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argonvile

My furry gallery recommendations

After FurAffinity started doing its FurAffinity thing in 2018 or so -- I signed up for many, many different galleries! I was worried about being permanently banned and did not want to lose all of my friends. I have since developed an appreciation for which galleries are good and which ones aren't. Now that Twitter is sort of doing the whole Twitter thing, maybe people are wondering where to migrate to and gosh, do I have some advice for you!

My short answer is that e621 is the best choice for a gallery (they have absolutely ridiculous features), and InkBunny is the best choice for a community (they are the least restrictive, and offer many features other galleries lack). FurAffinity has issues with heavy-handed moderation and the lack of a keyword blocklist (you will either be mentally scarred by paddington bear vomit art -- or suspended when someone discovers your paddington bear vomit art.) Newgrounds has less traffic but a surprisingly healthy furry/rule34 community.

There are a few other contenders which would be nice if they only had more traffic! I really have nothing negative to say about SoFurry or ArtConomy except that they are not popular. Why aren't they popular? Maybe you should open a SoFurry account so the world can make more sense.

If you'd like to see a more detailed breakdown you can read my notes below.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ e621
++ extraordinary keyword/filtering/sorting abilities, e.g "bowser -female -animation date:month order:random"
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ community-driven tags alleviate the burden on submitters
++ strict unambiguous tags makes it easy to filter your art
++ images are linked to other galleries
++ supports localization of dialog (japanese/english translations)
+ friendly moderators and a highly active discord
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- lacking typical community features, no journals, no watchers

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ inkbunny
++ front page of keyword-blacklisted popular images increases discoverability of new artists
+ allows most uploads (except for humans)
+ highly active community
+ robust community-driven keywords; users can suggest keywords which you can accept/reject
+ supports multi-image submissions for comics or alternate versions
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- reputation as a repository for underage material
-- neglectful moderators, often taking 6-12 months to respond to a ticket

⭐⭐⭐⭐ furaffinity
++ incredibly responsive moderation team, i have submitted many trouble tickets which are always resolved within 24 hours
++ extremely active community
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
- front page is dominated by advertisements, reminders, YCHes, commission notices
- no keyword blocklist
-- suspends you for linking to other galleries

⭐⭐⭐⭐ newgrounds
++ you can still play monster mind on newgrounds via the newgrounds player
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
+ surprisingly active furry/rule34 community
+ lenient takedown policy; offending art is deleted but there is no further punishment
- their brutally honest five-star rating system is a real blow to morale

⭐⭐⭐ twitter
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
++ extremely active community, especially for images which go viral
- strict character limit on text posts
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- no keywords, cannot search images by content
-- cannot block offensive content by keyword/subject matter. god help you if you enjoy a furry artist who also posts RL nudes
-- overall abysmal browsing experience, worst than all other gallery sites including buggy sites still in beta

⭐⭐⭐ furrynetwork
- cannot reupload submissions
- dead community

⭐⭐⭐ pixiv
+ reliable hosting and infrastructure, seasoned administrators
+ responsive moderators
-- terrible keywords; many ambiguous/conflicting keywords and a ten keyword limit
-- lacking standard community features, no journals, no social links
-- all NSFW images must be censored
-- charges a monthly fee for keyword blocklists
-- charges a monthly fee to sort search results

⭐⭐⭐ sofurry
+ exposes API to automate uploads
- dead community

⭐⭐ deviantart
+ has been around for forever -- so they are unlikely to close soon
- no NSFW material

⭐⭐ itaku
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
- cannot reupload submissions
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
-- just opened in 2020; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community

⭐⭐ artconomy
++ allows all uploads (nick wilde, zangief, spyro, olimar, etc...)
-- just opened in 2018; future is uncertain
-- completely dead community

pillowfort
- all submissions default to SFW, making it easy to accidentally leak NSFW material
- other users' NSFW material is blocked by default, but this is not made clear through their UI
-- terrible browsing experience; cannot view more than 1-2 images at once
-- everything is broken; attempting to view notifications or search for art results in long wait times or errors
-- completely dead community

weasyl
-- bans/suspends users with no reasons given, not even specifying which characters violated a rule
-- absurdly unresponsive moderators who have literally never responded to a single ticket or inquiry
-- completely dead community
Viewed: 435 times
Added: 1 year, 5 months ago
 
Ruaidhri
1 year, 5 months ago
Reading this does make me wish there were more, better, furry art sites. There's so few and only like.. 3 or so are active.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Every once in a while a new one comes out and it's like, "This place is great! ...I wish there were people here!"
Ruaidhri
1 year, 5 months ago
Yeah, which FA is slowly losing users, so, hopefully, it'll make the rise in popularity of new furry art sites happen.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
most months, i get more favs on FA than IB... but more watches on IB than FA! this month is no exception (FA has more favs; 2700-2300 -- but IB has more watches 44-39)

it's a cool trend because i guess it implies people are moving over here! i don't know about people leaving FurAffinity -- from my experience both sites seem to be experiencing slightly decreased traffic. Or maybe I'm just becoming less popular!
Ruaidhri
1 year, 5 months ago
FA, mainly, is experiencing decrease in traffic because people are getting fed up with it being outdated, unfulfilled promises, constant raids from anti-furries and weirdos, and an incompetent owner.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I have kept rigorous notes on my favs/watches for the past year, so here are some numbers for you to evaluate

