This was originally posted to my cohost page, days before it was set to read-only, and its sunsetting began. It was uploaded in two parts, mainly to avoid overshadowing the advice and perspective I gave in the latter half, with the history and background I give in the former. This also made it easier to work on while I was dealing with other important things in my life, which I certainly needed at the time.

I've reposted it here as it will be inaccessible from the start of the new year, and I feel it's worth reminding folks about what happened, in case they need another push to take the steps necessary to protect themselves from the dangers I describe below. I left the post untouched from its original upload, blemishes and all, because the mistakes I may have made in the mad scramble I went through between getting suspended from FA to when cohost would start shutting down is an essential part of the piece.

If you'd like to skip to the second part for the more practical advice, click here.

Over 8 years ago, I suddenly found myself left without any foundation online. The admin team of FurAffinity, the only site I'd been actively maintaining my presence on, neglected to address a fatal vulnerability that had been identified prior to the eventual attack, taking the site offline for weeks.

I spent that time migrating as much of my art as possible to as many sites I was permitted to post them to. I then made some artwork to commemorate completing the task, entitled "Omnipresence." I've never looked back.

Since then, I've always maintained at least 8 separate galleries at any given time, replacing them as they either went down, or kicked me off. Today, I'm revisiting that concept in an effort to share my philosophy of being present online, and encourage others to take a page out of it.

This is long, but if you've seen or felt the effects of sites clamping down on friends or your favourite artists, I believe you owe it to them to read it. Please do either way.

Part 1 of 2

On Belonging Nowhere, As a Digital Kink Artist

I've been thinking about writing this for a long time now, mixed in with my crazy little trans artist life's goings-on, so intertwined with the many folks I care about. I've had a lot on my plate, even without the need for sites I called home either dying or turning hostile towards my existence helping to spice up the pot.

I wish I could've have more time to write this, too. Cohost's planned closure simultaneously stoked and set a hard deadline on the need for putting these tangled, clamoring thoughts and feelings out on digital paper. I didn't want to miss the chance to commit them to the most appropriate canvas before it got frozen in time, in anticipation of its untimely end.

This is something I've felt in the air for a long time now, and the changes have been coming ever more rapidly as time passed. Capitalism and tech's rapid "race to the bottom" continues to increase its kill count with no signs of stopping, and we, the misfits and dreamers who've used this platform - the Internet as a whole - to thrive on for so long have always been the main victims of this creeping malaise's unstoppable march.

I'll try (but fail) not to belabor these points for too long, but I feel they're worth revisiting from a more personal perspective to emphasize the effect this has on us as individuals, as part of a community. I don't want to sound like I'm fishing for sympathy, but the fact remains that they did happen, they happened to people like me, and we shouldn't forget that. This is a trend. It will continue.

Tumblr was the first biggest loss during my career. It was and still remains the fastest growth I've ever seen in my active followers on any single platform. If you've paid attention to my exploits beyond the art I make for any amount of time, you'll know that I've struggled to build my follower counts anywhere as quickly as most of my peers, and it's been a source of stress for just as long as it's been a thing. No adult content or "female presenting nipples" allowed was a dangerous standard they set that would continue for a while.

Several of my friends chose to filter their work to remain active on the platform. Maybe I should've done the same.

I caught wind of a so-called "rogue moderator" on Patreon telling another hypno artist that the implied dubcon of their work was not acceptable on the site. Patreon's terms of service had to be reinterpreted in a form of modern sophistry in order to reach such a verdict, but their decision was ultimately what mattered. I took this as a sign, and although I'm certain that many at the time saw my response as an overreaction - effectively pulling teeth to get myself migrated off of Patreon and onto my own website - I was vindicated four years later when several artists got banned, days before their monthly payout.

The morning that I'm writing this, I saw another furry artist get banned off of the platform.

On the eve of an extremely important trip, I opened a tab I had kept with the comments I received on a recent upload to FA, so I would remember to reply to them later. I wrote my thanks to one, hit reply, and the site responded with notice of my suspension. I should have seen it coming, given that others had also been subjected to this months prior, and even though I'd made a conscious choice not to go along with the change in policy, this was still the one that hurt the most. The ruling was frankly questionable at best, and completely undermines the safety of the site as a whole. Ultimately though, their decision is all that matters.

