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bluesky
Posted 10 months agohttps://bsky.app/profile/snake.cool
I am also on mastodon still - https://snake.cool/Cal and @cal@snake.cool
...Assuming anyone ever wants to use that. It does the same thing bsky does, more or less.
Apparently everyone is ditching twitter because of both the block thing where blocked users can still see you (which is whatever IMO, since you could get around it by just logging out), and more importantly, their TOS was updated to specifically allow them to use any images uploaded for training AI, or other "commercial purposes."
The way the clause is worded seems pretty standard, and I can guarantee they were already doing this anyway, but now It's Official so people are actually jumping ship.
I will still be posting on twitter because people are going to use my art for whatever they want regardless of what any TOS says and I am ok with the reality of this, even if I don't like the companies (people) who are using my art or what they are using it for. I can't exactly enforce my art being or not being used for x or y because I am not a multinational corporation with billions of dollars to piss away on lawsuits against random people who decide to plug my fat lizards and paws into a machine that makes more of them but of slightly worse quality than I could at any given point.
People doing things I don't like with things I create seems to be the reality of basically anything one can make. This is especially obvious to me as a small arms designer, given what they are designed to do, but I digress.
It'd be cool if companies making these products with things we've all released for free gave the people they take from a slice of the profit they make, since the product only ultimately exists because of the data it's trained on, but I cannot imagine a way that would make that economically viable or possible to implement without both sending people billions of spam messages asking for permission to use their art, and ultimately giving them payments amounting to pennies, like you'd usually see with with class-action suits.
The better solution would be to require the whole thing to be released for free like the GPL does for software. Anything made for free must be used only in products which are available for free, and available for download and modification. This applies to every piece of software built using anything ever made with this license. Again, though, nobody's going to piss away time and money on the courts to try to enforce that.
I don't see a future where this sort of thing is able to be enforced by any law, not in the US at least, but I think it's valuable to consider. Even if it would require effectively abolishing the USPTO and copyright as a whole.
I am also on mastodon still - https://snake.cool/Cal and @cal@snake.cool
...Assuming anyone ever wants to use that. It does the same thing bsky does, more or less.
Apparently everyone is ditching twitter because of both the block thing where blocked users can still see you (which is whatever IMO, since you could get around it by just logging out), and more importantly, their TOS was updated to specifically allow them to use any images uploaded for training AI, or other "commercial purposes."
The way the clause is worded seems pretty standard, and I can guarantee they were already doing this anyway, but now It's Official so people are actually jumping ship.
I will still be posting on twitter because people are going to use my art for whatever they want regardless of what any TOS says and I am ok with the reality of this, even if I don't like the companies (people) who are using my art or what they are using it for. I can't exactly enforce my art being or not being used for x or y because I am not a multinational corporation with billions of dollars to piss away on lawsuits against random people who decide to plug my fat lizards and paws into a machine that makes more of them but of slightly worse quality than I could at any given point.
People doing things I don't like with things I create seems to be the reality of basically anything one can make. This is especially obvious to me as a small arms designer, given what they are designed to do, but I digress.
It'd be cool if companies making these products with things we've all released for free gave the people they take from a slice of the profit they make, since the product only ultimately exists because of the data it's trained on, but I cannot imagine a way that would make that economically viable or possible to implement without both sending people billions of spam messages asking for permission to use their art, and ultimately giving them payments amounting to pennies, like you'd usually see with with class-action suits.
The better solution would be to require the whole thing to be released for free like the GPL does for software. Anything made for free must be used only in products which are available for free, and available for download and modification. This applies to every piece of software built using anything ever made with this license. Again, though, nobody's going to piss away time and money on the courts to try to enforce that.
I don't see a future where this sort of thing is able to be enforced by any law, not in the US at least, but I think it's valuable to consider. Even if it would require effectively abolishing the USPTO and copyright as a whole.
and now to return to my cave for like 4 months
Posted a year agoenjoy your shark pictures you creatures
i will still upload everything to my personal site in case anything / everything breaks, alongside everywhere else
https://snake.computer
i will still upload everything to my personal site in case anything / everything breaks, alongside everywhere else
https://snake.computer
Where to go from here? (part 2!)
Posted 2 years agoI've updated the big fat list of alternative platforms in my previous journal. view that here: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10592957
It seems a lot of people are leaving for mastodon, given that the other options seem to be absent and it mostly just works. I've included the others still, and people are still choosing where to go, but mastodon is the big one. You can see available servers with open signups specifically for furry stuff here: https://furryfediverse.org/ or regular things here: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list
To put it shortly, Mastodon / Activitypub are the way to go, currently. If you'd like to join and start posting / viewing, I recommend finding a friend with a private instance for just a small group, or some such other tiny / locally operated server. Over the last few days, I've booted up https://snake.cool, though it is closed for signups and is just for myself and people I know. The about me page lists the various things I used to get it started, though hosting one yourself is definitely still not something the average joe can do. You'll want someone who knows a thing or two about computers and linux specifically. There are a lot of components to hosting a website, nevermind a fediverse server. I do intend to post art there going forward, and once I start, I'll post a link to my profile there on my profile here.
If you have any questions or are still hesitant because it is either daunting and complicated or seems dumb, by all means ask them here. I've modified my instance and dug through the source enough to get a pretty good idea of what it does, as well as used it for the last few days. it takes some configuring, but i'd say even without the changes I've made on the front and back-end, it works great for most people. There are some quirks starting off, but it is by no means annoying once everything is up and running and you've federated your server to some other instances
It seems a lot of people are leaving for mastodon, given that the other options seem to be absent and it mostly just works. I've included the others still, and people are still choosing where to go, but mastodon is the big one. You can see available servers with open signups specifically for furry stuff here: https://furryfediverse.org/ or regular things here: https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list
To put it shortly, Mastodon / Activitypub are the way to go, currently. If you'd like to join and start posting / viewing, I recommend finding a friend with a private instance for just a small group, or some such other tiny / locally operated server. Over the last few days, I've booted up https://snake.cool, though it is closed for signups and is just for myself and people I know. The about me page lists the various things I used to get it started, though hosting one yourself is definitely still not something the average joe can do. You'll want someone who knows a thing or two about computers and linux specifically. There are a lot of components to hosting a website, nevermind a fediverse server. I do intend to post art there going forward, and once I start, I'll post a link to my profile there on my profile here.
If you have any questions or are still hesitant because it is either daunting and complicated or seems dumb, by all means ask them here. I've modified my instance and dug through the source enough to get a pretty good idea of what it does, as well as used it for the last few days. it takes some configuring, but i'd say even without the changes I've made on the front and back-end, it works great for most people. There are some quirks starting off, but it is by no means annoying once everything is up and running and you've federated your server to some other instances
Where to go from here? (platform-wise)
Posted 2 years agoThe issues from May with FA itself seem to have calmed down (even if people still disagree and suffer from the vague rules put in place), but I think Twitter has taken their absolute incompetence to an ultimate end-point, if not just one step before actually shutting the platform off entirely or preventing new signups. Rate limiting individual users to VIEWING (not posting) 6-800 posts per day, and preventing non-logged-in users from using the platform at all is a great way to kill the platform entirely.
Unfortunately, Twitter can't die, because people will just keep using it, since there is nowhere else for them to go. The platforms that exist currently as alternatives are all either unstable, inconsistent, untrustworthy, dead, or some combination of those four.
Discord is suffering from comfort in complacency as well, having been around since 2015 and having made untold billions of dollars thus far. Unfortunately, their management was totally gutted and replaced by ex-facebook and ex-twitter staff who have turned even that into a cesspit. Prior employees are review-bombing the company on glassdoor and the platform itself seems to be becoming adversarial towards its users. The username change thing is just the most recent cut of the thousand it deems necessary to wear people down with for some reason.
I've compiled a list of platforms that people might end up migrating to if anyone ever ends up motivated enough to actually leave. This list is absolutely not exhaustive, but it contains all of the ones I was able to find that had anything resembling life on them. I doubt anyone is going to "move" and we'll all just end up having to access 15 different sites at all times to see all of the users we're watching / following, until a postybirb equivalent comes along for end-user use, but I figure it's better to have the information out there. I've tried to order it by best to worst in terms of support for artists and people who want to view their art.
If everything ends up totally discombobulated, I recommend postybirb: https://www.postybirb.com/. You can more quickly upload art to multiple places at once. Twitter's API thing broke this, but it works for most other places.
Good IMO: these are all fine platforms from what I can tell / have experienced. They work and there are either people using them or there is the potential for migration to them.
- Mastodon / Activitypub Was in a much worse state than it is currently during the last attempt at an exodus from twitter. When I say Mastodon, I am referring to the entire platform style, including stuff like: Mastodon, Misskey, Micro.blog, Friendica, Pleroma/Akkoma, WriteFreely, etc. I personally recommend Akkoma over base mastodon, but I only do so because I have experience with it. There are likely other flavors out there that do the same or similar things and work just as well. It is effectively a FOSS and decentralized version of twitter. Decentralized in the peer-to-peer / torrenting sense, not the scumbag crypto scammer-y sense. Anyone can host an instance using whichever of the aforementioned systems they want (or something totally unique), and it will basically just work, and connect to every other instance as if each instance is part of one big central site, like Twitter or Instagram. I recommend this one with the caveat that you should either join a large and crowd-funded instance, or a small one run by a personal friend or yourself. Data retention and permanence is a big issue when everything is hosted on what is usually a dinky little homeserver in someone's basement, so hosting your own or knowing the person who hosts it will provide assurance that your instance won't just one day poof out of existence along with your account. If you must use a public instance, I recommend either Mastodon.social, aka the OG, or one of the furry-specific ones, from this list here: https://furryfediverse.org/
- itaku is great for artists, but their UI is not the best in the world, in terms of usability. Some of the way things are placed and how feeds work is confounding, but they do have feature parity with FA and then some. They're supported by patreon donations.
- Cohost had a rough start and is still very clunky but seems functionally the same as pillowfort. They are not very large and there is currently not much draw to them, but they have said they intend to support activitypub at some point in the future, so they may eventually fold into the mastodon-alikes and be a good choice if you like their interface.
- afterdark.art is a lot like furrynetwork UI-wise and works basically like FA. It's not great for sharing things but it works well as an art gallery.
Not great: These platforms are either past their prime / missed their chance, or don't really serve a function that would make people want to use them. These may be useful as backups.
- Bluesky social is being created by the former CEO of twitter,but is not yet released. Seems to be centrally accessible but decentralized in practice. Everyone can see everyone else and files will have parity in case one component goes down. Likely the future of social media if it goes according to plan. Is currently in closed beta (7-27-23), and the feedback has been largely negative. I signed up for the waitlist a while ago but have not been allowed in yet. From what I've heard, the platform has egregious performance, but has a decent featureset, though makes some boneheaded choices. I have not heard much specifically what those choices were, only that they were boneheaded. It also does not federate with the rest of the activitypub system (the "fediverse"), so it will be insular like twitter and instagram and so on were. Initially it seemed like a good idea, but of course marketing never meets reality. and is still in closed beta. The platform itself is still having teething issues, and it is still fundamentally incompatible with activitypub, which means it will be a walled garden like twitter and instagram were / are. They are still claiming it will be self-hostable, but no source code has been provided for anything other than the front-end, and the only current method for getting onto the platform is still via an invite code from another user, as well as using their own servers. I want to advise people to stay away from this if they can use Mastodon instead, for sustainability going forward, but it seems like most users are flocking here rather than anywhere else currently available. major artists are gaining their following back, but slowly.
- FA was a good candidate but now is also being stupid about file upload limits and so on.
- deviantart is both a laughing stock to people who used to use it and a weird middle child like newgrounds where some really big artists are there but they're basically the only reason people use it
- newgrounds exists and probably will continue to for the foreseeable future but same problems as deviantart, being that most people associate it mentally with cringe-y mid-2010s culture. It is unfortunately functionally the same as it was in the mid-2010s. It is not likely to grow much into the future.
