As if social media is forever to say. Hey one day they can say "Porn, get the fuck out" and all that luster of it will be gone, like it happened with Tumblr. Sure as hell all the old money running these sites might one day have that thought that society can't have nudity.

But seriously: consider this - if someone misses the post from that specific time window when you posted it, they will never see it again unless you or someone else reposts it during the time when they're looking at stuff. On FA I can look at it right before I go to bed, enjoy all the stuff from the day and be happy. Instead of constantly clicking refresh not to miss anything.

Everytime I see artists using twitter as their main page I'm super confused. I understand using it to pull the audience, but as your gallery it makes no sense. The structure is absolutely not adapted for artwork, navigating it to see stuff is a nightmare. Same for pretty much any other social media.

Absolutely agreeing with you on that. They're definitely not made in mind for long-term galleries.

I was just thinking: to me it feels like because an art gallery won't be open all the time you decide that instead of exposing there you will just throw artwork through your windows so they are accessible 24/7.

Five minutes into the feed, it refreshes, and that wonderfully interesting bit of artwork vanishes forever.

Yeah, I have Bluesky and twitter only to comm from people that just don't wanna make any accounts anywehre else, I don't ever personally check those ever. idk man, I just get shoved in my face crap I don't ask for, random audience and bots. I don't like those places.

all the twitter and bluesky does, is distracting you for what you came for in first place.

Instead of art, I get distracted by certain controversial things that are better to avoid.

I'm probably susceptible to doom scrolling. Need to break that habit tonight.

Man, I HATE it when people move exclusively to social media.

Everything is disposable, they randomly block public access behind a walled garden, things aren't sorted chronologically, infinite scrolling, mixing reposts from other accounts, fake stat numbers, bots everywhere, endless algorithmic games...

I just don't get it.

Yeah the normalization of infinite scrolling feeds murdered Internet communities and culture. Also the dreaded "like" button. We need to bring gallery community sites aimed towards desktop users as the norm for art communities instead of reducing ourselves to brainrot dispensers all the time.

After one bad experience with commissioning an artist who now spends all their time on x/twitter and cares more about socializing there instead of getting their commissions done, I'll never commission artists who refuse to set up a proper gallery somewhere. It's a red flag, kind of showing that they don't care about art as art and see it as the equivalent of a meme collection.

Twitter has always been a cheap replacement for Tumblr, for when it basically kicked away artists, but it has never been meant for art.
I honestly consider Bluesky and IG more than Twitter especially since the day "Musky boy" bought it and sold it to his own company

Well, old money will die... someday ⏳

I haven't thought of that because I do mainly SFW but my argument was mostly about continuous website takedowns.

A social network turning bad is a risk you can somehow accept in exchange of a major audience reach, but seeing a website going offline because "Obsolete infrastructure has flaws" always rings me a bell and makes me think about how 4Chan abruptly went offline and changed forever. In one night.

Aside from this, I agree with you! Galleries lead less than Socials towards FOMO

I feel your frustration, but I have hope that the new administration will strive forward with technical advancements to this furry-owned platform. I like having a gallery structure and I uninstalled the nazi app years ago. Bluesky is OK but just isn't an enjoyable gallery for pure art browsing.

I am strongly fond of Furaffinity because it's the place where it all started for me... Sadly, when it comes to more generic audience/customers, FA may not been a viable greeting card because they either have no account or are a bit doubtful about it (remember that the half of FA's audience is into quite "particular" fetishes)

I feel like the FA staff are on the case in overhauling the site's technical workings. This past week can be seen as an example of the site undergoing genuine technical improvement, in a strict IT sense.

for what it's worth FA's crew consists of everyday folks and no CEOs or high tech bros. they try to juggle their lives with managing a site so yea, shit happens here on the reg, but i highly prefer it over deviantart or any other gentrified social site. people felt similarly about cohost when it was around. these sites are no joke when it comes to management but i entrust the furry community with my info more than "official" social medias any day.

deviantArt should change its name into deviantAI tbh...there is more AI generated stuff and thefts than actual art and artists

Yeah I like how FA is run and moderated and contributed to by real people instead of faceless CEOs, moderation bots, algorithms, and AI slop. We need sites like FA in this day and age.

I don't think that's fair honestly. It doesn't give off vibe "It'll go offline ofrever" imo. I mean, steam might close up one day too. In temrs of art, I think, this place is like million times more usable than something like Tw*tter. And people here are like billion times more friendlier.

Mine is mainly fear indeed... I saw how 4chan ended in one night and I hope it never happens to FA. Its obsolete structure (talking about its technical side) is what worries me

I see. Fair enough, still. You're overthinking. Any website can end in kne day. It's not worth worrying about imo.

Not to mention what happened to 4Chan was very unique to the cultural context surrounding that situation.

imo 4chan deserved it lmao It was not a good place.

True, but then again the hack was done by a 4Chan splinter group who is arguably even worse.

