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Yes I made a Weasyl. My thoughts on this episode...
12 years ago
General
I think two steps fully sums it up. Step 1: lots of people create accounts on all other sites (inkbunny, Weasyl, sofurry, etc), and they keep their galleries current across all sites. Step 2: people realize if all galleries are pretty much the same, why bother with FA?
But, I want to be very clear on this, I don't think FA will ever be abandoned. Thousands of people have hundreds of submissions, and migrating that is a hell of a chore, not to mention the idle galleries of users that have since left the fandom, left FA, or simply died. Those galleries end up being exclusive content in a strange way, and that is an incentive to stay.
But this is progress. Like society builds upon the rotation of public domain and copyrighted material, so too do websites and the fandom evolve. In the real early days, there were those newsgroup thingies and mailing lists. Then select artists who had both the artistic ability to justify the traffic, and the financial resources to create their own sites, did so. Then, we as a fandom got the VCL. Then we got FurAffinity. For all the problems this site has, it is a part (and a very important part) of the fandom's history. And as FA made VCL all but obsolete, other sites are popping up now with more elegant coding, better features, and so forth.
FA blended a social element with the ease of browsing galleries and receiving notifications and updates to your own personal inbox. And for a long time, it was, yes, the best resource the fandom had. That means this site has a huge advantage in name recognition, and the wealth of users and content that flocked here when there was nothing else. Like trying to compete with Nintendo's gameboy platform, having a monopoly for years and years is a hard thing to compete with. So no, FA's not going away unless the owner decides to throw in the towel.
Competition is good, it brings out the best ideas and incentives to keeping things current and interesting. Other sites popping up that have learned from FA's mistakes and listened to the wants and needs of the fandom is a good thing. It's the natural process.
Someone I know said that many things can be likened to a house. Sometimes a house needs a room added on for an unexpected addition to the family. Sometimes something gets damaged and needs repair. Most of the time, you can fix or patch it. It won't always be pretty or just like before, but it's still functional. But sometimes the necessary additions aren't compatible or possible with the house, sometimes the damage is too deep in the structure or foundations, and it's not worthwhile to patch or fix it. And the only remaining solution is to raze the building and start again. It's a normal process we go through in our daily lives. Do I keep this job and try to put up with the co-workers, or ask for a transfer? Do I really enjoy working for this company, or should I put in my resume elsewhere? Do I enjoy this line of work, or should I find a different career? Is this car worth repairing, or should I just up and replace it before it becomes a money pit?
It's possible FurAffinity has run its course as the top dog of furry art community sites. Possible, I'm not claiming to know for sure. But it certainly has seen better days. I feel like people are attributing too much to the "drama" aspect of this without recognizing the bigger picture of what is going on. If FA fades into the background, that's not a terrible thing by itself; that is simply the natural course of business. In the future, the same thing may happen to Weasyl and the other sites. If they can't revamp their sites as necessary, patch and rework code in a timely manner, address user issues quickly and diplomatically, then they will also be supplanted by newer sites in due time.
But, I want to be very clear on this, I don't think FA will ever be abandoned. Thousands of people have hundreds of submissions, and migrating that is a hell of a chore, not to mention the idle galleries of users that have since left the fandom, left FA, or simply died. Those galleries end up being exclusive content in a strange way, and that is an incentive to stay.
But this is progress. Like society builds upon the rotation of public domain and copyrighted material, so too do websites and the fandom evolve. In the real early days, there were those newsgroup thingies and mailing lists. Then select artists who had both the artistic ability to justify the traffic, and the financial resources to create their own sites, did so. Then, we as a fandom got the VCL. Then we got FurAffinity. For all the problems this site has, it is a part (and a very important part) of the fandom's history. And as FA made VCL all but obsolete, other sites are popping up now with more elegant coding, better features, and so forth.
