As I'm writing this, FurAffinity is melting down. The site had a pretty good run, but it seems like the combination of Dragoneer's death, the site's crippling lack of cybersecurity, and the rest of the administration being psychopathic zoosadists have resulted in a very blatant and very serious hack. The site's URL briefly redirected to the furry subsection of the KiwiFarms forum, and its Twitter account was also hacked.
If this is somehow your first time learning of this, then you should also know that FA has been hacked twice in the past - once in 2010, and once in 2016. The site has not been secure for a long time, and any credentials you used with it should be replaced immediately.
If you uploaded a lot of your stuff on FA, there is a chance you could reclaim it. Apparently all the data is safe, but I am dubious of that notion until I see it myself.
Regardless, there is one pressing question a lot of people are asking themselves: what now?
I have put my thoughts into a Twitter thread which you can read here: twitter thread. In short, FA was unstable for a long time, and it was incredibly outdated - it was just the only place you could upload furry art and have people see it. That will probably change in the coming months.
While it is possible to migrate to another art host (Itaku is probably the only practical one), I want to stress that independence from a major platform is the hardest but most rewarding thing you can do to carve out a niche for yourself on the internet. Spend an afternoon reading HTML tutorials and you'll be more than capable of building a simple HTML site.
It used to be very common for people to slap together their own websites, and that's what gave the 1.0 web its charm. For doing something similar today, I strongly recommend Neocities, since that's where my website is hosted: neocities.org
You can host a pretty huge amount of data for free, you get a unique subdomain name, they have very lassaiz-faire ToS, and you can do anything within the limits of HTML and CSS, which is practically anything you could think of. There's a paid option for larger file storage and more in-depth domain management, but the vast majority of people will never need to worry about that.
Here's one of my favorite sites built on Neocities in simple HTML and CSS to show case the work of an anthro artist. It really doesn't have to be a huge undertaking to make something simple and stylish: neracoda.neocities.org
If there are any technical questions you have or you aren't sure where to get started, please reach out to me and I'll try to point you in the right direction. I know this stuff can be intimidating, but it's not much different from working a word processor or playing a game of cards.
I hope you make something cool. Take care of yourself out there!
