Furiffic

» see furiffic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Furry art has more hosting than any other amateur art scene on the internet, because the audience pays artists directly and always has. Fur Affinity took the bulk of it from 2005 onward while Inkbunny and Weasyl carved out slices, and every few years somebody launched one more on the theory that the incumbents were slow and ugly. Furiffic, from 2013, was that theory executed unusually well.

It was fast. The site loaded like something built after 2010 rather than ported out of 2006, the browse page did infinite scrolling with a real filter behind it, and the profile system let you list an account on every other service you used, with an icon for each: DeviantArt, Inkbunny, FurryNetwork, LiveJournal, IMVU, Discord. For a scene spread across a dozen half-compatible sites, a profile page that admits where else you live is a more honest piece of design than any of the big hosts managed.

Behind it was one person, posting as Bun, who wrote the code and paid for the servers. That worked for nine years and it is also the complete explanation of how the site ended, since there was nobody else in the building when the owner got tired.

~ the case file ~

~ the pink notice ~

At 10:31 on the morning of 6 March 2022, pinned to the Furiffic Announcements page, headed Service termination, and typed in a shade of pink the markup records as #ff99cc: "After a long think about it and not too much interest in the site since its creation Furiffic will no longer be available from 01/06/2022."

Then the part that makes it a real document rather than a corporate goodbye. "It was a nice experiment of technical learning for me personally, but socially it never really went anywhere as managing people has never been a strong skill of mine and it took a lot out of me to do the little I was able to." And the instruction underneath: "If you would like to keep your content you should back it up now."

~ the size of it ~

I am not in this fandom and never have been, so the only thing I can read here is the arithmetic, which is brutal and the same everywhere. A third-party metrics service called Furbitron was tracking submission IDs across all the furry art hosts, and its last reading of Furiffic in November 2021 put the collection at roughly 124,810 uploads against IDs issued up to about 205,000, meaning three in every five slots were ever used. WikiFur recorded 11,820 members in August 2019. The leader in the same category was counting in the millions.

Numbers like that are survivable. Plenty of small communities run forever on less. What they are not is interesting to maintain, and there is no revenue at that scale to hire the enthusiasm back.

~ twenty-four comments ~

The announcement collected two dozen replies over the following months and they are a small comedy of distance. Americans read 01/06/2022 as 6 January and spent a week arguing that the deadline had already passed and the site was still up, until somebody pointed out that it says 1-6 and the owner lives on a British date format. Another user built a countdown clock on timeanddate.com, labeled Furiffic offline in, pointed at midnight on 1 June.

Under that, the bargaining. One comment reads, in full: "Creator please stop we have jobs here and care just hand the site to someone dont shut it down". Others named a specific person who had offered to take it over. A journal on Weasyl that April used the whole thing to make a wider argument, that the small art sites die because people upload and favorite and never comment, so nothing on them feels inhabited. Nobody in any of those threads got an answer.

~ two words on a purple page ~

The crawlers caught the handover almost exactly. On 27 May 2022 furiffic.com is still a twenty-kilobyte application. On 10 June the same address returns 845 bytes: a purple background, a webfont, a reload button, and the words "Site offline". That is not a farewell page. It is the generic maintenance screen the site had always had for outages, left switched on permanently, which means the last thing Furiffic ever said to anybody was a message designed to mean come back in an hour.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »