Firstsona: a raccoon dude.

Replaced by: a dragon lady.

Twenty-five years and one gender transition later, she is still my fursona. In the past few years she’s gone from being pitch black to being a starry night sky with blue and purple accents (nsfw), also her tits have generally gotten bigger, her tail’s generally fatter, and she’s often a noodle-dragon.

Sometimes the raccoon still pops up. She’s transitioned too. But dragon’s what sticks.

Thanks for your work running what was, for a while, the the best furry art site! :)

Nice hat.

Not at all, I am very happy to be able to preemptively keep Terf Fedi and 4Chan Forever Fedi and all those other Fediverse the fuck out of my little corner of Queer Furry Fedi. Throwing everyone into one giant discussion forum and pushing them to fight with each other because that’s what keeps the ad impressions coming is not an experience I care to return to.

Realistically though I can’t be bothered to engage in “fighting about which instance is better to be in” though, I know which one is better for me and if you think that one is a shitty place for you to be then I am pleased to have you stay in whatever place you like as long as you don’t try to make the place I like stop existing or change to fit your desires.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I’ve been on the fediverse. (I can’t check the exact date right now as I’m in the middle of upgrading it.)

Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you’d rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook’s Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the “Standalone” Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?

Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else’s chill zones.

Really liking the ridges on those coppery crystals.

“I made him white and pink because I wanted him to look femmier” sure is one heck of a thing to look back at and wonder how on earth you managed to avoid saying “oh I’m trans!” for so long. It’s a big thing to come out with though, and has a lot of hard work following it, so it’s really surprisingly easy to avoid saying it until suddenly it is obvious.

We tell ourselves a lot of things without realizing it.

I started my transition back around 2003 and it is largely over. I seem to pass pretty well. I don’t introduce myself to the world as trans any more and neither do my fursonas. Really they never have, and neither have I. Perhaps in part because “a trans person” was not a social space that really existed as a possibility to inhabit for an extended period of time the way it does now; you were a guy, or a girl, and if you were transitioning, either you passed, or you didn’t, and in the latter case you were some kind of weirdo. People gave less of a shit about physical gender in the furry scene, which was nice.

My very first fursona was a guy, as I was at the time. I stopped playing him on Furrymuck shortly after experimenting with a female fursona around 1995. When I drew him after I’d started transition, she was a girl now too. With pink and blue fur. I never consciously decided on the color change, she just started having the transiest possible color scheme whenever I doodled her, which was kind of hilarious in retrospect once “my fursona is the colors of this queer identity flag” became A Thing. She’s clearly gone through a gender transition but I’ve never described her as “trans”.

The female fursona that replaced the first one has always been cisgender. Even if I draw her with a dick, or as a pan-gendered sex beast with every possible flavor of genitalia and two dozen pairs of boobs, she’s not trans. She’s just this lady dragon. A while back she started insisting on being drawn with a third eye, which maybe reflects some other stuff going on in my life.

Oh good, that means I get to buy some Apple and Google stock and mine a dragon’s hoard or three worth of bitcoin well before it’s at the point where its energy usage becomes an environmental problem.

Probably like the eighties at the earliest. I don’t want to live before modern medicine and whatnot. Or is there an unspoken “before you were born” rule in play here?

I’ve been a dragon in this fandom since about 1995 and I don’t think anyone has ever said I don’t belong in the furry scene because I am covered in scales instead of fur.

If you like to present as some kind of animal person, then you are a furry.

Oh I’m not saying these putative AI mods would be any better than existing Reddit mods. They’d probably be even more arbitrary and capricious and unappealable, and I sure don’t expect them to be anywhere near fully-trained. But they’d be owned by Reddit, who would now be ⭐️⭐️⭐️AN AI COMPANY⭐️⭐️⭐️, which is the replacement for “the blockchain” as a thing you vaguely mention your company using if you want rich, dumb investors to wet their pants and throw tons of money at you.

My bet? AI.

If they have any kind of archive of past mod decisions then they can just dump all that into a neural net. And then they get to look all sexy in their upcoming IPO because they are using ⭐️⭐️⭐️ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE⭐️⭐️⭐️ like all the ⭐️⭐️⭐️SEXIEST⭐️⭐️⭐️ companies!!!1! No more of those annoying unpaid volunteers to get uppity any more!

I, for one, do not welcome our new AI moderation overlords, and will probably be done with Reddit if this happens. But I just know someone there has to be pushing for this.

September came for Reddit long, long ago. Personally I stay way the hell off of any popular subreddit because they’re just a total wasteland. And September comes for the small subreddits now and then, too - they’ll grow too big, the active mods get overwhelmed, and it starts to turn into 4chan. And I unsubscribe. If I’m lucky I hear about the mods starting up a new offshoot subreddit that’s trying to be small, relatively quiet, and aggressively unpopular.

The last straw for LJ for me was when they made any mention of queerness illegal so as to conform to the laws of their new home country. I logged out and never logged in again. I still get badly-translated email about anniversary gifts for my various 13-year-old accounts now and then.

I have a DW account but it lies fallow, mostly because I could never get the auto-crossposter plugin to work on my Wordpress site.

That AMA tomorrow with the CEO is gonna be a heck of a thing, that’s for sure.

On the gripping hand, they were right - the Ringworld would fall into the sun, but after books 3/4 of that series, it would have been a blessing if nobody ever brought a single one of its attitude jets back home.

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

hahaha holy shit

I wonder if “cross-posting about /r/LemmyMigration to a bunch of other subs” triggered an automatic spam filter in a way that a bunch of different people saying “hey have you heard about Lemmy” does not. There’s a certain level of slack I’m willing to cut for people trying to moderate something as huge as Reddit or Twitter or whatever; it’s what happens in the next few days that’s really going to be worth reacting to.

Good luck with the appeal. <3

(Update, a week later: yeah Reddit’s CEO completely blew through all that slack I was willing to cut him, and then some.)

I think there’s a lot of user interface hurdles between now and The Year Of The Linux Facetop. And a lot of very tight hardware design. And a need for someone to point a lot of devs in the same direction, and make them give a shit about how well stuff works for a non-technical user. And a source of funding for all of this.