Furry Chat

I found out about fursuits when I was trying to come up with a skit for trying out to be my college mascot.

Hey there 👋 Bahman here from lemmy-meter.info

I just wanted to drop a line and say yiffit.net stability looks great! Keep up the good work, folks 👏

Could I just do it? Not right now. My programing experience is python scripts and embedded systems and I have no knowledge of anything sysadmin or infrastructure.

People are always complaining about whats around and we have lots of smart techy people here, so why not?

Hello! I'm very out of touch with the furry community but I do know that there's an ungodly amount of furry art that is created every day, and that number is continuing to increase. I've already got a career and my clumsy paws can barely draw a stick figure, so I've often wondered how artists can dedicate such time and skill to making such an immense amount of art. Many artists I see create a new piece of art every few days, and some have hundreds if not thousands of art pieces total.

• Do most artists draw art without expecting any money?

• Do most artists do it as a side hustle in addition to a regular job? Is that exhausting?

• What sort of "salary" could one reasonably expect from being dedicated to full-time drawing [furry] art?

• If it's meant to be your only source of income, how does your job security feel?

• Is it required to "get lucky"/"get noticed" in order to make any real amount of money?

• Is it fun, or does it become "work"?

• Any other interesting topics that I don't know enough about to ask?

Fair warning, this is something that's been in my head for a while now, and I just want to get it off my chest. This is going to be a very emotionally charged post, so... I guess take everything with a grain of salt and with the understanding that I suck at word choice.

So this is partially in response to l_b_i's thread asking about Lemmy/Yiffit here: https://yiffit.net/post/3318470 . Would have responded there, but that seems to be focused on Lemmy (and particularly Yiffit) side of thing, and I want to rant about the fediverse as a whole.

So, firstly the software. I think Mastodon is a really good piece of kit. As a Twitter competitor, it's really good and has more than enough features. It also makes a fairly solid ActivityPub reader, although it doesn't really work with Lemmy that well.

Lemmy is rough around the edges, but that can be fixed with work. The leanings of the developers might be concerning, but it's AGPL so whatever.

ActivityPub as a whole is a cool concept, many social media networks connecting together regardless of platform. Anyone heard of pixelfed? No? It just kinda happened and if you have Mastodon you might have been following a Pixelfed user without realizing it.

I just... Have been increasingly frustrated at the aristocracy running everything recently. There's just so much drama between admins that result in them completely severing connections between instances. And this isn't petty squabbles between two small instances either, these are large instances with up to several thousand users each. Constantly falling out and causing their users to fall out of touch.

Personally, I've been using the Fediverse seriously since like April (or whenever the Reddit drama started), and currently have 5 fediverse accounts (excluding my super secret AD ones). I'd consider them all to have been on instances involved in fediverse politics that had resulted in some amount of connections being lost.

Since April, to my knowledge, there's been three major fediverse-wide "dramas" that have resulted in major instances either defederating or threatening to defederate. One was started by someone who had perhaps too much influence and inability to listen to feedback, one was started by a literal troll and one was started by Facebook. How does a platform that prides itself on being censorship resistant let itself fall apart this easily!?

I don't want to have to feel like I have to keep on track of the latest fediverse politics. I don't want to have to feel like I have to keep a backup of my followers list just in case something happens. I don't want to feel like I have to frequently change instance due to the influence of some other instance. I don't want to have to feel like I have to "pick a side" in conflicts that are mostly hidden in an unsearchable space.

Hell, the Mastodon devs literally had to add a screen to the defederation flow that basically says "this is how many people you are going to fuck up".

I just want a place to look at people in funny animal costumes and fancy coloured pixels. Maybe it's because of autism, maybe this is a neurotypical thing as well, but personally I am very uncomfortable with the idea of losing contact with people I follow without realizing it and not being able to regain that contact. I'm also heavily vulnerable to obsessing over drama and politics (and try to curate my feed to avoid it as much as possible), which I can't really do against this stuff.

For the Fediverse to work, we NEED to fix this. We need to get better. Maybe something simple like this: https://furry.engineer/@savvywolf/111292057237519826 . Maybe a public record of accountability for instances that explains why things happened.

Honestly, with these issues being a frequent enough occurrence I can't really wholeheartedly shill Mastodon as a Twitter/Bluesky alternative anymore...

For reference, if you were a furry content creator looking for an instance to maximise reach, I'd personally recommend you avoid the following instances (from personal experience):

• beehaw.org
• furry.engineer
• lemmy.world
• mastodon.art
• mastodon.scot
• mastodon.social
• meow.social
• tech.lgbt
• Any instance with a hidden blocklist
• Very small instances, since they have limited reach and may vanish.

Not saying these instances are bad, it's just that, through their fault or otherwise, they've been involved in drama that has effectively cut them off from parts of the fediverse.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant. Apologies for having to do this and ruining your day, but I just needed to get it off my chest.

We've been here a few months now, how is everybody feeling about it?

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there's less new yiff are around these days. Maybe it's because the brony world is winding down now that mlp gen 4 is over? Or maybe I'm just wrong?

To start, I'm okay being alone, but I sometimes try to take an objective look at myself. I try to understand how I think and do things the way I do.
If my brother didn't live with me. I would probably live alone. I work from home and have infrequent meetings, outside of that I would probably have almost no interaction aside from the people I see doing my weekly grocery shopping. I have probably 2 or 3 people I could call a friend, and a few acquaintances, and all of them are previous coworkers. My interactions with them are generally constrained to discord chat. This is simply setting the stage, lets continue to set the stage for how did I get here?
If I'm being critical, I don't know that I have ever had many/any friends. In grade school, I had neighbors who's houses I would go over to, but I don't think they ever came over to mine. I was a member of many clubs, but I didn't really talk to any members outside of the club itself. After starting college, I think I might have kept in contact with one person from high school, but that was only once or twice. I haven't talked to anybody from then for over 10 years.
Surely people from college, right? Well, again I was in the marching band and lived on campus, certainly many friends from there. Everybody in band has a friend right? Other than attending alumni events, and some volunteering, I don't talk to any of them either.
So what does this all mean? Well I think I can say I can be alone in a room full of people. I can go to a meetup, after working though the anxiety that would keep me from attending, and leave after barely talking to anybody. I have anxiety that keeps me from going to events where other people would be, and if I do go, I have no idea how to interact. In general I would say I don't really know how to start a conversation with others outside of a professional setting. I can respond in a conversation, but leading is out of the question. I'm bad enough at reading people in person, online I'm even worse. It takes effort for me to only say "fine, you?" instead of a full explanation in response to someone I know saying "hi, how's it going" as a greeting.
I used to say I was an introvert, but I don't even know if that's true. I'd much rather do things with someone else than just alone, I just don't have anyone to do it with. I just don't want to be in a group of people having fun, and not knowing how to even start a conversation. Anyway, yep I'm lonely and usually okay with it.
For reading the above, here's a silly music video with lots of cartoon violence (including cartoon death) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-atRsitNsY Song is let your love flow by the Bellamy Brother and animation is by Tirrelous

Continuing my fight against my anxiety. The link format here is [text here](and link here), or just the link

I can't open the fedinedia.packmates.org links anyone have an idea.

I think the unnamed yiffit yeen should get a name. Start with a y to keep the theme, be absurdly normal, be absurdly weird? Keep them intentionally unnamed or be named None, unnamed...

I have as much anxiety about posting as I do about talking to people I've never met (A lot). I feel uncomfortable with two word responses "nice work", "I like it". I am not an artist and have no art of my own. I don't feel like I have anything to say, and if I do, I don't know that anyone wants to hear it.

I have been off social media for a while and I'd like to make a Mastodon account to post my nsfw oriented art. What instances are best for this purpose and what etiquette rules would apply for posting adult art particularly on the Fediverse?

I want to add some consistency to the way to draw eyes. As it stands, I feel like I'm just improvising every time I try and draw them and when I finally get to a point where I'm happy with the result, I have no idea how I got there (which makes it hard to apply the same rules the next time).

Can anyone recommend a clear guide? I would love something that uses easily remembered construction lines.