- you could self-host your own website like the good old days but most artists don't have enough money or computer experience to do that. Search engines also aren't what they used to be and I really don't think an RSS feed for every artist is the way to go here or what people are going to use going forward, as cool as that would be. (most mastodon-alikes do have RSS, if you'd like to go that way as a viewer! I recommend QuiteRSS if you need a client.)
- there's neocities, but again, size limits and programming experience. For context, neocities is basically a free do-it-yourself, all-in-one website with optional paid features for more storage and whatever else. You can have multiple pages and run scripts and access a database and a bunch of other stuff, though all of this is true of most other methods for which you could pay to host.
Largely pointless: These are sites that have not been maintained, are becoming unusable, or are not tailored towards hosting and viewing art. Some of these may be good sites in general, but they are not good replacements for FA or Twitter.
- tumblr has rescinded the total ban on porn, but has wasted any goodwill they have with any prior users after literally erasing them with little to no warning. You can disable the spoilers / blurs in your account settings, and allow NSFW to show up in searches, though NSFW does not seem to appear in your feed, even if you follow NSFW accounts. They claim they'd like to support activitypub at some point, though all this will allow is for their users to interact with the rest of the web, as it doesn't seem like the kind of thing anyone will be likely to join going forward. The only reason I don't put this lower is because there is still a community on there, for what it's worth. I'd not recommend making an account here if you do not absolutely have to.
- Wordpress is a lot like tumblr, but lacks the social aspect, so there's no way for posts to spread without another platform. You can follow people, but can't interact with their posts, can't re-post them, or otherwise. Have sparingly seen people try to use this as an art platform, and it works as a gallery, but not for much else. Intends to support activitypub at some point, for what it's worth.
- pillowfortallows public sign-ups now, I think? nope, closed beta w/ 5$ entry fee. not worth bothering with. it is majorly clunky and isn't sure if it wants to be tumblr or twitter or even work half of the time. I won't put this in the lower category, if only because it hasn't become horrifying and obviously greedy yet. it gives me the vibe that it is very open to that kind of corruption, however. Extorting 5$ from people just to see what's there is pretty lame in my book but whatever.
- inkbunny is full of pedophiles and has been for years. Anyone unaware of this will very quickly find out how much cub there is there when they try to turn off the NSFW filter.
STAY AWAY: These platforms are worse than the plantation many people are currently in. They are actively hostile towards users and are on the path to end up the same way that twitter has, or are already dead.
- newtumbl is dead (officially offline) as of June 8, 2023. They enforced a bunch of random DMCA claims against their already miniscule userbase, a bunch of people got mad about it, and then they shut down because the remaining people and good faith they had evaporated.
- Threads is a twitter / mastodon clone that federates through activitypub. But it's owned and run by facebook so is immediately unfriendly to real humans. Also officially doesn't allow NSFW so it's pointless to artists.
- Facebook is not a social network, it is a tracking tool. Stay far away.
- Instagram is also terrible and owned by facebook / meta so I cannot recommend it in good faith
Not applicable: These sites really don't offer options to host images in the sense that twitter / FA / e621 do. I am putting these here because I have heard them brought up in conversations about where to go previously. I presume out of desperation.
- e621 has no follow system in the sense that the others do, so people can't get notifications when you post new things. I still recommend posting here, of course, but it's not exactly social media.
- subscribestar/patreon/kofi are anti-social platforms, have no inherent method of spreading content, and are exclusively for supporting creators. Non-paying users cannot see content unless specified by the creator per-post.
- Artstation is a professional portfolio type site, not specifically for sharing works to an audience. I believe NSFW is allowed, but spoilered, and does not show up in public search results.
- Odysee is more of a youtube alternative than twitter, but you can technically upload any type of content you want (image, video, text, files, etc.), since it and LBRY are just a peer-to-peer file sharing platform. You can follow people and so on as well. It is not really made to support anything but video, however. There is absolutely not a community there for artists, in any case. It is largely used to host alt-political content that was banned from mainstream platforms and also files for 3d printing for some reason. It's good for the latter one, at least. (UPDATE 10-30-23: the company that hosts Odysee is supposedly going bankrupt, so this will no longer be a thing for most people very soon. The network it runs on, LBRY, is decentralized and peer-to-peer, but the website itself and the bandwidth people use to interact with it are hosted by a single company. If they do go under, the site will likely become unusable, and the only way to view content from the LBRY network will be through a custom client or if someone else makes a web interface for it.)
