YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BRING SAFETY TO MY GALLERY, NOT LEAVE IT AT THE MERCY OF TRANSPHOBES
When I started out on my lewd art journey way back in November of 2017, I used two sites for my main galleries; FurAffinity, and InkBunny. Both of them were fairly decent in terms of interaction, and whatnot.
Around 2 years ago, June of 2023, I shut down my FurAffinity, deleting my entire gallery, because I was afraid of being banned on the site due to my cutesy, cartoony art style and the potential that it could be mistaken for cub art. Save for one instance around two months ago, I haven't posted there since. I've instead stuck to InkBunny, relying on this site for hosting my entire gallery.
Aaaaaaaand now it comes to light that the admin/owner is a transphobe. I'm trans. I don't feel safe here. More info on CookieSkoon's journal, where the owner of the site basically fesses up to it in the comment section.
I'm still not entirely certain what I want to do in response, mostly because I'm not happy with the given alternatives to IB: * I don't think SoFurry or Weasyl are good alternate homes (they feel... barren?) * while FurAffinity has gotten their shit together, my typical post nowadays has like five billion alts, which FurAffinity demands me to either stitch them all together as one image, or give each alt its own page. Not a fun time * Bluesky feels like home in a way Twitter never was, but also, it's a microblogging site, not a gallery site. Same goes for any Mastodon instance, with the exception that I haven't made a home in any Mastodon instances as of yet, and also Twitter itself, with the exception that it hasn't been home in a long time and I also burned my house down there LOL * We just got done confirming that certain OCs of mine (specifically Aurelia Cobalt) are basically banned on e621 * I haaaaaaaate Itaku's UI, it's like you took a microblogging site and shoved the tools for a gallery site in assbackwards and broke a few things while "making it fit" * DeviantArt is SFW only (with about a billion asterisks but point is, I can't get away with drawing full-on smut there). Same goes for Tumblr, with the exception that it's a *blogging* site with all of the "this is not actually a gallery site" issues that Bluesky has * Stellarfur looks to be a cute site, but it's a forum site, not a gallery site, so, similar issues to Bluesky * Pixiv requires me to censor my art to comply with Japanese censorship laws; not something I feel like doing * Newgrounds... I'm not sure about jumping to Newgrounds tbh?? Doesn't feel Right tbh
I'm still thinking on what to do and welcome suggestions rn. In the meantime, though
I've already seen multiple people hop back onto FurAffinity today, looks like this is why! But it sure is tough when cub folks don't have a good option. People have tried explaining it to staff, but they'll never get it. They'll still complain about being "unwelcomed" in other places and that no one else is "open-minded" towards them, when they're being stubborn about a gender thing they are not educated about. Thankfully there are small friendly groups on telegram that understand people better. :3
I've already seen multiple people hop back onto FurAffinity today, looks like this is why! But it su
if you look at the list of sites I mentioned the uh the fourth bullet down is e6
in all seriousness tho, Aurelia is banned because apparently, in my artstyle there is nothing that I can do to make the mods sufficiently conclude that Aurelia ***cannot ever at all*** be just a human with a funky artstyle, thanks to the limitations they've set regarding what they can look at to determine if a pic is a human or not, in an attempt to make sure Bart Simpson isn't allowed on the site.
Which means that while I can post MOST of my stuff there, because I'm not just throwing Aurelia to the side and never drawing her again, there's gonna be pics that I can't post to e6, which means it fundamentally fails as a gallery of my work.
ahem if you if you look at the list of sites I mentioned the uh the fourth bullet down is e6 in a