Spoilers below, I want to complain, not ruin anybody else's experience with the game.

Okay, so. The main reason I play dungeons and dragons? Aside from the sense of adventure and the ability to write my own story? It's the dragons.

Now my problem is that in any and all official DnD content (and most other media tbh), dragons get absolutely fucking screwed, ESPECIALLY the good ones. It's why the ability to write my own stories with DnD appeals to me so much.

I didn't go into Baldur's Gate 3 with high expectations. I know that the idea of having a powerful force of good that isn't under player control or completely useless is beyond the comprehension of most game/show/book writers (It's really unimaginably fucking easy to have one that doesn't destroy character agency btw, just putting that out there. I can write a whole god damn essay on how to have Big Good forces that aren't fucking useless while maintaining narrative tension).

All I wanted, in the game that advertises itself on how lets you approach every problem from your own angle and with your own methods, was to be able to share a little conversation with a dragon and make sure they were okay. I didn't have unrealistic expectations. I know games aren't made around what one man wants, so I didn't hope for more than maybe three lines of dialog and an ambiguous ending where they're free and alive. I'd have been happy with that.

And Baldur's Gate 3, despite allowing you to spare, or befriend, or protect, save, speak with or at least bring some hope to EVERY OTHER ENTITY IN THE GAME, doesn't just give none of that to their one dragon that can speak. It actively goes out of its' way to make it so that the dragon has the absolute worst fate possible, significantly worse than death, will never speak to you (only to another NPC), is killed pre-adventure, has their spirit tortured for eternity, and cannot be saved, helped, or even given a ray of hope. Just. Like. For FUCKS SAKE.

I wouldn't be so pissed off it this wasn't such a common thing in games like this! But I sunk 70 hours into this game intending a little interaction with a dragon as my reward, and as far as I'm concerned, I got a flaming pile of shit thrown in my face for making it to the end. It wouldn't sting so much if they weren't the only character to get screwed to anywhere near this magnitude. It wouldn't sting so much if shit like this didn't also happen so ridiculously frequently.

Please tell me I'm not the only one frustrated with how dragons (ESPECIALLY good dragons) get treated in any form of adult media. Is it really, really so much to ask for a story where dragons don't get the deck stacked against them so unbelivably hard that even actual gods would be pretty much screwed?

I'm from Connecticut and dropping by for a day trip today (August 26th.)

When I moved to Lemmy, I saw a thing for Matrix in the profile area and checked out that and have been sitting in a furry room for like a month. I just started actually looking at it and of the only 2 active people who talk, one is an incel and the other has a nazi fetish so I noped on out. The other issue is I constantly get PM'd by underage users looking for sex RP.

Anyone have any recommendations less... Uncomfortable?

I got a report on one of my posts, It was for the mods of lemmy.ml letting them know that porn was popping up on .ml. I went and checked lemmy.ml's instances and we are now in the blocked list. I know they had a number of large communities so this is just a heads up to everyone who may have been subbed to any.

What I've been busy with lately

About three weeks ago I started renting a new dedicated server which is going to host both packmates and yiffit very soon.

Because the server isn't hosting anything yet, I've taken the opportunity to play around and try out different configurations, including ZFS, LXC containers for small services, VLANs for better isolation ( which I did manage to get working ), wireguard tunnels, improved firewall rules, security groups, iGPU passthrough, etc...

Tomorrow I'll wipe the disks, install #proxmox from scratch and make it production ready.

Then it should be as easy as loading a full backup from both yiffit and packmates to complete the migration ( but I'll announce this last step in due time).

Am excited *wags* :dogcited:

cc: @chat

@chat Good day, and a message to the german furs:

Ich möchte euch fragen ob ihr ausgehfreudige und Abenteuerlustige #FurSuiter #FurryGruppen kennt mit denen man auch mal etwas erleben kann, so zum Beispiel #BungeeJumping oder #ZipLining im Suit

Bin aus Süddeutschland und von Tirol bis Berlin geht vieles auf einen Besuch

Is there any place for finding yiff stories? Like e621 but erotica? Ideally with ratings and such. I remember there being a couple places decades ago, but wouldn't really know where to go now.