The difference between FA and 4Chan is that FA didn't have a massive internal civil war that spawned a splinter faction which evolved into a longer blood feud leading to said splinter faction dedicating themselves to taking down the site.

I am in *exactly* the same place!

I wish you luck, Mr. Fox!

FA is by and large only good for the structure of its gallery. However the search function is abysmal and finding new artists/people to follow/watch is hard.

I hope FA sorts everything out soon. I really love this place, but it can get a bit messy. I just want to look at art and get away from the noise. I miss when most people just used art sites and not those micro blogs like Twitter or Bluesky. Bluesky is alright most of the time, but I've had some issues with it, mainly the moderation lists, and I sometimes get greatly misunderstood on there, but other than that, it's been okay.

Bluesky is definitely better than the Musk Hellsite but TBH the culture on Bluesky reminds me a lot of Tumblr as it was 10 years ago and that isn't a compliment.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about Tumblr overall. Bluesky does remind me of the old Tumblr, and I don't know how I feel about that, but I'm glad FA is back up and running at least.

People get really aggressive over there (Bluesky) whenever you inevitably break one of the community's unspoken rules I've noticed, not to mention they seem to have an attitude of what is the "right" opinion to have on a piece of media or a ship or whatever, not to mention all the hate lists/mass-block lists where people put people they dislike. But at the same time I've met some cool people over there? IDK how to feel about it.

But yeah glad FA is back.

Feed-based socials are probably the worst way to display art online. All information just zips by, countless people miss it and the algorithms create trends a lot of artists feel forced to follow to remain "relevant" and visible. It really messes with originality because it "educates" artists and audiences alike to only create and expect conformity.
On top of that it discourages effort: why spend hours on a piece which most people will just scroll by when a mindless piece of quick fanart or an arbitrary, cutesy OC will probably attract more attention?

The internet reduces art to fast food!

Yeah I've felt this way for years. Art has been reduced to fast food due to feed based socials with no human moderation. I only ever use FA and Eka's these days for art, and maybe BlueSky but even then BlueSky is still sideshow that doesn't let me post my full artistic intent.

I'm not talking much about the way art is proposed online in this case (I prefer gallery over socials all the way... sadly I had to adapt to socials too, but I prefer galleries).
My point is seeing FA going offline more often and realizing it has an obsolete structure and this worries me a bit about its future BECAUSE despite they also have good sides, I don't like how socials present art

On top of that it discourages effort: why spend hours on a piece which most people will just scroll by when a mindless piece of quick fanart or an arbitrary, cutesy OC will probably attract more attention?

People have been complaining about that since DeviantArt was still king. It's the unfortunate nature of the Attention Economy. Like the real economy, it is not a meritocracy.

Socials 100% made it worse though. A few artists I knew from DA stopped trying and resigned themselves to making slop when they moved over to socials not to mention people mostly stopped attaching stories and detailed lore to their art whatsoever. Not to mention many artists don't engage in comments anymore. Reading those descriptions and getting into long convos with the artist was always the fun part.

I know there's a lot of data to move over, definitely WAY more data than they would have had when just starting out! I work in tech; I appreciate the work they're doing. I'm glad there's no data loss!!

Out of curiosity lately, I looked up the average lifespan of a web site online, and it's apparently something like 2 years. Considering how long FA has been around (and folks want it to stay around) I think FA has been doing pretty good!

As an artist, HECK. I've got stuff to upload! Artist brain keeps going "WannaPostWannaPostWannaPost!"

FA's issues has got me working on building my Wordpress install into my gallery site. It could go offline forever, but it is also installed in my living room so I can tinker with it etc.

Also since people made an ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress, it can be my socials, but also my gallery - rather than a side site that mostly doesn't matter to anyone.

I can even post stuff to it backdated to when I originally created, and it shows up in my mastodon timeline with that date!

....now if only I was good enough at wordpress and design to make it look good XD

I am curious about this! tell me more! :)

So like....if you run your website on Wordpress, you use "pages" for content that is part of the structure of the site - a gallery browser, "about me", a commission form or rules, contact info, etc.

And then posts (since Wordpress was originally designed around blogs, and what most blogs run) for content like blogs/journals, recipes, art, news articles, anything you might post more of at some point.

You can put them in categories and tags, however you want to assemble them. Wordpress natively supports comments, particularly on posts, if that feature is turned on.

There's a free Wordpress plugin published by the Wordpress company itself, called "ActivityPub", that takes all that dynamic stuff (but not the static pages) and makes it subscribable and interactable via the ActivityPub protocol (a W3C standard designed to let websites interact like social media).

That's the same open standard that Mastodon and Misskey and Lemmy and all the other "fediverse" social networks are built on - it's like RSS, but all Twitter-like actions. (Automattic is actually planning on enabling that for Tumblr as well, but with no targeted date, who knows when it'll actuallt happen)

Long story long, you turn that on on your Wordpress, and people can interact (follow/like/reshare/comment) just like they can with any other social media account via ActivityPub.

So for example, you can see the (very under construction) site here - https://weanimatethings.com/time-dragonborn/

(there's an age gate on the whole site because I haven't yet figured out how to apply it to single posts in a way that prevents the previews from showing as well unless you've completed the age verification - this post is SFW but the other test post I've made is topless)

But you can also drop that link into a Mastodon searchbox if you have one of those accounts, and load it as a regular post there.

I feel you on this, it’s wise to diversify. I’m trying to remain optimistic that FA is just going to suck more while they fix longstanding issues before it gets better. This site’s format and community are unique, simply functional (when running) without a mind-mushing algorithm, and I love the people here. But for the time being, it seems like it’s going to suck for a longer time / more frequently than artists can truly rely on. Wishing you the best in all of this 🍻

i used to be more active here and in deviant art, and in betwen life, the lack of purpose and that, the fact that i remember when i have the old pc, the old internet with the old black box that we usedto have to use internet was much better, and now in furaffinity not so much but in deviant artthe amount of censorship, becoming more an AI gallery, entire gallerys behind pay wall pixiv also is becoming pay wall, and censorship, i realize with moder crap, i write in deviant art here and with furaffinity since that guy may he RIP, now we have several day you can post things, i post as last hobby, mi gaming pc i dont have it, life is passing and i do stuff for manaining miself knowing that it can be done or over any day, we no longer live in the world of things made to last, i know specialy now all we do wont last no where near as in the past

Y'know I used to be pretty pessimistic about FA, especially after 'neer died, but it seems like the new staff are actually doing their best to save the site. Sure we've got a bit of down time, but they're actually making an effort to add requested features instead of just stalling/ignoring the community. I think the rest of the '20s are gonna be much better for FA than the 2010s were. In the meantime, sites like NG or Itaku are waaay better than twitter or wannabe twitter

I haven't considered Itaku yet due to its lower amount of users (i have to be rational here).
I am on NG but I honestly find it too complex to use and... I feel my audience is not there. The audience on there seems to be on more 2000s stuff, graphical/synthetical styles etc... I never saw my stuff having traction on there so I kinda ditched it... for now

I'll have to be straight-up blunt and no disrespect to 'neer as a person but the direction he was taking FA in was kinda...
How do I say this?
Not exactly the best?

I remember 'neer talking about how he basically wanted to turn FA into yet another social feed site which came across as a horrible idea not to mention the staff felt distant under him and bugs hardly got fixed. The current staff seem to be taking the site in a much much better direction.

I haven't thought of that... this may be good then

I'm thinking the same as you. This had been my most successful place, but it hasn't been for quite a while.

Nothing online is permanent. I do my preliminary drawing on paper; this digital stuff feels like it's written on air. You could wake up tomorrow and it could all be gone.

I am thinking about this more and more often... maybe because being into computer science for work, I developed more awareness in these terms and this is what worries me.
Especially looking at FA being a bit obsolete... but I truly hope to be wrong and that FA stays for a looong time :)

About art making... I agree with you! I'm slowly starting to rediscover traditional media. Alcool markers, acrylics... I want to learn gouache... maybe even canvas painting!

lol as if social media give any permanence in their vibes

the matter is not the permanence itself (nothing is permanent) but the worry of seeing FA gone... my worry came from seeing FA offline so often

It's really sad tbh... I barely started my "Art Career" here on FA, only because I got enough courage to finally sign in and post some of my slop, find so many new artists to follow and being inspired by... only for the site to say "Welp, it's been fun, bye bye now"... I feel like I just bring bad luck...

same here, that's why I worry sometimes

You don't bring bad luck... You bring GREAT art ~♥

aw you ❤️❤️
No i didn't mean the bringing bad luck, I mean I fear to see the website going offline forever without warning

Yeah, stuff like this and the shoddy reliability of social media is why I keep my own website to archive my art. Sure it's looks templatey, but everyday I fiddle with it and improve in small ways because it's mine, plus I can put whatever content I want on it.

I am actually thinking of doing the same because i saw wordpress allows stuff like comments etc so you can somehow create a community and not just a static website

I can warn that, without moderators or paid filters, a comment section on an individual website can get stuffed with bots and spam.

Have you tried using a crossposter? Postybirb makes it easy to put things on multiple websites without too much more effort.

Have you considered Cara.app or even Newgrounds? Both of them ban A.I. "art".

"FOX POPVLI ~fox-pop OP Digital artist
4 months ago
deviantArt should change its name into deviantAI tbh...there is more AI generated stuff and thefts than actual art and artists"
me logging into dA after like 6-7 years: LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOI

eh it hurts i know... i started from there :( sad to see it like that

Same, first art site i joined, back in 2008 ;w;' and used to lurk all the way back since the early to mid 2000's...
Found my favorite artist there, met my closest friend on there too, it used to be so exciting to find obscure cool fanartist on it.
Now the search results give out mostly AI slop...paywalled AI slop even...
Meh.