Frightening times. x_x

Don't forget your e6...

I didn't, I mentioned it in there. :P

How'd I miss that?

From my experience, Itaku is worth checking out.

You missed sofurry for the big furry sites.

If its twitter itself your opposed to and not the format https://furryfediverse.org/ has a list of Mastodon instances to choose from.

If you don't mind a reddit like site, yiffit.net or pawb.social instances of lemmy, though they're still small.

I'm working on something but its nowhere close to being ready.

I love Sofurry (though I haven't used it much recently) and they've recently begun working on a more modern version of the site.

I also love my corner of the fediverse. Lovely people.

I usually hate change, but we'll see what comes of it. I found my voice on yiffit, but lemmy doesn't talk to mastodon very well so wound up creating an account on furry.engineer.

Have you considered Bluesky? The reach isn't as good as Twitter but it's been steady for awhile.

I'm a little hesitant to go with a general social media site, I tend to prefer to stick to furry specific corners of the internet when I can, but it's certainly an option worth keeping in mind just in case I suppose.

Itaku.ee seems to be a good place to check out; has a similar structure to Twitter's dashboard for looking at new artwork in sequence, but it also allows actual gallery layouts, as well as folders for proper organization, and even allows for the separation of clean and adult ratings. While still in its infancy, I think with proper building it can be a strong base for artists

I think it’s a good idea to prepare if things go south. I’m still holding out hope that there’s *some* kind of contingency in place for the biggest and most popular furry site on the internet, but it’s never a bad idea to have your eggs in a few different baskets

I hope things don’t go down :(( but I think I should finally give Weasyl and Inkbunny a try for myself.

Reminder that Dragoneer is not the only person who helps run the website

This is true. As heartless as it sounds to say, I’m imagining that this day was known to come soon, so I really do think that there are folks out there who have already planned out a way to keep things up and running.

Let’s hope for the best :))

'Neer nay well have left a will and/or instructions that address this as well.

Indeed, like I said, this is more of a better safe than sorry thing. I do hope they can sort things out and keep things going, but I'd rather be over-prepared now than under-prepared if the worst does happen. :P This place isn't just a site I sometimes visit, it's been a central part of my entire adult life, heck, it's my career, so kind of a big deal if it poofs. Gotta be ready.

Oh yeah. It's definitely good to spread brand and reach elsewhere, just a pain in the butt to do it

Use NewGrounds my friend.

Inkbunny account empty :'(

I never did end up using it, but I made an account anyway just to hold the name. :P

shame, it's the only other place I actually go besides FA :(

Guh. Not particularly excited about re-building things on a different website. I follow so very many artists and they're all here on FA.

I'll follow, if the majority ends up migrating, but grumble de bimblty bim!

RIP Dragoneer. Hopefully that which you brought into this world is maintained by those that remain.

Point of order, Neer wasn't the original owner of FurAffinity. But it definitely took off after he got in charge.

It might not have *started* as his baby, but he did wind up raising it.

Hopefully one or more of these websites will stop being a ghost town from the vacuum caused should FA shut down.

(I'd prefer IB to stay in it's corner though).

Hah, you'll notice that's the only one of the three that I have zero posts on. It's... not my favourite. But honestly I'd still prefer it over something more social-media like bluesky or mastadon. I tend to like to stick to corners of the internet that are specifically made for furries, when I can help it.

I do think it has a purpose in being the place for content that is more difficult to justify being shown in the public feed and is downright niche.

"Safe Mode Off" but one level deeper.

Something something necessary evil, best it be the devil you know, etc.

Sofurry is still big and active. I'm not sure what level of NSFW content it allows, but anthro.art is a site currently in development that looks promising

AFAIK all content that Ru does is okay there

There IS SoFurry, though it's original intent was a story site

Never ceases to astound me that folks who have been around as long as I have still immediately catastrophize when changes happen and/or uncertainties arise. Sure, this is a little different. Or maybe it just feels different. I don't know, and I'm not about to let my mind just fill in a blank. Websites like this have a whole group that runs them, and that group likely has contingency plans.

I've seen so many waves of "FA Doomed, Find Me Here" journals over the years that I've lost count. The website will be here. And, if for some reason it's not, I guess I'll have to hold my nose and make a BlueSky or what the hell ever Twitter clone ends up the hub.