(year-month: FA faves / watches, IB faves / watches)
2022-01: FA 3101 / 55, IB 2900 / 70
2022-02: FA 5189 / 62, IB 4151 / 101
2022-03: FA 3613 / 55, IB 3649 / 97
2022-04: FA 5092 / 86, IB 4018 / 97
2022-05: FA 4504 / 86, IB 3523 / 62
2022-06: FA 4429 / 59, IB 3866 / 72
2022-07: FA 4016 / 59, IB 2160 / 66
2022-08: FA 4142 / 55, IB 3256 / 77
2022-09: FA 3672 / 58, IB 3266 / 61
2022-10: FA 4250 / 69, IB 3307 / 49

My upload volume is surprisingly consistent (about 20 uploads a month to FA, and about 25 uploads a month to IB) but there is of course still a lot of noise in how popular my uploads are. But on FurAffinity i get about 4,000 faves / 60 watches a month and that has not declined recently. On InkBunny I get about 3,600 faves / 80 watches a month and interestingly, that HAS declined a lot since July

I'd love to see a more reliable/non-argon-centric web traffic report, but I think this is better than nothing
TalentlessHack
1 year, 5 months ago
I'm sorry, really gonna have to disagree on that e621 take.

1.) They're literally taking your work and driving traffic to advertisements without permission in most cases.
2.) Abusive moderation.
3.) Artists have little to no control over what tags are applied to artwork.
4.) Subjective tags are driven by user complaints, not a system that is public to the eye.
5.) The entire cuntboy/trans argument (reiterated abusive administration.)
6.) Complete lack of transparency.

I have a lot more on the subject, but I'll spare you unless you really want to get into the nitty gritty here.
Dylanamin
1 year, 5 months ago
e621 is also overbearing when it comes to their "no creepy comments" and "tag vandalism" rules where they will literally permaban you for being horny on a porn website or making mistakes while tagging
PaintBass
1 year, 5 months ago
Also there's a quality floor not allowing for rough sketches or first-time artists (which is only acceptable if they're also underage), and the community LOVES to downvote instead of using their blacklist properly, then complain about the content or bitch when reminded about the blacklist.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I really remembered e621 leaving really nasty hurtful comments on my older pictures -- and then when I went back to find some examples I couldn't find any!

I'm a little paranoid I just imagined the whole thing... it's almost reassuring to hear about how nasty they are to other people! Maybe I'm not crazy... It really did happen! I remember it!
PaintBass
1 year, 5 months ago
Comments downvoted enough are hidden; you have to click "Show All Comments" to see them
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
yeah, i know about that part and i looked for them!

https://e621.net/posts/215988 here's a weird ass chess pic from 2006

https://e621.net/posts/223882 here's a pretty scuffed looking hypno imho

https://e621.net/posts/656208 and here's a bunch of old colored sketches with a bunch of comments

the e621 crowd never bashes my art or says it sucks, at worst they're like "whoa trubbish, that's weird". honestly -- i had more shade thrown from comments on FurAffinity #1 #2 #3, they're all "it seems like you're about quantity over quality," "ack the nose" "the neck looks weird" and they don't even mean it as an insult -- just as more of a educational, "just so you know, you're drawing a ton of stuff but it's all shit". it's like thanks i guess!!! okay
MomartikPSITIME
1 year, 5 months ago
Welp, for here on IB, I blame them for not doing like esix with their aliases or "includes" on keywords
That's hecking handy to find stuff
For example on esix, if I want to find ws content, I'll type "urine" and it will find those tagged as "watersports", "pee", "peeing", "piss" and so on, it help when all taggers don't have the same words for the same thing, which doesn't seem to be the case here
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
When artists want control over their own keywords over their own pictures, you just can't really police it. A system as stringent as e621's really requires taking power away from artists and giving it to moderators or the community. I don't think it could ever work on an artist's personal gallery site

InkBunny strikes a cool balance where you can suggest keywords to add. But you still can't look at a random artist's submission and be like "Dude, 'cute boy' is not a tag, and 'gaysex' is not a tag... Just tag it gay or m/m"
MomartikPSITIME
1 year, 5 months ago
Well I never saw esix as an artist page, more like a good mix of different galleries, and the "tag what you see" policy with the source being the truth in case of doubt is pretty fine by me
Like if you want to look for specific things, that's often what I would want to have available x)
That's why to me esix should always be a complement to websites like IB where artists have power over their own gallery
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
yeah basically

as i typed the whole "...it couldn't work on an artist's personal gallery site" sentence I did some thinking, and realized it COULD work if somehow there were like two tiers of keywords, the artist's "here's the keywords i want" and then the community/moderators "well too bad, here's the keywords you're getting" and those are the ones that matter. ha ha

