foxyoreos (they/them, commissions open)

It really is kind of of embarrassing to look at the amount of VC money dropped into Bluesky and to compare it to how much more useful Postybirb is for artists without any of that investment.

It would not be hard for a few wealthier furries or developers with a lot more free time to *vastly* improve the state of the ecosystem, just by doing shit like updating the program to take advantage of new features, fix performance issues, etc..

Postybirb is really efficient, development-wise.

Worth adding to this, Postybirb is developed with a minuscule fraction of the resources that go to any part of Bluesky - and still manages to be one of the most useful artist tools I have.

If more of the resources being plugged into decentralized protocols were plugged into Postybirb..

If you're worried about censorship of that kind of art, it's just unquestionably better for different gallery sites to be making different tradeoffs and allowing different subsets of art on them.

But it's really not as simple as just moving to a different state. The only way I can think of for FA to allow cub is for it to get a lot *more* censorious about other categories of art.

And some sites like Inkbunny make that tradeoff, but it is a tradeoff and not one that every site should make.

There IS away out of that system, but only through coordinated, mass-organized political advocacy for the merits of NSFW and sex workers to produce legal art - and that will likely take multiple years of consistent effort.

It is a thing that NSFW artists *need* to do, it will get worse otherwise.

Inkbunny doesn't have to ban cub *because* it bans art with humans (and with humanoid characters). e621 similarly has rules on how animal a picture needs to be, and they've sited.. restrictions from payment processors and financial partners.

This is almost universal.

Sure, but my point is you all are going to have to make some kind of tradeoff short of taking political action (which, if you'd like to take political action, see stop-paypros.neocities.org)

But the sites you're looking at that don't ban cub only get around that restriction by banning other art.

If you were an artist hit by the 2.7 bans, I fully 100% understand saying, "well fuck that I'm not going back." That is reasonable. I was not shy about how I felt about FA's handling of that situation.

I'm saying, as somepony who was not shy about how I felt about ANY of that, I recommend FA now.

But, Furaffinity is not a bad site to include in your galleries. I'm optimistic about the site's future.

This is why, as artists, we use multiple galleries. Itaku (afaik) doesn't currently use Cloudflare. My own gallery doesn't either.

Where tags are concerned, of all sites, Aryion(!!) now has the best filtering tools of any artist gallery I use. Speaking of how things can change.

Use multiple sites.

That's not to say you should only use FA or that there are no issues.

The site is still very clunky. 2.7 changed in a way that was acceptable to me, but is still broader than most other furry galleries I'm on. FA is going through Cloudflare, which can be an accessibility issue.

I spent a while where I offered commission discounts purely for coordinating the commission off of FA.

I wanted critters to leave the site, move on, go to better places.

It's not nothing that I think it's now a better art platform than Bluesky.

> with no notice

No, better than "with no notice." They really publicly apologized and made some very public commitments.

As far as I'm concerned, FA is a model for how to turn a site around.

If you go back a year and look at my writing about FA, I was convinced the site *couldn't* be salvaged.

The way you protect yourself isn't with decentralization or by finding the perfect be-all-end-all site, it's by having redundancy.

Like I'll add to that - you shouldn't just upload your art to FA.

Critters really really really want to find the one site that they can go all-in on, and the answer is you don't do that.

One of the reasons why I like my galleries to diverge a *tiny* bit is to encourage users to use multiple sites.

I absolutely trust FA moderators today more than Bluesky moderators, *especially* on subjects affecting queer/trans users. It's not even a contest.

And if there's stuff I make that can't go on FA.. that's WHY I don't use a mono-gallery. My galleries purposefully diverge between sites a little.

I have no qualms being critical of FA's decisions, I have HARSH stuff I wrote on FA about the impact of its policies - I didn't take any of that down, you can still find blog posts on FA where I talk about the site feeding into anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The site has gone a long way to gain back trust.

I need to sit down and write up something longer about this, but Bluesky's "credible exit" is a poor substitution for just *being on multiple sites*.

And speaking as somepony who a year ago was *trying to lead migrations away from FA*, it's not the same site it was a year ago.

Mono-galleries are a larger risk to you as an artist than any centralized platform. Precisely for this reason!

Every gallery that I'm on - literally every one - has different content standards. If a piece I draw falls afoul of one, it'll still be everywhere else.

But if you're looking for a site that allows anything - there isn't one. Everything is tradeoffs.

Inkbunny has categories of porn you can't upload. So does e621.

Every site is going to have its own standards on where they want to draw lines - but if an accidental violation is "hey, we think this character looks slightly young" and not "get off the site predator", that changes the dynamic a LOT.

And FA has that better enforcement now as far as I can tell.

The bigger issue for me as somepony who draws cute Pokemon was that the old FA staff treated it like defacto cub if it fell afoul of the rules - you'd get banned out of nowhere.

The newer rules feel much more artist-friendly - context is considered and the whole thing feels less accusatory.

e621 is.. kinda its own thing. But has also been running into legal problems with this afaik.

I'm not passing judgement on anypony, but it is very believable to me that FA would face legal risk from hosting cub.

Inkbunny bans human artwork for exactly this reason - there are human/Pokemon pairings I've done that can't be posted on Inkbunny. Ironically, post-mod rollover and with better Pokemon rules, FA is now less restrictive for my art than Inkbunny.

How do they BANK!?

Again, I realize it's pawbably not the same critters saying this, but that the bar for avoiding Discord is "go buy a *second phone*", and the bar for avoiding FA is "I'd have to paste a password instead of clicking the Discord button"..

It just feels like different standards, ya' know? >w<

I understand not everyone is the same, etc etc, but I will point out that as an artist, when I've told critters Discord won't verify my account with my phone number I've gotten multiple suggestions that I should research and buy a burner phone or secondary number.

It's a happy ending for everypony! <3

....It's a happy ending for almost everypony, with one notable, very small, fluffy, bunny shaped exception! <3

"Funding the Forest" is a thing I set up where multiple critters can help fund original comics/art in ongoing settings like the Forest, and Max the Eevee.

Contributors don't get any input into how the stories go, but they do get early access to WIPs while I'm drawing them <3