Gotta keep in mind, in my case the furry community is my career, and if I lose my main contact with the furry community I'm kinda fucked. I have done a very poor job of growing a community anywhere else, just 'cause I never really wanted to be anywhere else, so I don't really have a fallback. I'm hopeful that FA will keep trundling along as it always has, but that's not something you can take for granted in a situation like this... I just figure, better safe than sorry. Maybe it's overdramatic, but I'd rather be overdramatic now than wish I had been if the worst does come to pass. :P

Apologies, I hadn't considered the livelihood angle. Kind of dumb on my part. Still, I'm sure things are going to be fine. And if it goes, I'm sure there'll be enough warning.

Thanks for sharing them. I use Inkbunny primarily so I'll watch you there. Lots of good things are coming to an end... for FA it happened many years ago, Dragoneer leaving us will only make the platform's fate more official I think.

I thank Dragoneer for the Furaffinity he have us during the mid - late 2000's: I know that place is just a nice distant memory now, but it's at least something positive in my life I can relate to him.

Itaku is pretty good so far

I think FA will survive somehow, but I will find you if things go south!

Yeah. The LLC was under him which means it belongs to his estate and the debts the estate owns have to be settled before all else so... yeah it's up in the air at this point.

Kind of the problem with one person owning it. That talk of a community buyout that was being offered prior to the IMVU buyout could be a thing now. I don't know.

Yeah mourning wise. I guess i'm kind of just lingering in faded out mode. But like the thing about being replaced with a 'new king' sometimes is. It can kinda be like getting a new boss, manager, or president.

At first, you think of all the great ways the new person could be better. Then you roll the dice or find out the people you once thought couldn't be topped, go into limbo.

Dragoneer didn't sound like a inherantly bad person, but not a spotless one either. I skipped a lot of drama but it sounds like he secondhand might not have been a hardhearted person or a 800 lb bench pressing irl gigachad, but like the guy you'd expect to run a online server that brought a lot of people together, in a human way.

It sounds like, his flaws in the 1-3 year old drama videos, (rest in peace dragoneer), were less flaws like "mwuhaha, run over children to build parking spaces!" but.. being "too forgiving" as a flaw, or "too overlooking", if those are even flaw flaws?

It sounds like he had hard times banning friends or punishing people he wanted to be close with, most of the drama in the videos were well just like potentially problematic members of the community always being allowed to stay and at times alleged cover ups(??), but i mean, guys dead now, and we could get someone worse.

I try to be a realist at times and even if one chapter ends, if furry fandom closes, i might be one of the person to wander into spring fields or lurk wander at times.

But i don't know. It is true that with a manager succession, there's a LOT and LOT of 'suspiciously wealthy furries tms".. But the implications of a hole for a previously money losing site, and 2024 economics are looming.

Will furaffinity be sold to the highest bidder? Will a cash grabbing company make a 10,000,000$ offer people put in a dire -27,000$ couldn't refuse? Will a board of staff take over, or Wikipedia style fund it? Will furaffinity run on fumes, or continue with a trust. Do we just get more ads or do like some cash grubby company buys out data on our sexual fetishes. it's a whole lot of fuck nos for me tbh.

Yeah fair. A lot of people expect people to act like their fantasy ideals of them, say maybe like Prince Stolas's with endless money, or people who always do a favor, or etc.

I never modded furry communities but i remember modding a smaller but still moderate 20k-100k discord gaming server. For like a year, not a decade.

I remember getting word vs word stories, for our case, item theft, but i remember just hearing like furry art dramas, most online gaming people were distanced.

From what i could hear, in the furry fandom there could be like this weird triple reinforcement loop.

If you got in conflict someone might uninvite you from cons or refuse to go with you or start beef at areas.

People could seek conflict or bring virtual arguments into in face discussions, etc.

I don't know myself but i know even for virtual going from seeing your own pov to two povs and alleged word vs word stories, and having no way to tell if someone stretched or fibbed other than intuition and common sense made sense.

But even in our small server we had someone try to forge a accusation with 10 alt sockpuppets sometimes. Only caught because intuition noticed they all stopped typing to let the next type. And all typed the same, one message at a time, in sequential order.

I guess things in life can be messy though. Lots of stories can be about black vs white, Some moderation stories sound like trying to keep people together, or the claimed stories go that Dragoneer didn't seek out those people because of who they were, they sought him out because he was admin(?).

But im not sure, i didn't know the guy firsthand. It sounds like friends i had knew him better though. I saw some of my old friends from the old days, seemingly drawn by him like Brim the eevee/Tavix firsthand. I don't think i know dragoneer but it seems like i knew Brim the eevee/tavix and Dragoneer drew him gift arts of their two eevees together.

Not sure what the story was but that's for them, not me. I guess to a lot of people, he seemed a central member of the community, and drama aside or not. It does sound like his actions, good or bad, did seem to try and keep the community of the furry fandom positive in the eyes of media.