overall though I totally agree, I don't think anybody would be happy with just having one or the other -- it's good to have both
MomartikPSITIME
1 year, 5 months ago
Fact is it's not often that the artist post art himself on esix, most of the time it's others x)
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Oh for sure, I just started doing it a month ago! It got to where others were uploading EVERY single picture i drew and I started feeling guilty like -- "well if they're going to do that anyway... then it's easier for them if I do it" ha ha. I hope they're glad I'm doing it and that they don't feel bummed out that I'm stealing their "e621 karma" or whatever!
MomartikPSITIME
1 year, 5 months ago
Haha maybe, who knows their intention…
Anyway, it's always better when artists upload art there theirselves, tho I guess you already post to FA and IB at least, so it's already a lot
Also, for the underage content here on IB, I see it as a + more than a - x) and it's not really a reputation, it's just a fact, one of the too few many places where it's allowed and supported
Plus even you have few pieces tagged as cub ;) not sure a lotta places you mentionned would allow said pieces
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
i upload my "cub" art (bowser jr, koopalings, spyro the dragon, etc) to five sites: Artconomy, e621, Inkbunny, Itaku and Twitter. I don't upload it to the remaining sites (FurAffinity, Pillowfort, Newgrounds) either because I have firsthand experience of takedowns/suspensions, or because I have heard from others that they will take action

I don't care about a site's reputation or intended use, I just care what I'm able to use it for. FurAffinity was intended as a "furry site" but I don't really like anthropomorphic animals -- I like cool rule34 monsters and Pokemon and skeletons. FurAffinity is cool with that. InkBunny has a reputation as a "cub site" but I don't really like underage characters, I draw random shit like Spyro the Dragon, Kamek, Riolu and Sparkster. Other sites have some weird beef with 50% of those characters so, y'know, InkBunny works for me. Imgur is explicitly against nudity/sexual content, but I still use it to share images with my customers. I've never gotten in trouble with Imgur but maybe I will some day!
DownThePipes
1 year, 5 months ago
I appreciate this dude
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Hope it helps in some way! I hope you think about signing up for some of the lower popularity furry sites on my list, they could use the boost. Let's build some communities 🌈
Graedius
1 year, 5 months ago
How big of a pain in the ass is it to upload to e621?   I've wanted to, but like.  the tagging requirements are so insane that it's been too daunting to even consider... l3
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
If you want to do it CORRECTLY, like about 50-100 tags, then it's like... 5-10 minutes per picture which sucks

Personally I just submit basic tags -- characters, genders, sex positions. I thought I'd catch a lot of grief from people being like "hey asshole tag your stuff properly!!! don't make us do it!". According to an e621 mod I spoke with most users just use basic tags (male, female, order:score) so as long as you just tag that it's fine
Dirtsky
1 year, 5 months ago
While IB does not allow human nsfw art, you can still provide an outside link in the description that leads to said art.

Have you checked Baraag? It's similar to twitter in terms of UI but is the least restrictive out of all (and no crazy "sjw" users on there). But it's also a place where users upload loli/shota art so careful when browsing if you don't like that kind of stuff.
TalentlessHack
1 year, 5 months ago
Shame on that human non-allowance, but I understand the blanket ban. They don't have enough moderation to make a million subjective decisions.
Reizinho
1 year, 5 months ago
I used Baraag and I liked it, except for the fact that I can't block keywords there...
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Honestly of all the things i hate about twitter, i hate their UI the most.

I really just want to be able to look at 20-30 submission thumbnails, click through them, search by keyword and stuff like that. The entire idea of reducing a gallery to a literally 1-dimensional feed where you can only scroll in two directions is just like... why...?
Anonymless
1 year, 5 months ago
This is a fair assessment. FA, IB, twitter and e621 are all sites that I use pretty regularly. Sofurry I occasionally browse but only for stories and not art. Furrynetwork and Weasyl are sites that I hate with a passion and never use, while pixiv is a mysterious website that's hard to understand if you aren't or don't know Japanese. itaku/artconomy I've never heard of.
Currently FurAffinity is my main gallery, because it's active and because they allow humans and most of my work contains humans. If that weren't the case, IB would be my second choice. I do like it here and wish I could post my stuff here without the workarounds (like off-site hosting) but for now I just follow and fave other people's posts.
One I want to mention for authors is Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short. It's quite active, has a great tagging system and many other features. It's only for text content, but it's great for its purpose and I recommend authors/readers to check it out.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
ohhhhh interesting, thanks for the insight! never heard of AO3

i'm glad you feel i was fair and impartial. i tried hard to be objective and base my conclusions on metrics and not feelings. i made a spreadsheet!!
Skykiru
1 year, 5 months ago
e621 is not an art gallery.  If you submit your artwork and it fails to meet some arbitrary quality standards, it'll be rejected.  Which is strange considering how some low quality stuff gets approved, but who knows.

As a commissioner and not an artist, I've also had some of my commissions taken off e621 because the artist suddenly decided they no longer wanted their art hosted there.  Moderation has also permabanned people as "trolls" for merely upvoting people calling out the moderation's behavior.  

I'm glad you've had good experiences with e6, but that makes sense since they parasitize off artists' work.
TalentlessHack
1 year, 5 months ago
Parasite is a good term. They steal work but it's ok because they have a takedown form.

So if 100 (e621s) pop up, I have to issue 100 takedown notices? What makes Varka think his site is special and falls outside of the norm?

It most certainly isn't artist friendly either.

