do have one now! Yep, while I was gone I put together an archive of all my stuff, including a lot of things I never posted! I'm NOT putting that link up on this site! >.> It's up in my discord for the time being if you wanted to join that, and I'm currently deciding where else it should go.

Besides that... Yes. I am planning to reupload quite a lot of old stuff on my new account/s when I can get into the headspace for it. I don't have thousands of pictures like some artists do but its still not something that happens overnight. ^^'

Isn't the purpose of water marking an image is to exercise the right to copywrite that image?

That would be stupid for FA to oppose that. FA does not own the writers to the artists name or art.

Tell that to the moderator who commented "welcome back" to me, about 2 hours before all that stuff was taken down. >.>

Life sucks

i used your linktree and you seem to have found me to as you followed me back lol

And to think, all of this could have been avoided if they didn't go on what amounts to a stupid witchhunt against people with small/cute characters, or just styles the moderators didn't like.

They deleted your entire gallery? What the heck? That is just...wrong. On so many levels.

Furaffinity took down every picture I put up that had a watermark. Which was a lot. I took down the rest. Because I am done. Fuck this place.

Not sure why I even glanced back to answer this comment, but if memory serves you've always been nice to me. Appreciate that in the end. See you round, maybe.

Watched you on all your other presences online, so you will find my comments and faves there as well, cause I really like your art and all, I was especially curious about your latest comic, where you would you with that giraffe pokemon.

So you won't loose me yet there, buddy. *winks*

Apologies in advance for the book ^^;

I’m honestly not sure what to say, but I feel like I need to say *something.* I’ve been lurking hear for a few years, I’ll admit it. I like your art, and was honestly kinda sad to see you leave your original account. Personally just into suiting stuff tbf, but there were plenty of things you made that I liked. Honestly, I’m not sure who it would hurt more, FA or the people who like your art to take all that stuff off. If I shouldn’t say “do what you want, then I’d have to say that, personally, I don’t want it all gone. It’s always felt bad to me to see hundreds of images gone with the press of the button, with no way for the people who liked them to see them again. There was Twitter, I’m aware, you made great stuff there too for a bit (the snep Khajit was my favorite, sorta liked my headcanon that it ‘stole’ the wearer, but I digress)! I tend to stay away from Twitter tho, I’d rather not join that little circus, and seeing the deleted account (and all art associated with it) I’d guess you dislike the site even more now. In the end, I'm not whether sure me or anyone else on this platform can convince you otherwise, I genuinely wish I could provide something better, but what is there to say? Not sure if this will just end up as another mean voice in the image, but that’s not my intention! I want to help, I want to provide some solution to where you can upload all of your art, I want a solution where you can store all of your art somewhere else but still leave FA like you want. I can only think of discord and Weasyl but you’re basically already doing that (Low key tho, the only way I see FA being forced to reconsider is if a bunch of users got together and cancelled their FA+, sorta like D&D beyond subscriptions). You probably see this as a big nothingburger, and I don’t blame you, but I felt like I had to say something before it all went away. At the very least, maybe a Google drive link or something might help? Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. In the end, I guess I should just say thanks for the contributions you made. You have my utmost sympathies and I want to help however I can, but I’m not really sure if there’s anything else I can do, but please, if you can find it in your heart, please put all the old art somewhere where we can still view it. You already know my preference. But know that it would be for the people who still care about you, not someone doing all this to you on the site. For all the crap on here, I believe that there are people on here that still care about you, including myself. That said, if this is goodbye, I hold no contempt or anger and wish you a fond farewell.

Hugs and best wishes,
Paulthedragon
(creative, I know…)

I've seen something similar happen to people who have art erroneously detected as AI created ... sometimes it gets fixed via manual review, but that requires dealing with staff and probably some luck, and that's probably harder for some people than others. (I've had good luck, like when I got my account back after the 2015 data leak, but that's just one case)

I only glanced over your other journals, but given the mix of commentary and the fact you still post on sofurry, I'm going to assume you prefer less censorship and restriction over more. (I'm usually more on the side of less restriction over less content that offends me) Though sofurry also has the very useful feature of detailed content filters via tags, etc, so you aren't forced to manually sift through content you don't want to see. (I forget it if allows user-suggested tags too, booru style, but that can help) It's not an issue for me personally as I tend to user tags to find things, not avoid them, but it obviously helps a ton of people from being upset or soured by having to go through things they dislike or be forced to miss out on stuff by using too coarse a filter.

