Whither Fur Affinity?

With the recent far-too-early passing of Dragoneer, Fur Affinity’s owner, I’ve seen two understandable if conflicting impulses:

• Shit, what’s going to happen to FA now?
• How dare you even ask that question!

And, okay. I get the “don’t speak ill of the dead unless they’re Henry Kissinger” thing, but what happens now? is not speaking ill of the dead. It’s a legitimate question. When Dragoneer bought FA back from IMVU, their blog post announcement described it as moving “under sole ownership of Dragoneer”; Frost Dragon Art LLC may be just one person.

After his death, Dragoneer’s partner started a GoFundMe to support FA; the fund originally requested $75,000, and generous furries blew past that. On August 15th, they changed the goal to be $221,800, with several question marks indicating more to be added later; this could easily break a quarter million. Furry lawyer Buddy Goodboy argues this raises questions about the expenses, particularly around the business itself:

[Fur Affinity’s debts include] a working capital loan ($32,000), the balance owed to IMVU for Fur Affinity’s buyback ($17,000), and past contract services owed ($38,400). Are there are any other outstanding debts? Who owns this debt? What was the plan to pay it back? What were the terms?

As uncomfortable as it is to be asking, these are valid questions, as are questions about FA’s relatively high operating expenses. FA has immense storage requirements, but they purchased their own hardware in 2020; their September 6th update put their colocation costs at $5K/mo, which seems startlingly high based on my research. To be clear, I am not accusing anyone of running a grift. Questions notwithstanding, most of the cited costs are sadly plausible. The concern is what this means for FA’s future. To quote Buddy’s list of questions again,

What happens at the end of two months? What is the plan to pay Fur Affinity’s operating expenses moving forward? Why is Fur Affinity’s current income not supporting its operating costs?

Unlike Buddy, I am not a lawyer, nor am I an accountant; I’m just a grumpy cat with an occasional eye for details. What jumps out at me is the sheer amount of debt: the working capital loan and the amount owed to IMVU and “past contract services” total $87,400. The GoFundMe is more than enough to discharge those outstanding debts, but what then? You take out a working capital loan to cover everyday operations—in other words, it sounds like FA had to borrow $32K just to keep running. Dragoneer always described the site as kind of a money pit, and apparently he wasn’t kidding.

I’m not going to make dire predictions of FA being doomed; the site’s escaped the jaws of death multiple times at this point, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see it do it one more time.

But it’s the time after this that I have my doubts about. When FA’s operating income is still outpaced by its expenses, Dragoneer is no longer there to give his literal everything to the site, and the burst of energy and enthusiasm around honoring his legacy can’t be counted on to turn this into a semi-annual donation drive.

At the very least, I’d suggest downloading favorites that you might really want to keep—and for God’s sake, make sure you have all of your own uploaded content saved on your own computer. Fur Affinity is not and never has been a place for you to store your only copies of your work. (And if you’re thinking “I don’t care if I lose that old stuff I can’t even bear to look at now,” download it anyway. Future you may not have the same opinion about looking back that you do.)

I’ve said before that I think furries—and the web at large, but maybe especially creative types—need to embrace the idea of digital homesteading, of making their own places on the web. Yes, FA is a by-furries-for-furries place, as is SoFurry and [insert name of your favorite FA challenger that has like fifteen people using it], which means it doesn’t have the issues of corporate social media sites like Xitter and Tumblr. (Bluesky gets partial credit here for being a public benefit corporation.) Unfortunately, they’ve traded the risks of being for-profit entities with the risks of having a much higher bus factor.

I get that agitating for every creator to set up their own website, and every fan to just go around to multiple websites, is quixotic. What they should do, of course, is use RSS readers to monitor all those multiple websites. There have been so many free, easy alternatives since the mid-2000s that it stopped being something “normal people” do. The problem, though, is that those free, easy alternatives always have strings. Always. You get the features those sites have, and no more. You get the moderation those sites have, whether you think it’s fair or not.

And even more to the point, somebody gets those bills, and sooner or later somebody has to start paying them. The service enshittifies, or stops accepting free users, or sells itself, or shuts down. Or, I guess, it keeps juggling debt until its successors have to run a GoFundMe to dig themselves out of the hole.

But how long can they stay out?