Also, everything good about e621 is about to work against artists bigtime. If you don't think AI art generators are scraping tags to train models, you're dead wrong.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I totally agree with your criticisms of e621 not being a reliable gallery. If you are a patron commissioning 5-6 artists for art, you can't really collect it at e621 -- there is no tag for "Commissioned_By_SkyKiru" or something like that.

With that said, I don't really understand the logic of simultaneously criticizing e621 for "parasitizing off artists' work" and also criticizing them because "artist suddenly decided they no longer wanted their art hosted there". I'm not really sure how they're supposed to get out of that one! I guess they could ignore takedown requests from artists, if that would make their website better...?
Snowfall
1 year, 5 months ago
I rate inkbunny above e621, though with the inactive moderators complaint i've never had to interact with any so I cant really compare
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
As far as my interactions with mods I have had 2 or 3 people leave really incisive hateful comments (calling me a pedophile, leaving death threats, things like that). And unrelated, I also wanted to donate to InkBunny twice to support the site

The first time I donated successfully! The second time they never got back to me so I didn't get to donate. Just trying to help, guys!! Shut up and take my money 💸💸
dahan
1 year, 5 months ago
Yeah, I was a regular donor, but back in January 2021, I wanted to send a couple bucks, and never got a reply. I like IB, and it's my main site, but it's definitely concerning that the admins seem absent. On the other hand, the site's Twitter is still active with reports on software upgrades, etc., which is nice. But why the silence on the site itself?
GreenReaper
9 months, 3 weeks ago
This is basically my fault, so sorry about that.

I'm the only one who can take donations as it is; they're all payments to me one way or another, ever since the host we used switched invoicing systems in early 2020 - around the time we did our last donation drive, which wasn't a coincidence - and we now can't do arbitrary third-party payments through them.

I also do most of the server upkeep. So if it's a choice between one or the other, the servers usually get my time, and tickets get neglected. Plus I've felt bad taking people's money in the pandemic/energy crisis when I know most artists need it more. I know it's confusing and disappointing people, though, so I should find some way to address this - ideally when I'm not also setting up a new main server.
argonvile
9 months, 3 weeks ago
yeah makes sense! well if you guys are ever hurting for cash hit me up and i'll give what i can, i really appreciate all of the hard work you've put into such a cool website
Draxamir
1 year, 5 months ago
Since the great tumblr exodus and my breakaway from twitter I've kinda gravitated back to newgrounds. I had the account since I was in school and back then I only used it to follow old newgrounds animators.

Nowadays I follow a plethora of NSFW artist and animators, it's been very comforting to see the platform be very welcoming to a lot of artists, however some styles or subjects get really slammed down hard so sometimes is difficult to know whats acceptable by the community on that site (ie. some inflation artists get their submissions downvoted often).

I usually give you good star reviews on that site xD but i haven't checked your overall score so I imagine you get a lot of mixed reviews.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Everything I post is rated 4-5 stars it feels great! It was rough at first -- I think when Tumblr first closed Newgrounds users were all "ahhhhhh this site sucks!!! there are all these gays here now!!" but -- something changed and now they seem cool. (Or maybe Newgrounds tweaked their algorithms so they don't see penises. I don't know!)
aeolicservant
1 year, 5 months ago
Probably two of my favorite features of IB is that you can still jump to the last page of the gallery so that you don't have to manually get there by clicking "next" one page at a time. And also that you can tag and keyword search an artist's gallery, scraps, and favorites complete with sorting filters by date submitted, date like, stars, and view count! Just... yes! I so desperately wish other sites would include these features! Just as a rule of thumb: if there is a massive list of things that a user would potentially try to sift through; let them keyword search it, please! I cannot tell you how absolutely miserable it is trying to find a tweet you liked from even a week ago on twitter...

Beware FA imo. If you post anything, and I mean anything, on FA you should treat it as if it will be there and accessible forever. FA in particular is periodically mirrored and archived. Likewise, I won't go into detail about how to do it, but to put it lightly you can access a disabled account's gallery locally on FA just by exploiting the search feature. And as far as I know the devs have known about it for years, but still haven't fixed it.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
My favorite things about InkBunny are the keyword blacklist, lenient AUP, multi-image uploads and user-submitted keywords.

Honestly it is such a nitpick -- but my least favorite thing is just the very floaty graphical appearance of the notifications tab. On FurAffinity it just has text, "Mamino replied to your submission... Lalimo replied to your submission...". I can see 30 of them at once and click-click-click through them really quick to answer comments. On InkBunny it has this huge 300-pixel star image next to a single comment -- but I can't reply to it so I have to click through to the target page, and then click to close it, and then wait while everything "ZWOOOSH" animates to fill the empty space, and then do the next one

It is like going from playing Factorio to playing Minecraft! It's like... Wait... I have to do this one at a time? And wait for this whole animation? Is there REALLY no faster way?
air6ornepig
1 year, 5 months ago
FA suspends you for linking to other galleries? This was never a rule I heard of

You can put your Inkbunny link on your profile, so what kinds of galleries will get you suspended?
Lewdotic
1 year, 5 months ago
Not so much that it's a rule, but they have been known to suspend accounts for things that were said off site. AKA complaining about FA staff on Twitter has netted some accounts bans. Really it just depends on how much you and their admins butt heads it's more restrictive for some than others, lots of favoritism going on there.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
More specifically -- I crosspost most images from InkBunny to FA, and would say "Hey, the full image is over here!" so that people could see the hi-res version. (FA caps uploads at 1280x1280 and i choose to respect that)

Usually these were the same image! But sometimes I would make edits to FA to play by their rules -- like one picture would have Tom Nook and Nooklings, and then the FA version would just have Tom Nook.