- derpibooru/aryion are specialty sites and really more tailored as boorus and forums than social networking sites
- piczel and picarto.tv have posting abilities, but they're really streaming sites, not image hosting or social sites
- pixiv is for japanese artists, but not specifically furries. Unsure of the acceptance there of Americans/Europeans or non-professional artists.
- discord is not a social network. Also a horrifying plantation like FB / Insta / Twitter. Giant mainstream company in silicon valley run by ex-FB and ex-Twitter goons. Candidate for replacement and likely to start dying more noticeably when they do the next big dumb decision that pisses off all their users. The most recent one was the username change. They have largely been silent since then. (edit 11-05-23: they have introduced more aggressive user message scanning to enforce their braindead TOS, including "Intellectual Property violations," whatever that means to discord. Stay away, find another way to talk to people. Discord needs to go the way of Skype ASAP.)
- GAB, Minds and Truth Social are political platforms (and very one-sided at that) so normal people don't want to join. Not really made for posting art in any sense, and the communities there are basically just extremist political groups. Not friendly to furries or probably artists in general.
Anything more obscure than that is a lost cause IMO. nobody is going to use weasyl, or myspace, or like, some internet forum specifically for women with menopause or something. I'll list those here anyway for completeness.
- inkblot.art General art hosting site, largely used by furries. Really only good as a gallery, like FA.
- Furrynetwork Retort to 2015-2016-ish FA when people were freaking out and trying to leave then. I believe this was in response to the IMVU acquisition of the site. IMVU has since returned ownership to Dragoneer, some time in 2021.
- Sofurry FA clone from 2008-ish. Has not changed at all since then and seems to be running on the bare minimum bandwidth to support the dwindling userbase there. Good for a backup gallery but not much else. Very clunky and slow.
- weasyl FA clone from 2010s-ish. DOA because it requires account verification to even use which takes literally months, if it ever even happens. I put in a request for verification 6 months ago and it still has not been approved as of nov 05 2023.
- myspace not really useful to anyone anymore
- transfur TF-specific furry site
- GNUsocial doesn't work and hasn't for a while now
- MISSKEY a mastodon clone. Technically software rather than a platform
- Pleroma / Akkoma a mastodon clone, also technically server software rather than a proper platform. Federates with other fediverse crap through activitypub.
- Socialhome DOA, requires account approval from the domain admin who no longer seems to be alive. Truthfully more of a tech demo than a real site.
- Enjin used to host free isolated forums and websites, kind of like reddit but smaller. Now they run some NFT grift nonsense. Very sad.
- Reddit has furry sub-forums and forums for specific niches, but the air of the site really is not conducive to posting porn. It's also very politically charged and toxic, and seems to currently be dying due to their API thing.
- Telegram is really more of a texting platform, but i have seen people use it with a sort of newsletter-type channel or server that they send their art to. This is about as close as I have seen anyone get to just regressing back to RSS feeds in the last like 10 years.
I'm including a list of Discord alternatives as well, just for the hell of it.
- Revolt (best so far, missing video chat / screen sharing. very limited file uploads @ ~15mb. No clear monetization method.)
- Matrix (decentralized, does not have custom emoji. Very feature-rich but also lacks most of the things people actually used from discord. Complicated and unfriendly to end-users.)
- Slack (Made for enterprise users. Servers require payment PER-USER from the host, and pricing is unsustainable for normal people. Not useful to anyone other than businesses, though has full feature parity with discord and then some.)
- Telegram (lacks server functionality beyond single-channel group chats of ~10 people. Lacks screen sharing, but has video calls (no screen sharing). only good as an alternative to texting / iMessage for apple people.)
- Signal (same as telegram)
- Jami (same as telegram)
- Session (same as telegram)
- Rocketchat (individually hosted server system. Not even close to usable for normal people.)
