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So, a friend pointed me to the fact that it's a day that ends in Y and there's FurAffinity being shit as usual, and this user had this take about how you should totally make your own site.

That's nice and all, it's really cool that you should start your own art site and all. I mean the situation for art sites is pretty bad, they're all dying or are loaded with jannies, and Twitter is godawful and getting worse daily for art site usage. But there's just one problem, it's easier said than done.

Do you have good hosting, and solid code? Sam Hyde and pals thought they did and look what happened to fishtank, it's down just a few days in. They stupidly chose to use Google's cloud and burnt through $30k in 3 days thanks to it. Or look at trashfires in the past like Zippcast that were down 24/7.

Are you willing to bend the fuck over for payment processors who will dictate what you can host? No seriously, if there's one thing that Ana Valens, Joshua Moon, Auttomatic's CEO, and the EFF can agree on it's that payment processors are the censors of the internet and are cancer. How are you going to monetize it with crypto when normies are too lazy to use it or see "scam" in their head? Pornhub wasn't safe and Patreon censorship has known to be notorious due to it, since you have to obey the rules of 4 credit card companies and your payment processor to do business online. Shit, even Pixiv cucked out with their fanbox service because of it.

Are you willing to deal with drama when the inevitable Cub Question comes along (or if it's just a plain NSFW art site, the loli question)? If you're lucky enough to not be a furry, the Cub Question is literally the same as the loli one except furries are more militant and autistic (if they remember it exists). If you ban it, they'll want more content banned. If you don't ban it, if your site is high profile they might try to take it down (look at e621) or if it's low profile like Inkbunny, they'll pretend it doesn't exist until they're doing a yearly cancellation of some artist again.

Is your website's security good? Remember furries and other autists online are very very petty about minor things, and will try to hack you.

And then there's exposure. So many dead art sites tried to steal the lunch of a bigger one except with no users and no chance of getting exposure, they wound up back at the art sites that were big or on Twitter of all places, and as you can tell that was a mistake years before Musk took over. Artists replaced drawing with getting involved in online flamewars.

I could go on and on, but the point is the easiest way to tackle these is to make a federated art gallery of some sort; the issue is nobody will do it because furries would rather work a soulless tech job at Google.

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