I was banned from FurAffinity and the mods admitted, "Oh -- we thought you uploaded the same picture to both sites! We didn't realize the FurAffinity picture was different. We're sorry!" It's very obvious they just have some sort of bot scraping inkbunny and looking for the "Cub" keyword, and automatically handing out bans -- even if you are playing by FA's rules. You cannot link InkBunny or you will get suspended.
air6ornepig
1 year, 5 months ago
I don't think a bot explains it. An FA mod told me directly that they only handle direct complaints (but maybe sometimes they handle things they come across themselves) after I told them they still have a bunch of unambiguous cub art that is easily searchable through keywords. This is still the case today, actually. So either a dumbass mod came across it and somehow made the mistake, or a dumbass user notified the dumbass staff and they deleted it without actually checking if you broke any rules (2 failed checks).
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
i'll caveat all this stuff happened in 2018, and stopped happening after 2018. it's totally possible that FA decided "let's be total assholes for six months," and then changed their minds or something? or that some random user came up with a script to browse e621 for images crossposted to FA and InkBunny, and batch flag anything with the "cub" keyword or something weird. there's a lot of explanations that don't contradict what you'd hear from an FA mod in 2022 but still align with my experiences back then.

2018 though was a time for mass FA bans -- it went from not being a thing, to hundreds of users being suspended every day. if the process wasn't automated, (e.g a script browsing FA for IB links, or scraping e621 for images posted to both sites) then someone was very, very, very busy. maybe it was a random user with a ton of time on their hands but i doubt it
air6ornepig
1 year, 5 months ago
Yeah, it's definitely possible they just went asshole-mode for a few months. If FA did a bot sweep, you would think there shouldn't be any cub material from that year left, but there is. That's why I'm more inclined to believe it was either rushed staff, unusually motivated users, or both.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
just curious, which specific cub art from that year is left?

there might still be cub art from that time left if they only targeted specific artists, or if the stuff you think is "cub art" isn't tagged on any other sites (IB, e621, etc). i'm not just trying to make you do extra work for no reason, but i'm curious if you look on other sites if the art was tagged as cub. my theory is it was just a keyword sweep
air6ornepig
1 year, 5 months ago
I don't want to make it easy for FA staff. I'll dm the links.

I found one cub pic with an e6 source, and there are still a few pics that look like and are labeled as cub on FA from 2018, but don't appear on e6. Most of what's left is messing/diaper art and vore, and to each their own ofc but I don't want to go digging through that just to prove a point, lol

I've had pony art of mine that was removed as far back as 2013 (i don't remember the exact years) for simply looking too "cub-ish," even though they were adults, and I had examples of what young ponies look like in the same gallery (sfw).
I'm really inclined to believe we're just the victims of mod negligence
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
awesome, thanks for doing all that! you're right there's still a few unpopular cub pics from that time, which makes it more likely it was user driven and not automated
MeusArtis
1 year, 5 months ago
Oh also, the 1280x1280 limit seems to just be a cost saving feature for people who arent aware that you can just click "Update Source File" and upload any image under 33,177,600 total pixels (still has to be under the 10MB limit tho)
It's been a thing for the last decade at least, they "added support" for uploading without resizing it to 1280 limit last year and announced it in a site update, but silently disabled that a few days later and went back to the old system of "Update Source File"
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I know about that, but they resize images for a few reasons -- one of which is that their page layouts are unusable with larger images (comments stretch off to the side and you have to scroll horizontally to get to different parts of the UI)

i choose to respect their size limitation
MeusArtis
1 year, 5 months ago
If youre talking about /full/ urls, then yeah, but most everything is displayed resized with just the normal /view/, without it mangling the images themselves (who thought it was a good idea to let animated gifs get resized into single frame low quality jpgs)
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
yeah you're right! they must have improved this in the past 3-4 years without me noticing -- wide submissions used to stretch all the pages out to where you'd have to scroll horizontally, but now it shrinks them to the browser window
matthegamer
1 year, 5 months ago
Why have I seen Twitter users hate Inkbunny because they see it as a repository for cub art but do not despise e621 for allowing the same thing?
aeolicservant
1 year, 5 months ago
I don't think anyone has the absolute answer for that, but a large percentage of twitter users that resent IB also do harbor the same sentiments for E6 as well. E6 is pretty infamous and disliked. Another thing to consider is that IB was, more or less, made for cub art. It was created around the time that FA did it's cub ban and became a hub for cub artists to coalesce. With E6 the cub art is more a biproduct of what that particular site provides whereas IB it is the main draw. For example currently the "cub" tag on E6 is around 115K submissions out of the 3,184,964 posts. That's about 3.6% of the art on there being cub art. I would imagine that percentage is much higher here
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
If you look at the front page of InkBunny and the front page of e621 I think you can answer your own question!