- Steam (You can upload images and stuff now)
- Skype (people left skype for discord because it was awful. same as telegram, functionally. Also turned into microsoft teams, which people hate.)
Unfortunately, Twitter can't die, because people will just keep using it, since there is nowhere else for them to go. The platforms that exist currently as alternatives are all either unstable, inconsistent, untrustworthy, dead, or some combination of those four.
Discord is suffering from comfort in complacency as well, having been around since 2015 and having made untold billions of dollars thus far. Unfortunately, their management was totally gutted and replaced by ex-facebook and ex-twitter staff who have turned even that into a cesspit. Prior employees are review-bombing the company on glassdoor and the platform itself seems to be becoming adversarial towards its users. The username change thing is just the most recent cut of the thousand it deems necessary to wear people down with for some reason.
I've compiled a list of platforms that people might end up migrating to if anyone ever ends up motivated enough to actually leave. This list is absolutely not exhaustive, but it contains all of the ones I was able to find that had anything resembling life on them. I doubt anyone is going to "move" and we'll all just end up having to access 15 different sites at all times to see all of the users we're watching / following, until a postybirb equivalent comes along for end-user use, but I figure it's better to have the information out there. I've tried to order it by best to worst in terms of support for artists and people who want to view their art.
If everything ends up totally discombobulated, I recommend postybirb: https://www.postybirb.com/. You can more quickly upload art to multiple places at once. Twitter's API thing broke this, but it works for most other places.
Good IMO: these are all fine platforms from what I can tell / have experienced. They work and there are either people using them or there is the potential for migration to them.
- Mastodon / Activitypub Was in a much worse state than it is currently during the last attempt at an exodus from twitter. When I say Mastodon, I am referring to the entire platform style, including stuff like: Mastodon, Misskey, Micro.blog, Friendica, Pleroma/Akkoma, WriteFreely, etc. I personally recommend Akkoma over base mastodon, but I only do so because I have experience with it. There are likely other flavors out there that do the same or similar things and work just as well. It is effectively a FOSS and decentralized version of twitter. Decentralized in the peer-to-peer / torrenting sense, not the scumbag crypto scammer-y sense. Anyone can host an instance using whichever of the aforementioned systems they want (or something totally unique), and it will basically just work, and connect to every other instance as if each instance is part of one big central site, like Twitter or Instagram. I recommend this one with the caveat that you should either join a large and crowd-funded instance, or a small one run by a personal friend or yourself. Data retention and permanence is a big issue when everything is hosted on what is usually a dinky little homeserver in someone's basement, so hosting your own or knowing the person who hosts it will provide assurance that your instance won't just one day poof out of existence along with your account. If you must use a public instance, I recommend either Mastodon.social, aka the OG, or one of the furry-specific ones, from this list here: https://furryfediverse.org/
- itaku is great for artists, but their UI is not the best in the world, in terms of usability. Some of the way things are placed and how feeds work is confounding, but they do have feature parity with FA and then some. They're supported by patreon donations.
- Cohost had a rough start and is still very clunky but seems functionally the same as pillowfort. They are not very large and there is currently not much draw to them, but they have said they intend to support activitypub at some point in the future, so they may eventually fold into the mastodon-alikes and be a good choice if you like their interface.
- afterdark.art is a lot like furrynetwork UI-wise and works basically like FA. It's not great for sharing things but it works well as an art gallery.
Not great: These platforms are either past their prime / missed their chance, or don't really serve a function that would make people want to use them. These may be useful as backups.
- Bluesky social is being created by the former CEO of twitter,
- FA was a good candidate but now is also being stupid about file upload limits and so on.
- deviantart is both a laughing stock to people who used to use it and a weird middle child like newgrounds where some really big artists are there but they're basically the only reason people use it
- newgrounds exists and probably will continue to for the foreseeable future but same problems as deviantart, being that most people associate it mentally with cringe-y mid-2010s culture. It is unfortunately functionally the same as it was in the mid-2010s. It is not likely to grow much into the future.