I could continue to post my work while filtering it accordingly, but I refuse to do so within the broader spaces of the community I've contributed to for most of my life. Even if I did, I can't trust that the rule's catchment won't shift again to have me purged in spite of my compliance.

The confluence of feelings that these events - and more besides - have stoked and kept burning in me for years now have mostly become part of the background radiation of my life. This latest one, though, having come quite literally from inside my own home, has left me feeling pained and restless.

With FA's consistent mismanagement, tumblr's policy change, Twitter's loss of competent leadership, cohost's unfair and untimely demise, AI encroaching upon all of our spaces like some malicious grey goo, and FA now taking a page out of other platforms' censorious playbook, it's hard to stay motivated and feel safe online as a kink artist any more. I also think that this is a breaking point though, and we need to do something about it to avoid things getting any worse.

Centralized administration for hosting art clearly doesn't work long-term, especially when operating within a capitalist society. We need to start reclaiming some form of control through shared acts of community however we can, and I think we should do so by rekindling the older ways of the Internet.

To that end, I have an idea. It's a fairly simple and perhaps somewhat ambitious one, and it'll take time and combined effort, both of which I have little of and even less control over, but I believe it will help, even if in some small way.

I didn't want to risk it getting buried under what might come across as one artist's impotent rage in the form of a long-winded rant, so that'll come in a second part as soon as I can make the time to work that out too.

Please share this around. Either way, stay tuned, and thank you for reading.

Part 2 of 2

Embracing Online Nomadism, and Making it Ours

Okay, so the current ways aren't working for us any longer. What now?

We set ourselves up to be present online more safely. Reclaim our spaces in small but significant ways, while protecting ourselves from policy overreach.

If you'll allow a rabbit in her late 30s to reminisce for a while; back in the day, people made websites. Websites made of pages, rather than databases, which worked more like separate little curiosity shoppes, alcoves and holes in the wall. These were meant for individuals, or smaller groups, to show and share their wares and trinkets - not like the massive town centres we frequent and share nowadays, meant for people to congregate within and yell over one another for attention.

As the latter thrived, grew, and gradually took over, the former became harder to maintain. Now those little establishments have long since been shuttered, and mostly gone forgotten.

While the advent of Web 2.0 did bring improvements for site-making across the board, the massive, centrally maintained content sharing platforms that resulted from it have dominated the web and left little room for much else. I believe that site-making platforms like GeoCities and Angelfire losing popularity has left us far too dependent on more shared, social spaces. These now hold and retain all the power in deciding whether we get to exist on the Internet or, as is often the case, not.

Granted, even if these older platforms had remained as prominent, they most likely would still have similarly restrictive and repressive policies as those that many of us are struggling under today. I'm not naïve, I won't pretend like it would be some kind of utopia online if Twitter or Facebook had never come to power.

However, I think there's a lot to be said about and learned from those older ways. We don't need to do things exactly the same way, but the reliance we've built upon other people allowing us to be present online - in places where everybody else usually is, too - was always going to be risky deal. Now, and for a long while already, many of us are paying dearly for it.

How can that help us today?

As I explained in Part 1, I've had a lot of experience with this sort of thing. If I may be self-serving for a moment here, I've spent a lot of my time and effort over the years yelling about these problems, effectively from the sidelines. It's never felt to me like I reached enough ears to make a difference, so I want to compile my idea of how we should move forward from here. Putting it all into one place will hopefully make it more easily be found and shared around.

I will warn that parts of this plan can and will sound daunting, and that's okay; much like moving out from your parents' house, you must learn skills you need to be more independent online. You also don't need to do everything to the letter; this is just my advice; take and leave whichever parts you feel will work for you.

To sum up my principles of existing online, they go something like this. I'll elaborate more on each of them further below.

1st: "Know Your Standing"

Learn about the sites you're on, their policies and attitudes towards who you are, and the things you're about.

2nd: "Hedge Your Bets"

Spread yourself across the Internet as much as you can comfortably manage, to minimize the harm of losing any one platform.

3rd: "Have a Hub of Things"

Centralize your presence online by making a page linking to your other places on the Internet. Link that page everywhere.

4th: "Own Your Own Thing"

Set up your own place, separate to other centrally managed ones, where people can find you and what you want to share.

New 5th: "Connect Yours with Others'"

Build a network of places by exchanging mutual links to each other, so folks can navigate our distributed communities.

First Principle: "Know Your Standing"

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the bare minimum requirement for being online, and might come across as a tad redundant. If what you're about doesn't sit right with the "normies" in some way, you need to keep tabs on if and how you can work with or around the rules of a platform you want to use.

While I'd prefer not to use "othering" as the basis of any rules or principles, there's no denying that society at large threw the first stone long ago. I actually won't belabor the point but if you're reading this, you're likely an outsider, and there's always going to be someone with you on every space online who would prefer that you weren't there.

Doing your research into the sites you use, their reputation with moderating content, their content policies, the vibe towards what you want to do there, is all essential. Don't leave it up to luck, unless you know what you're risking. Your time and energy are precious, and focusing it on the places you can thrive within will pay dividends in the long run.

It's important to note that this is an ongoing task since, as we know very well by now, this can change overnight. Keep yourself informed and up to date on goings on as best you can. Social media can help with this, but if that's not your jam, checking in on your peers from time to time through journal posts and the like is invaluable too.

Second Principle: "Hedge Your Bets"

Nowadays, you owe it to yourself to maintain some level of redundancy online if you keep a presence online, especially if you're a creative type sharing your things here. The best time to get yourself set up on more than one place was yesterday. The second best time is now.

There's no sugarcoating it; you can't afford to put all your stock into and rely on any one place. You put yourself entirely at the mercy of those running it, which can ruin you sometime down the line. The day that your work might get policed, or worse, banned entirely off of the one site you're on, it will be too late to do anything about it.

As an artist, with a tool like PostyBirb being actively and regularly maintained, there is little to stop you from crossposting to various sites any longer. You don't have to be as crazy about it by posting to 8 or more places at once, but a couple of backups in places which will let you post there can, and will prove invaluable.

As a sideline to this, but still worth mentioning; please, please set up some form of offsite backups for original copies of your work. Under NO circumstances should you rely on someone else's website to safely store your only copy of anything you have ever created, because they can and most likely will delete it if they see fit.

Third Principle: "Have a Hub of Things"

Putting things in their appropriate places is a good start, but being in multiple places at once can get a little confusing or difficult for folks to keep track of. You should ideally have a single place you can point people to, so they can pick whatever it is that fits what they're seeking from you; following you on your socials, finding where to commission you, or simply to be on a platform you both use.

There are many ways to go about this, but with Linktree and Carrd now being a thing, it's easier than ever. If you're doing your thing in more than one place for whatever reason, there's no reason not to have one set up.

Then, link it fucking everywhere - I mean it! I've seen so many folks who have a redirect page set up and then don't have it front and center of their every profile. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making your hub your homepage, so just. Do it.

Fourth Principle: "Own Your Own Thing"

This is where the big guns come in - making your own space. A website.

Unfortunately, this part proved the hardest for me to write, simply because it is such a daunting thing to ask of folks and there being so many variables to it.

Already having my own website and a background in computer science to help with its maintenance means that I'm rather biased on this subject, but I can still fully appreciate that it can seem like an impossible prospect for most folks. Even I feel a little out of my depth managing my site sometimes, but that's because of the way I chose to set it up.

There are far easier and accessible ways to do this, and a little bit of help is never too far away when you really need it. Tutorials for just about anything exist online, and setting up something basic like a WordPress site is more accessible than ever. There are also plenty of technically minded folks out there who could lend a hand if you reach out to them; while I often have my hands full with all of my things, I've always done what I can to offer advice and help when I'm asked for it.

Since explaining the technical parts of this is far too broad and beyond the scope of this post, I'll instead emphasize the fact that - assuming your hosting provider allows the things you're wanting to share on it - once you're set up and ready to go, you are now your own moderator. I cannot overstate how good this sense of freedom really is.

It does come at the cost of the feeling of connectedness that a centralized platform provides, but having somewhere that you can always go back to - barring any major complications - no matter what policy changes those shared sites decide to enact, is invaluable in this day and age.

Which also brings me neatly to my final point, and a brand new principle.

New Fifth Principle: "Connect Yours with Others'"

One of the things people did when they still made and maintained their own sites was join them together in what were known as Webrings. These were made up of interconnected sites that shared a common theme, so that those interested in one site could more easily find more like them too. They were also apparently connected in a circular fashion, but I feel like this part of the structure isn't an essential feature for our present needs.

This is the "Big Idea" some of you may have seen me teasing in places. I feel like it is the next logical step for bolstering our hopefully increasingly and deliberately nomadic, disparate presences online. We are stronger as a community, and since finding any one place to be together in will continue to be a problem, then we should choose to be nowhere other than everywhere - and make it work for us.

What I propose is that folks with their own niche online, from a little links page to a fully-fledged crowdfunding site, should connect with one another in more meaningful ways.

Exchange links with your friends and peers, set up a section or page on your redirector or website to keep them in, and bolster each other’s disparate presence online. It's a small thing, but I believe it's a great way for us to start reclaiming our agency on the Internet again, together.

I've always tried my best to lead by example and, to this end, my friend Gemma and I have already done this with our two websites! We both have a page dedicated to our online friends now, where our visitors can go to find more of what they seek out from us, or things we might like. My crosslinks page is here, while hers is here, though you'll need to register an account to see it.

If you have a landing page or fully-blown website and would like to connect with me, please let me know! You can reach me through any of my socials via https://the.choco.one/#follow or via email if you prefer, at chocosune.artwork [] gmail. I can't promise that I'll accept every request, but please don't let that stop you either way. Encourage your friends to do the same, and connect with one another too.

So, there you have it. I was admittedly very hesitant to post this second part because it seemed like it may come across as entirely obvious or far too broad-strokes to be of any real use to anybody. However, after the wonderful feedback I got from posting the first one, I realized that a lot of what I now take for granted needs to be said out loud and shared around in order to encourage more folks to get on board.

I genuinely believe that this trend of spaces tightening and growing ever more restrictive to folks like us will only continue, and we aren't likely to find the "perfect website" for us to all agree to move to any time soon.

So, why not make our own, on our own terms?

Thank you once again for reading and I genuinely hope this helps, even if in some small way. If you think you know someone who might benefit from this, please consider sharing it with them.

I hope to see you all on the flip side.

Most important part upfront: PLEASE keep a keener eye out for and report any weirdness or problems on the site to me if you notice anything unusual. I just got done moving it to a new server and things might've gotten broken in ways I'm not aware of yet, despite thorough, albeit brief, testing.

The past few weeks I've been quietly making preparations to migrate my entire hosting setup onto a fresh new server because the one I was using was set to be decommissioned. Over the past 24 hours or so, I've gotten that done and dusted, and boy howdy was it a scary and frustrating ordeal.

But, here we are!

To be fair, it's a lot less exciting for y'all since, if I've done my job properly, you shouldn't have noticed a single thing (except if you tried to access the server during that time cause it was in maintenance mode but shh).

So yeah; as I mentioned at the start of the post, for the next couple of weeks please be a little more vigilant than usual, and quicker to report any strangeness going on with the site. There may be things I won't have run across since I'm using it in different ways than you all do, but if all went well then you shouldn't see anything amiss.

See you all in the New Year!

Hey!

Jager Darklite needs to secure a baseline monthly amount for his comic series' crowdfunding campaign to make it feasible for him to continue making art full-time, and is currently running a subscription drive. This is due to a sudden change in his situation, which has put a lot of pressure on him both mentally and financially.

Jager is a good friend of mine who makes absolutely stunning art that frankly feels as though it's tailored specifically to my tastes; involving gratuitous amounts of transformation, magic, messing, diapers, and even hypnosis! If you're into what I'm well known for, you're sure to enjoy what he's got.

He's running this campaign until around end of February, by when he'll need to be more self-reliant. He'll be making pages in the meantime to give early pledges something to enjoy until then, but he'll hopefully meet his goal and keep making more well beyond that!

Please do consider supporting another great artist who's already contributed a lot to the community. I know I would wish for the same if I was in his position, and I know y'all appreciate dedicated creators and the art they make for us, too.

If you're unable to afford a monthly subscription, you can share the campaign on socials with the buttons below!

This really, really sucked to have to make, but here we are.

I'm crossposting this everywhere both for visibility, and because I'm especially pleased with the art itself despite the heavy feelings it conveys. Pupbun dissociating, Chocolate taking charge, Ruby looking scared.. All the things at once made this very hard to make. I thought to add Soul looking worried about us but in the end I just couldn't do it.

I won't tell you what to do, but FA doesn't deserve our attention. It hasn't for a long time, but with Dragoneer being gone, their sheer unmitigated incompetence knows no bounds.

I don't know how I'll handle migrating off of FA, but at the bare minimum I'll be posting on there a lot less. A huge chunk of my work will immediately get me banned off of it now so, given the insane fuckwits out there who'll report the entirety of my gallery again on a stupid whim with zero recourse, attracting as little attention as possible will be my safest option anyway.

I'm doing this wholly with the expectation that I'm going to lose the entirety of my 19 year archive on that site at a moment's notice, but I simply can't afford to let my now single largest audience go so completely to waste, at least not before encouraging them to find me elsewhere.

As of today, I've been running my own crowdfunding site for 5 years! The Yeariversary was yesterday, but I can still celebrate.

Thinking back to when I first launched the Candy Shop, I remember very vividly struggling hard with expressing myself in ways I wanted to. I was terrified of scaring folks away with the things I wanted to make - kinky or otherwise - and well, now look at me.

I sadly haven't had the time nor presence of mind to focus my efforts like I did this time last year for Kinktober, but I've been prioritizing some important life stuff and making bigger plans with my art for when hopefully won't be long from now. I'll be back to business as usual as soon as I can manage, cause I do miss making as much art as I can muster for y'all, and not of any one genre either.

Given recent events with my FA suspension and cohost's closure, I've definitely been thinking a lot about our collective online presence lately. I'm really grateful that I'd divested myself from relying on any one platform by having this site going for so long, even if the continued upsets and frustrations still affect me.

I know I say this often in these kinds of celebratory posts, but it'll always bear repeating; thank you for believing in this crazy pipe dream of mine. I've had to claw my way up to here slowly over these past 5 years, and the fact that I've gotten as far as I have is not something I take for granted. I know I do things a fair bit differently to my peers, in ways that might not be all that popular, and I often lament scaring people away and stifling my own growth. However, if that were true, then those of you here genuinely believe in what I have to offer.

And that means the world to me.

Here's to another exciting year.

I spent my afternoon today tweaking and polishing up a new feature for the site - the navigation menu now has subsections under the Gallery and YCH pages for easier filtering, browsing, and finding what you want to see more of! You can expand the sections by pressing the arrow next to either one of them, and they automatically open if you're on the respective main page.

It took a lot of tinkering to get working just right and I haven't tested it as thoroughly as I'd like, so if you encounter any issues please let me know.

This was also a step I wanted to take towards dusting off and improving the YCH system again, since it's been neglected for so long. That's definitely something to look forward to in case you're interested at all in the feature being revived.

Until then, watch this space.

Over the past couple of weeks I've made some tweaks to the site, polishing things up to work just a little bit more smoothly wherever I can. Here's a quick breakdown of things I've done that might've gone unnoticed:

• Revamped payment pages to reintroduce PayPal and added "update payment info" to Stripe
  As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I enabled the ability to subscribe via PayPal again since support for it never actually went away. Furthermore, I enabled a newly implemented feature that allows you to update your payment info on Stripe subscriptions without having to cancel and resubscribe.
• Polished gallery and YCH views, making the layout and ordering more consistent
  Since the metadata for each post could vary to the point of affecting the height of the entries in the layout, this led to a strange behaviour where the order that they were displayed in wasn't always consistently chronological. Now, the layout is perfectly aligned along a fixed grid. YCHes will also be making a return soon, along with the planned but delayed commission schedule.
• Changed SSO options because of Elon Musk
  Twitter sign-on broke with the advent of new and creative ways of driving an entire social media network careening straight into the ground. There was no way for me to reimplement it without huge expense, so I removed it and added other options instead. You can now log in using Discord, Facebook, Google, OneAll, Reddit, Steam and Tumblr, which can be set up on your profile management page.
• Improved "Lightbox" image viewer for art posts
  Image galleries inside posts have been given a better, smoother viewing experience. You might have noticed this already, but it now allows you to navigate with swiping on your phone, zooming in with a click/tap, and even download the image easily with a dedicated button at the top right, which is visible while in viewing mode.
• Tweaked caching for faster response times; more work pending
  This is still only a minor improvement as of right now, but I noticed the site getting increasingly sluggish over time and I'm looking into getting it back up to scratch again.