e621's front page is like some big dicked demon, an anthro amy rose, a raccoon with a fat guy and some vaporeon sketches

InkBunny's front page is "cub boycarrot cub" "neighbor kids" "babysitting Lori" "Explorin' with Daddy!" and what looks like ralsei in the goatse pose

Am I missing some nuance? I mean this isn't like... Subtle right? I'm not hating, InkBunny is literally my favorite gallery but I don't think it's confusing to be like... "Wow! Why do Twitter visitors seem to think InkBunny is a haven for underage porn" when the front page is nothing but
BookerTW
1 year, 5 months ago
itaku doesn't allow all content, banning at least all porn involving underage characters (presumably cub included)
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
https://itaku.ee/posts/9870?comment=3855

This literally directly conflicts what the Itaku moderator told me so I will trust their word over yours. I'm sorry!
BookerTW
1 year, 5 months ago
Lol okie dokie.
dahan
1 year, 5 months ago
That was back in March, but they changed their rules some time around May, which caused some drama with people accusing the admins of pulling a bait-and-switch, since they did promote their site as being accepting of underage characters. If you look at the current rules page, it says "Do not post art in any form that sexually depicts characters that are clearly underage according to the artist."

Aogami called them out on it and ended up getting banned; you can check out their journal with more info at https://inkbunny.net/j/451784-Aogami-thoughts-on-itaku-ee
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I see, thanks for the detailed write up! I see their rules are slightly more strict than I was told, but specifies "Characters that are underage by canon but are portrayed as adults by the artist are allowed, since by definition those characters are still adults."

I'm sort of curious about the nuance of that and whether my Spike/Bowser Jr/Whatever pictures count as "portrayed as adults". I mean I think they're describing the nuance between 'Spike getting fucked by Big Mac' and 'Spike wearing a diaper and getting fucked by his babysitter Big Mac', but maybe they'll get mad at me at some point. Hopefully they just take the Newgrounds approach of art takedowns and not the Weasyl approach of "You're suspended... and we're not telling you why! YOU know the reason! Fix it!!"

Either way, sucks they tightened up their rules! At least artists still have other options if they need full creative freedom
Lloxie
1 year, 5 months ago
e621 is absolutely the best for viewers/consumers of art, by a wide mile. Understandably can be trickier for artists though- better as a secondary site, to get noticed, maybe. But their tag system is absolutely top tier and everyone else should take notes.

IB does definitely need more staff to handle moderation issues. And the tagging isn't as rigorous as it should be, and really aught to be universal to be useful.

I had some hopes for Pillowfort, but I recently found out they're not currently planning on implementing a critical Tumblr-like feature, which means (IMO) they're going to stay as small and irrelevant as they are now, if not moreso.

Mastodon, ehhh... way too Twitter-like for my liking. I loathe that format. The decentralization aspect is nice though. Would be nice if there were other decentralized platforms like that.

FA has been forever stuck in the past, feature-wise, for a long ass time. The fact that it doesn't have a tag filter system makes it basically worthless IMO.

As far as the rest go, I can't really think of anything else to add. e621 lacks the kind of casual user interaction many people would want (comments are often a cesspit, and last I checked the forums weren't much better). But other than that it's my personal favorite site for finding art these days. As far as interaction/community go though, I don't know of a decent place unless you count discord. Nothing has really filled the niche that Tumblr filled for me for a long time.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I don't know if I was using Tumblr wrong but I never had any interaction there. I'd just post a picture and see 327 comments and it was like, "oh wow cool! 327 comments!?! I can't wait to see what people said!"

andrew12552 reblogged this
caitlyn12341 reblogged this
drewsnoo5133 reblogged this
betsy155xxx9 reblogged this
kindred151m53 reblogged this
tementl133 reblogged this
bandrew12552 reblogged this
daitlyn12341 reblogged this
erewsnoo5133 reblogged this
cetsy155xxx9 reblogged this
jindred151m53 reblogged this
sementl133 reblogged this
...

Some people said that there was a 3rd-party-app you could run to browse ACTUAL comments or something like that but I was just sort of confused why that was necessary.... why can't they just show you comments? Frankly i'm glad the site died because it was just the worst. I never had a single interaction with another human being there, but at least people would link me cool porn sometimes
Lloxie
1 year, 5 months ago
Not sure if they changed it for some reason since I left back in the big exodus, but at least for all the time I was there, reblog chains were a big thing. You could not only reblog stuff, but add your own content below it. Led to a bunch of great games, memes, etc. Including collab pics where one person would start it, then successive rebloggers could add their own characters and so on. Sadly, Pillowfort currently has no plans to recreate that, so I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

But yeah, there was an extension (XKit is the main one I know of) that added features- but this wasn't one of them. It was always just a core Tumblr feature. The defining one, even, IMO.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
oh okay, i never experienced any of that! i existed on the site for 3-4 years and never had a single social interaction from anybody. it sounds like it might have allegedly been a cool place, interesting!

i remember it being a hilariously hard site to use for basic stuff like posting links, editing pictures, or saving them. like I'd want to edit an upload there would be a "gear" button and you'd click it and it was like -- okay cool, that was easy

but then the next day you'd want to edit another upload... there is no "gear" button on this submission! it's different!?! and you find out you have to click "76 notes". 76 notes means edit! it's just... whoever designed the sites had no idea how to create an intuitive UI. pieces are appearing and disappearing,  it was the absolute worst

i mean the site is technically still up! help me out, here is a picture -- does it have any comments? i can click "show more notes" a bunch and it's just a crapton of spam. are there comments too?
Lloxie
1 year, 5 months ago
What years were you active? I'd say its peak was probably somewhere in the early half of the 2010s, heh.