- you could self-host your own website like the good old days but most artists don't have enough money or computer experience to do that. Search engines also aren't what they used to be and I really don't think an RSS feed for every artist is the way to go here or what people are going to use going forward, as cool as that would be. (most mastodon-alikes do have RSS, if you'd like to go that way as a viewer! I recommend QuiteRSS if you need a client.)
- there's neocities, but again, size limits and programming experience. For context, neocities is basically a free do-it-yourself, all-in-one website with optional paid features for more storage and whatever else. You can have multiple pages and run scripts and access a database and a bunch of other stuff, though all of this is true of most other methods for which you could pay to host.
Largely pointless: These are sites that have not been maintained, are becoming unusable, or are not tailored towards hosting and viewing art. Some of these may be good sites in general, but they are not good replacements for FA or Twitter.
- tumblr has rescinded the total ban on porn, but has wasted any goodwill they have with any prior users after literally erasing them with little to no warning. You can disable the spoilers / blurs in your account settings, and allow NSFW to show up in searches, though NSFW does not seem to appear in your feed, even if you follow NSFW accounts. They claim they'd like to support activitypub at some point, though all this will allow is for their users to interact with the rest of the web, as it doesn't seem like the kind of thing anyone will be likely to join going forward. The only reason I don't put this lower is because there is still a community on there, for what it's worth. I'd not recommend making an account here if you do not absolutely have to.
- Wordpress is a lot like tumblr, but lacks the social aspect, so there's no way for posts to spread without another platform. You can follow people, but can't interact with their posts, can't re-post them, or otherwise. Have sparingly seen people try to use this as an art platform, and it works as a gallery, but not for much else. Intends to support activitypub at some point, for what it's worth.
- pillowfort
- inkbunny is full of pedophiles and has been for years. Anyone unaware of this will very quickly find out how much cub there is there when they try to turn off the NSFW filter.
STAY AWAY: These platforms are worse than the plantation many people are currently in. They are actively hostile towards users and are on the path to end up the same way that twitter has, or are already dead.
- newtumbl is dead (officially offline) as of June 8, 2023. They enforced a bunch of random DMCA claims against their already miniscule userbase, a bunch of people got mad about it, and then they shut down because the remaining people and good faith they had evaporated.
- Threads is a twitter / mastodon clone that federates through activitypub. But it's owned and run by facebook so is immediately unfriendly to real humans. Also officially doesn't allow NSFW so it's pointless to artists.
- Facebook is not a social network, it is a tracking tool. Stay far away.
- Instagram is also terrible and owned by facebook / meta so I cannot recommend it in good faith
Not applicable: These sites really don't offer options to host images in the sense that twitter / FA / e621 do. I am putting these here because I have heard them brought up in conversations about where to go previously. I presume out of desperation.
- e621 has no follow system in the sense that the others do, so people can't get notifications when you post new things. I still recommend posting here, of course, but it's not exactly social media.
- subscribestar/patreon/kofi are anti-social platforms, have no inherent method of spreading content, and are exclusively for supporting creators. Non-paying users cannot see content unless specified by the creator per-post.
- Artstation is a professional portfolio type site, not specifically for sharing works to an audience. I believe NSFW is allowed, but spoilered, and does not show up in public search results.
- Odysee is more of a youtube alternative than twitter, but you can technically upload any type of content you want (image, video, text, files, etc.), since it and LBRY are just a peer-to-peer file sharing platform. You can follow people and so on as well. It is not really made to support anything but video, however. There is absolutely not a community there for artists, in any case. It is largely used to host alt-political content that was banned from mainstream platforms and also files for 3d printing for some reason. It's good for the latter one, at least. (UPDATE 10-30-23: the company that hosts Odysee is supposedly going bankrupt, so this will no longer be a thing for most people very soon. The network it runs on, LBRY, is decentralized and peer-to-peer, but the website itself and the bandwidth people use to interact with it are hosted by a single company. If they do go under, the site will likely become unusable, and the only way to view content from the LBRY network will be through a custom client or if someone else makes a web interface for it.)