I've been mulling over revamping the entire site's layout with a brand new template because I worry that it might be a little bland, but I think it still does the job and it's gained a new lease on life with these key improvements.

So a few months back, Plushie noticed that her comments were apparently getting eaten by the site; no error message, no confirmation, no sign of the comment after submitting - nothing.

The mystery persisted for a while and I just couldn't get to the bottom of it despite a couple hours' worth of investigation and testing, so I shelved it. Just a few days ago, we were reminded of the issue when she tried commenting and once again, had it unceremoniously raptured into the ether.

To cut a long story short, after I looked in the right places I learned that several other people's comments were being similarly filtered out and tossed in the bin without any indication. The culprit?

WordPress' default moderation filter blocks users with .biz, .cn, .info, hotmail and yahoo email accounts from commenting.

... Well, that's thankfully fixed now. Apologies to those affected, but your comments have since been rescued and restored!

Since migrating onto Stripe, things have been going swimmingly on the site. Reduced transfer fees, simplified payment processing, and so on.

The vast majority of you have migrated to the new system but a few have held on tightly to your PayPal subscriptions, which has prevented me from entirely disabling support for them in the backend. A while back I received a note from a fan on DeviantArt who asked if it was possible to sign up to the site using PayPal instead of Stripe, so I figured that if some folks are already using it anyway, why not update the site to support them both instead?

While existing subscribers won't notice much of a change, if you've been held back from signing up because of my Stripe exclusivity, now's your chance to check out my tiers and sign up!

Please note that to make up for the higher costs of using PayPal, a slight markup of €1 to €2 will be added to the membership price depending on the tier. The final prices are listed on the checkout form for your information.

Thanks!

Hey there! For a while I'd been wanting to add transparency to the pledging system on the site; basically allow guests to see how many folks were pledging, estimated totals, that sort of thing - much like it was on Patreon.

To that end, I thought I'd start by adding a persistent perk for you all by implementing a little credits page, which you can opt in to and have your name visible as long as you have a membership active. Although the page/section itself hasn't been set up anywhere visible just yet, the ability to opt-in has already been implemented on your profile settings page.

I'm still figuring out exactly where to put the listing so it's both visible and presentable, but until then, you can help pre-populate the list by opting in!

Update: After some coding tweaks and poking the right buttons, the Patron credits listing is now live on the front page. I figured that was the best place to put it, at least for the time being. Your name will appear there as soon as you opt in to taking credit for your generous patronage. Thanks again!

After tinkering a bit this afternoon, I've managed to implement Discord notifications for new uploads to the site!

If you find it tricky to keep up with when I post here with email notifications, then there's no better time to set up your Discord account integration on my server.

NB: I do realize the irony of posting this to those of you having a hard time seeing email notifications as well as those of you already seeing this on Discord, but I figure it's better to say this somewhere that has the most visibility to get the word around.

A while back I set aside some time to create some new thumbnails for use with general and placeholder posts and entries on my various art sites.

You'll already have seen these pop up on some relevant posts on this site, but here they are at a higher resolution for your enjoyment. At least, that's the idea. I might make more in future, but they took a fair bit of time to make and this set covers my bases fairly well.

In order, here's what they're mainly meant to be used for. I kept them a little generic for flexibility's sake, but this'll explain where I was starting from.

• Open for commissions notifications - this is for my commiss.io page to make it very clear when my queues are open for whoever decides to check the page directly
• Noticeboard - general news, updates, notification posts etc
• Poll clipboard - pretty much self explanatory
• Sketch paper - concept art posts or YCH slots for the YCH section of the site; namely ideas that can be bought but which don't have any premade artwork to show for it
• Diary - journal posts, also fairly self explanatory
• Closed for commissions - same as the open notification, but for when I'm closed.