Don't get me wrong, it definitely always had its issues, and I had XKit for good reasons. (For one thing, it let me filter things out that I didn't want to see, heh.) And the incompetence of the staff was kind of legendary, and consequently the butt of a lot of jokes.

As far as your link there- I see a single reblog, but that's it. Keep in mind all "notes" are lumped together- including likes. So finding comments and reblogs on a specific post is a bit annoying. Especially since, by default, it only shows you the most recent ones. XKit might have solutions for that though.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
it looks like i joined tumblr in 2013, made a few posts and reblogs for things i liked, started posting a LOT in 2018 (probably when i was suspended from FA) and then left at the end of 2018 (when they banned porn)

https://www.tumblr.com/argonvile

here is my tumblr! most of my posts are hidden (but weirdly some of them are still visible.) maybe while you are there you can tell me if i ever got any comments! 😅
PFGFrankly
1 year, 5 months ago
yah i feel out of the main 3
inkbunny
e621
furaffinity

furaffinity is the worst due to it interface to me.
 
note newgrounds and devient art are usually SFW and the best place for art post for SFW
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Newgrounds has TONS of nsfw art! But with that said it's not a furry gallery so it's like -- human nudes, big buff gorillas, eldritch horrors spraying period blood, splatoon characters, stephen universe girls, just... like, everything.

I haven't actually found any artists i like there 😅 but... there are NSFW artists there and lots of them
JMLuxro
1 year, 5 months ago
You forgot to mention an important detail about e621; not all uploads are allowed.
They don't accept humans if they aren't any other species along them.
There must be at least one non-human character in the art to be accepted.
Characters that look mostly human (just having pointy ears, different skin color, animal ears, etc.) are accepted on their own though. But if the character looks completely like a human, there has to be at least one more non-human character to be allowed.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
I honestly had no clue that was a rule! I've never drawn human on human porn. I vaguely knew they were a "furry site" at some level so I should have guessed they had a requirement like that.
PepperThePoochyena
1 year, 5 months ago
I like e621 a lot, but if you've seen what happened to Nine Volt (the Pichu AKA TalentlessHack) the admins are a bit... iffy... when it comes to the 'tag what you see' rule and will lock tags like cub on posts that are not meant to have them.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Yeah they tagged a lot of my "baby pokemon" (elekid, riolu, etc) and certain charmander pics where i drew him misproportioned, and they tagged them as cub which y'know I guess it's their prerogative. Tag what you see, and all that

It actually sort of helped me out, i went to FA and removed those images. If it looks like cub to them it's sure as heck gonna look like cub to some random FA mod some day, better to stay ahead of the game
TalentlessHack
1 year, 5 months ago
FA's great cub ban 2010 debate led to pokemon being completely exempt from age requirements. You'll never have to worry about any pokemon post on FA. Maybe if you really intentionally try to make it look like cub?
JMLuxro
1 year, 5 months ago
It isn't always just a mod's decision.
There are dumb dramatical people out there that would accuse your first-stage/unevolved/small Pokemon to be cubs just because of how they look, and don't give a damn about Pokemon's agelessness, and will report them anyway. Eevee, Vulpix and Riolu are some of the most common examples.
Hell, I once received a warning because a stupid person reported an art I made of Chip from Sonic Unleashed, and it could barely be considered cub-looking... not even to mention that he's literally older than humanity itself.
air6ornepig
1 year, 5 months ago
Not quite. I don't remember when or where, but I'm pretty certain that it was expressed that pokemon that are explicitly made to be underage (i.e. character is referred to as such by others or the creator in text) count as cub and aren't allowed

It's more that pokemon gets to benefit from the doubt. FA infers "baby" pokemon aren't necessarily underaged because of how pokemon game mechanics work.
Drako
1 year, 5 months ago
I wish it was possible to fav journals, because this is a really good one.  The run-downs are pretty fair.  The only thing I'd add is that SoFurry has been around forever as well.  Deviantart started in 2000, and SoFurry (as Yiffstar) started in 2002.  The only site that's older is NewGrounds, which launched in 1995.  None of those sites are going anywhere.
Lloxie
1 year, 5 months ago
Seriously, there's been a few journals I've seen, including this one, that I wish I could fave. I appreciate the detailed review/rundown, even if my own perspective differs a little in some areas.

Also, there's definitely older ones than dA and Yiffstar/SoFurry out there. I had no idea Newgrounds was that old though.