- derpibooru/aryion are specialty sites and really more tailored as boorus and forums than social networking sites
- piczel and picarto.tv have posting abilities, but they're really streaming sites, not image hosting or social sites
- pixiv is for japanese artists, but not specifically furries. Unsure of the acceptance there of Americans/Europeans or non-professional artists.
- discord is not a social network. Also a horrifying plantation like FB / Insta / Twitter. Giant mainstream company in silicon valley run by ex-FB and ex-Twitter goons. Candidate for replacement and likely to start dying more noticeably when they do the next big dumb decision that pisses off all their users. The most recent one was the username change. They have largely been silent since then. (edit 11-05-23: they have introduced more aggressive user message scanning to enforce their braindead TOS, including "Intellectual Property violations," whatever that means to discord. Stay away, find another way to talk to people. Discord needs to go the way of Skype ASAP.)
- GAB, Minds and Truth Social are political platforms (and very one-sided at that) so normal people don't want to join. Not really made for posting art in any sense, and the communities there are basically just extremist political groups. Not friendly to furries or probably artists in general.
Anything more obscure than that is a lost cause IMO. nobody is going to use weasyl, or myspace, or like, some internet forum specifically for women with menopause or something. I'll list those here anyway for completeness.
- inkblot.art General art hosting site, largely used by furries. Really only good as a gallery, like FA.
- Furrynetwork Retort to 2015-2016-ish FA when people were freaking out and trying to leave then. I believe this was in response to the IMVU acquisition of the site. IMVU has since returned ownership to Dragoneer, some time in 2021.
- Sofurry FA clone from 2008-ish. Has not changed at all since then and seems to be running on the bare minimum bandwidth to support the dwindling userbase there. Good for a backup gallery but not much else. Very clunky and slow.
- weasyl FA clone from 2010s-ish. DOA because it requires account verification to even use which takes literally months, if it ever even happens. I put in a request for verification 6 months ago and it still has not been approved as of nov 05 2023.
- myspace not really useful to anyone anymore
- transfur TF-specific furry site
- GNUsocial doesn't work and hasn't for a while now
- MISSKEY a mastodon clone. Technically software rather than a platform
- Pleroma / Akkoma a mastodon clone, also technically server software rather than a proper platform. Federates with other fediverse crap through activitypub.
- Socialhome DOA, requires account approval from the domain admin who no longer seems to be alive. Truthfully more of a tech demo than a real site.
- Enjin used to host free isolated forums and websites, kind of like reddit but smaller. Now they run some NFT grift nonsense. Very sad.
- Reddit has furry sub-forums and forums for specific niches, but the air of the site really is not conducive to posting porn. It's also very politically charged and toxic, and seems to currently be dying due to their API thing.
- Telegram is really more of a texting platform, but i have seen people use it with a sort of newsletter-type channel or server that they send their art to. This is about as close as I have seen anyone get to just regressing back to RSS feeds in the last like 10 years.
I'm including a list of Discord alternatives as well, just for the hell of it.
- Revolt (best so far, missing video chat / screen sharing. very limited file uploads @ ~15mb. No clear monetization method.)
- Matrix (decentralized, does not have custom emoji. Very feature-rich but also lacks most of the things people actually used from discord. Complicated and unfriendly to end-users.)
- Slack (Made for enterprise users. Servers require payment PER-USER from the host, and pricing is unsustainable for normal people. Not useful to anyone other than businesses, though has full feature parity with discord and then some.)
- Telegram (lacks server functionality beyond single-channel group chats of ~10 people. Lacks screen sharing, but has video calls (no screen sharing). only good as an alternative to texting / iMessage for apple people.)
- Signal (same as telegram)
- Jami (same as telegram)
- Session (same as telegram)
- Rocketchat (individually hosted server system. Not even close to usable for normal people.)
- Steam (You can upload images and stuff now)
- Skype (people left skype for discord because it was awful. same as telegram, functionally. Also turned into microsoft teams, which people hate.)
paws
Posted 2 years agopaaaaaaaaaaaaaws
:)
:)
does anyone actually read these
Posted 3 years agoi just click nuke every time, does that make me a bad person