FA blended a social element with the ease of browsing galleries and receiving notifications and updates to your own personal inbox. And for a long time, it was, yes, the best resource the fandom had. That means this site has a huge advantage in name recognition, and the wealth of users and content that flocked here when there was nothing else. Like trying to compete with Nintendo's gameboy platform, having a monopoly for years and years is a hard thing to compete with. So no, FA's not going away unless the owner decides to throw in the towel.
Competition is good, it brings out the best ideas and incentives to keeping things current and interesting. Other sites popping up that have learned from FA's mistakes and listened to the wants and needs of the fandom is a good thing. It's the natural process.
Someone I know said that many things can be likened to a house. Sometimes a house needs a room added on for an unexpected addition to the family. Sometimes something gets damaged and needs repair. Most of the time, you can fix or patch it. It won't always be pretty or just like before, but it's still functional. But sometimes the necessary additions aren't compatible or possible with the house, sometimes the damage is too deep in the structure or foundations, and it's not worthwhile to patch or fix it. And the only remaining solution is to raze the building and start again. It's a normal process we go through in our daily lives. Do I keep this job and try to put up with the co-workers, or ask for a transfer? Do I really enjoy working for this company, or should I put in my resume elsewhere? Do I enjoy this line of work, or should I find a different career? Is this car worth repairing, or should I just up and replace it before it becomes a money pit?
It's possible FurAffinity has run its course as the top dog of furry art community sites. Possible, I'm not claiming to know for sure. But it certainly has seen better days. I feel like people are attributing too much to the "drama" aspect of this without recognizing the bigger picture of what is going on. If FA fades into the background, that's not a terrible thing by itself; that is simply the natural course of business. In the future, the same thing may happen to Weasyl and the other sites. If they can't revamp their sites as necessary, patch and rework code in a timely manner, address user issues quickly and diplomatically, then they will also be supplanted by newer sites in due time.
FA has been offline, hacked and spent thousands on new equipment so many times that I've expected FA to go offline for good, or for the admins to give up and sell it off to someone else, or to a company that would turn it into a pay site.
But it managed to stay online and keep growing. There's been a huge influx of younger teenage furries that have joined that dont know or dont care about FA's problems. And I agree with Hyper there's a lot of older furs dont want to go through the trouble of moving everything to a new website.
To knock FA from its #1 Perch, It's going to take a HUGE server crash or hacker attack that wipes out almost everything on FA. Or if FA somehow goes broke, or a Furry Art "Supersite" that does everything FA does but faster, with more security and more features takes it's place.
Weasyl is the closest site that might do that, but they could have the same problems with site slowdown and hackers as long as they keep growing.
[...] not to mention the idle galleries of users that have since left the fandom, left FA, or simply died. Those galleries end up being exclusive content [...]
Fortunately for us, FA allows us to download art from the site to our hard drives. After the week's outage and thinking about the constant staff drama it occurred to me to back up all of my Favorites up and I have done that. It was tedious but I got through it. Who knows if there will be an FA tomorrow?
I'd like to do the same for galleries of "Deceased" users for the same reason. But I'm not sure how I can get the list of all of those accounts - I need to know where the art is before I can begin collecting it.
That said, lots of good art has been lost before, and it can stink. Worst case scenario, it's gone, but we'll all live.
Additionally, FA has an additional problem, and it is that it is run by server administrators, not programmers. That alone causes a massive shift in priorities among upper management. Server admins don't want new features because it only causes them more trouble with increased load demands, bugs, and whatnot. They don't hire more programmers not because there aren't any in the fandom (I should know, because I am one). it's because they don't want to, because increased resource usage is the last thing they want right now.
So, with an apparent massive lack of human resources assigned to software development, FA is going to continue the way it has for most of its history, until traffic migrates away to other websites during extended downtimes like this recent one, eventually losing the largest-furry-website crown to competitors. If there is any software change at FA in the future, expect mainly layout/appearance changes, and not any significant new features.