Albeit one of the problems on multiple sites (FA and twitter ... and youtube included) isn't even adding new restrictions, but changing the way they're enforced such that years of established consistency on a subject get thrown out the window and it's confusing what does and doesn't fit. (it's like if you had that in the legal system where you just discarded all the case law on enforcing a specific law and decided to randomly enforce it in some other manner ... be it to the letter strict, or just some weird biased way)

"Free speech" discourse issues aside on twitter, the big issue there is enforcing of old/existing content rules in ways the mods used to completely ignore. (like artwork involving harm/self-harm, gore, or other violent content that used to be accepted no longer being such, and the line being blurred on how it's to be enforced ... and that's completely regardless of kink/sexual intent, which they don't seem to care about so much)

OTOH, I feel like artists gravitated towards twitter partially due to the demise of tumblr (which was MUCH better for art posting, albeit not as good as a proper art site with proper comment sections ... or an art forum for that matter; and prior to the massive content restrictions, the restriction on image size was the main issue twitter worked around vs tumblr). I realize part of it is the twitter-style culture of instant gratification and ego boosting, especially via mobile devices, but I'll avoid ranting about the negativity of that sort of mentality and behavior and instead point out: tumblr at least worked well for blogging with large character limits, and longer form comments could sometimes work, too, albeit not as well on a BB style forum (or the DA, FA, sofurry, and some other sites comment sections, which worked closer to a BB style forum, and often used BBcode formatting).

And, ego-boosting, inspiration/motivation generating or otherwise, long form comments and discussions is just much more intellectually useful for content creators, commenters engaging in it, and even browsing users willing to read into the comments.

This is one of the reasons I stuck to using FA. (the others being the remaining popularity or at least archive of old users ... sans those who delete or nuke accounts, and rather importantly: a fairly consistent front-end user interface that's generally much less resource intensive and buggy on desktop use than other sides, doesn't have a stupid doom-scrolling interface, and ... at least doesn't continually make itself worse via constant UI updates ... not that it doesn't do that occasionally, but it's not nearly as frequent or horrible as other sites, DA included: I seriously miss the way DA worked 10+ years ago, and that's aside from their older content policies on explicit/etc stuff ... though they did have a serious problem with harboring viruses, at least for windows based PCs)

Sofurry is a good site in most of those contexts, though is a bit resource intensive if you're not using noscript. That beta soffuryNext thing is a bit concerning though, if it's supposed to be an eventual replacement and not just a complement site. (I'd be fine with it being a place to migrate for more mobile social media oriented stuff, especially with synchronized content uploads to both it and the old site, but it looks awful as a direct replacement, especially given SF's legacy as a writing/literature-optimized site; especially relevant to this journal would be how there's relatively low character limits on descriptions and comments there)


And discord is too realtime for me, it's chat rooms with archiving. You CAN use it as a forum, but unless you have a server oriented around expecting people to respond days or even weeks later rather than instantly, it just doesn't work like a gallery site, forum, or even a blog.

Mastodon instances are a lot less restrictive than twitter and can be used a lot like discord servers (and are more isolated in individual servers if you prefer that), though they can't be searched or sorted through like more monolithic sites or networks and require peer to peer hosting (or a home based server) generally speaking. Albeit that's also like old style irc servers, too.

I haven't really messed with telegram or bluesky yet ... too many IRL distractions to branch out from what I'm already using. (I'm one of those people much more likely to keep using something old and busted that I'm used to than to learn something new ... unless the new thing actually fits into my preferred sensibilities for UI design: I'm the kind of person to use windows classic shell or the linux mint "mate" desktop due to preferring the way windows 9x and older NT derivatives look and feel ... hell, mate feels more like winXP or 2000 than it does win7, let alone 10, some of the old keyboard shortcuts are more similar, too, and the hardware monitor works more like the older task manager)

Meh, either I'm weird, or I can latch onto more primitive interfaces better. (like getting into retro computing and learning DOS commands, or using the DOS text shell is less ... jarring than using some modern mobile-oriented, especially twitter-scrolling style sites .... I hate that youtube doesn't have a page-by-page view of channel's videos anymore, and I'd find twitter much more useable if you COULD go page by page with a set number of tweets/retweets per page, same for facebook)

I'm very glad DA at least added a user-selected post-per-page limits (and optional continual scrolling) rather than forcing only the latter. (it's still a bloated, resource-hogging mess on the front end that will eat up RAM in WAY fewer tabs than FA ... or sofurry for that matter, though maybe not as bad as twitter, and not as weirdly CPU bloated as twitter, but at least it's got reasonable page organization)