Even if it did seem like maybe a lot got scrubbed clean or overlooked at times according to the allegations.(???).

I don't have a dog in the race, im coming late to try and catch up on a person i never knew. Some of my earliest closest friends seem to have been friends with him(?), but i never knew the guy.

He sounded like a nonconfrontational person who just wanted the best for everyone though. Just sometimes you get stuck in conditions two people hate each other, and just.. i've been there before. I had no idea how to solve that either.

So you neither care nor believe? Having a positive and productive attitude towards people is not the same as complete denial.

Do I need to quote you verbatim?

It has been interesting reading through the discussions here and elsewhere.

I have to admit your comment about community buyout talk prior to the IMVU got a big smile as that was the idea waaaaay back at the start (Jan 2005) long before Dragoneer was involved, as noted on the forums (remember those?); https://i.imgur.com/i0aw4lR.png

Will see how things go and the current trajectory could be worse, given the fundraiser support to hopefully provide a "buffer". Certainly we're in a far better position for the fandom as a whole than we were when FA started, albeit there are far more people nowadays relying on online communities...

Cohost, a Tumblr-like, also exists. It allows NSFW and also has a very good but very small community so far. It's on unstable footing financially, but they seem to be out of the worst of it now.

And I'm definitely gonna promote the furry fediverse. It feels so much better than twitter.

I'll see you on e621.

Artconomy is game for your NSFW content for sure.

Seconding Artconomy. It's been great to work with as far as commission sales go. Not as much for gallery things, but for payment and nitty gritty sales stuff? Awesome.

I really like itaku myself; it supports posting video directly for one and it also has good discovery features and a resharing feature that I like a lot.

Oh, I have your name. I love your art. I've been randomly following your art across different social media for years. It's weird to think that me and my first gf talked about your art back in college. And since so much had changed. And your art changed! But I'm still enjoying it. Thanks for that! Hope to keep seeing your work in the future. Gonna sit in my 60s, drink tea and enjoy your weird wack kink art x3 Exquisite.

Aw, well thank yas. :P Hopefully FA sticks around but if it doesn't, I hope to see ya wherever we all end up next!

Wow, I wasn't aware you had an IB account.
This is not meant to sound judgmental.

If I recall correctly they actually reached out to me to create an account during an early beta testing/invite only/something like that phase, and I figured I might as well at least grab the name so I signed up for that, this would have been well before they had any particular reputation if memory serves. Just never got around to using it since then.

I'll also add my vote for Itaku x3 Considering what your preferences are you should definitely check it out!

Itaku is something worth taking a look. Many useful features I'm sure would be welcoming.

I'll be heading to Weasyl myself. Established one years ago.

Really hope the site doesn't go down, only just started here and made some good mates.

Oh wow, geez. First Mark Merlino, one of the founders of the furry fandom passed on this year, and now Dragoneer.

I'm active on SoFurry and quite like it. It's an established site, if one slightly more oriented towards writing.

cohost is nice, though not exclusively furry.

I thought Furrynetwork went under a while back?

As for discord/guilded, I don't use it, but with  supcom 's help I made element.quakehoof.xyz

I wouldn't trust Twitter anyway. If it needs to happen, someone can create a new Furry community network just in case FA does go down.

Definitely recommend the fediverse. Since it's just a web standard for social website interoperability, dressed up to look like various monolithic social media sites, it's more like hosting your own blog or website or joining a webring. There's existing installable websites that act like Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, for however many users that host wants to make space for, but I mean....same protocol can even be set up on a wordpress install and used the same way.

Not as much instant exposure, so definitely wouldn't be the only place you'd want to be, but ultimately it's a rebuilding of the old internet of thousands of independent sites....except with modern social media interactivity.

Is FurryNetwork even still active? Last time I tried to go check my profile the site was unavailable.

Active might be a strong word. It still exists, at least. I checked before putting the link up there. It's a bit broken though and definitely a ghost town.

Hm. Looking back through my notebook of websites I used when I used to be in the fandom, apparently it was Furriffic that shut down, not FurryNetwork.

I might have to recover my FN account lol, I doubt I know the password for it anymore. At least I can follow you on weasyl, though.

Ye! If anything does happen I'll at least mention where I plan on heading on all the above sites, even if I don't end up settling into all of them permanently, so any one of them should do.

As far as I'm aware from what I've been told is that Neer only had himself on the LLC for FA so likely the writing is on the wall if that's the case. It's good that everyones at least preparing for the possibilities.

I should probably save the list of people I'm following here in case it goes down suddenly.

I'd say bite the bulelt and just join Discord, its a really decent ap and we use it constantly to talk with our community.