I remember the VCL days... and last I checked (which admittedly has been a while) it still technically exists, although it's kind of a buggy mess. Somehow there are still a tiny handful of artists that semi-regularly upload there though. (At least, as of a year or two ago.)
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
http://us.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/Argon-Vile/Adult/inde...

i still upload my furry art to VCL! i don't draw very much furry art which abides by their guidelines.

thank you, i'm glad the journal was helpful! a few people have disagreed on some points (some people really like SoFurry which is good! it sounds like it's good for authors even if my art gets no attention there) but i think overall the information is accurate, even if some people might not value the same things i value
Lloxie
1 year, 5 months ago
Yeah I noticed that after I commented! Heh, neat to see it's still active there. xD That place has been around on the internet even longer than I have!

And yeah, SoFurry (aka Yiffstar) originally started as a site for furry-centric stories, especially erotica. Hence why it still leans so heavily into written works. Heck, I read a few good ones there back in the day and even had a few (ultimately unfinished) of my own! Images came later as fanart before the whole site rebranded to be more of a general art gallery site like so many others.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
nice, i see!
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Oh okay, interesting! I didn't know that about SoFurry -- it sounds like in a way, it is older than a lot of sites -- even if the URL or website is technically newer. That's reassuring!

I'm glad you felt my evaluations were fair -- I tried hard to restrict my evaluations to "this is something I can measure," "this is a feature that is absent," and not just my gut feeling like "I don't like this site". I'm not a big fan of Twitter but objectively speaking, they have a huge audience and a lenient upload policy -- so I have to give them credit even if I think their site is obnoxious ha ha.

The only site where it was difficult to remain impartial was Weasyl because they banned me without explanation and wouldn't respond to any inquiries. I think if someone more objective evaluated it it would may be be 2 stars
Drako
1 year, 5 months ago
You're not the only one I know of to be banned from Weasyl.  And as for SoFurry, as others have said, it started out as a place for written works, and that still tends to be its main focus.  Most of the stories there are short to medium length, but there are some damn good authors on there that have put near novel-length stories up.
WarriorRashek
1 year, 5 months ago
This is super insightful! Thank you for compiling this!
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Thank you I'm glad it helped someone! I hope it inspires people to sign up for more art sites. There are so many good ones which are total ghost towns!
MeusArtis
1 year, 5 months ago
i shall wait for your review of afterdark.art
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
i've never heard of it! postybirb doesn't support it yet so i can't upload there easily. but it seems like there are plans to add it to postybirb

it seems like it doesn't support keyword search yet #1 #2 or maybe, just doesn't support some keywords?

it looks like most pictures have 1 "favorite" at most and no comments

looks like their acceptable upload policy is similar to FurAffinity/Newgrounds (no minors)

overall it is somewhere in between Itaku and Pillowfort -- it has missing functionality, I can't upload about half of my art there, and it doesn't really have any users yet. but if Postybirb starts supporting it, I'll create an account and share my stuff!
Patchhes
1 year, 5 months ago
My (very) personal issue with Twitter going twits up is that I used it for way more than furry smut. I also used it for sports, news, and as general social media with friends.

It's gonna be tough to replace that with an all-in-one, and that kinda really bums me out! I'll likely never see a big ol dog dick right next to an NFL highlight again. : (
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
yeah if it comes to that, there's a nonzero chance someone does what Reddit did to Digg and just gobbles up all their traffic with some new twitter clone, with all the same ideas of twitter but minus the weird policies which drove people away

i agree though -- despite my reservations of it as a way of consuming furry porn, it was a unique kind of site with a lot of useful innovations
Tygre
1 year, 5 months ago
I generally agree with all of these, and think e621 is the best of the bunch from a "pure" art perspective.

If I could follow artists there, and artists could have a little area for journals and stuff, it'd be pretty perfect. They do have a wiki system, and you can favourite stuff, so it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility.

I will echo a complaint a few people have made here: The way e621 handles tags can be batshit.
Generally it's not, and "Tag What You See" is a defensible starting point, but some tags are arbitrarily deployed and enforced.

This is especially prominent with cub stuff. Search riolu solo cub then search riolu solo -cub. Why did those cub pics get the cub tag, and the others didn't? Because one of the mods over there is incredibly overzealous and defensive and he has the admin's backing No idea!

This doesn't help people trying to blacklist cub stuff, because it means a bunch of non-cub stuff is being blocked that they might want to see. It also doesn't help people looking for cub stuff, because I don't wanna see all these Riolu cluttering up my results! Grrr!

User tagging is never gonna be perfect, and the tagging schema is still a work in progress. Even with the annoyances, I'd say e621 gets it more right than wrong.
argonvile
1 year, 5 months ago
Totally agree with the "arbitrary cub tag" stuff, although every other site (including inkbunny) has the same problem. this is "cub" and this is "cub" and there's no real way to blacklist one and not the other.

Honestly if you search e621 for my "cub art" i think it does a pretty good job -- it's a mixture of canonically underage characters, some slightly wrongly-proportioned pokemon (oops) and yeah a few "baby evolutions" like riolu, elekid and the like. still pretty arbitrary but honestly i expected worse. (I imagine you won't be happy about this but I recently used that list to justify more art removals from FurAffinity, I didn't make a big deal out of it but there's a few less riolus there now 😅 there are still a bunch. but, fewer)
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