Hello everyone! It's been four days since this instance was born and I feel like we have something special and with a lot of potential. But it's up to us to build the community that we want and I expect that we'll be put to the test if everything returns back to normal (or mostly normal) over at reddit.
Still, Mastodon is a good example that furry communities can thrive on federated network even if their main corporate counterpart (twitter) is still alive. Thus, we have all the reason to believe that we can build something meaningful if we persist in creating a welcoming, friendly, open and content-rich instance.
Goals for the future
After realizing how enriching it was to share this instance with like-minded people, I believe we would do ourselves a disservice if we didn't explore more of the SFW / community-building side of things.
I don't want to overlap too much with pawb.social who are doing an awesome job themselves, but since we only allow members over 18 and specialize in sharing artwork, I believe there's a very interesting niche to be found in becoming a community where mature conversations can be held as well as having an awesome collection of the best furry artwork and memes..
I believe it makes a lot of sense for Yiffit.net to position itself as the lemmy instance where you can hold conversations about sensitive topics regarding relationships, sexuality, life as an adult, evolution of the furry fandom over time, and many more mature subjects (as well as casual banter of course!). On the art side of things, we'll want to be THE place on the fediverse to discover amazing art of all types and funny memes.
In this sense Yiffit could be similar to one of those traditional adult magazines with sexy pin-ups on one page and a serious, yet also insightful and empowering report about trans rights on the other (not sure if you've ever come across one of those magazines).
Present Challenges
Currently my biggest concern is defederation. We are a smaller instance (although growing!) and not yet fully established. This means that we run a bigger risk of being blocked by large instances who don't understand or care for nsfw artwork.
Fortunately it seems that most instances really don't care about it as long as we don't start sharing content of underage characters or content which is extreme.
It is for that reason that I want to ask you to please be extra careful with both the images you post and their titles. For the following months as we become more and more established we want to make absolutely sure that anything that is posted could not look like an underage character to a non-furry remote instance admin who might be seeing yiff for the first time in their lives.
Images depicting teacher/student or posts including words like "daddy" or "mommy" are not banned and I really hate to be in this position, but from both the content and the title it must be clear to any casual observer that it is not an underage character. Likewise, extreme content involving blood, gore, cheesegraters or similar should be avoided until the instance is more established.
I'm the last person who wants put restrictions to the creativity and freedom of our users, but right now the fediverse is a bit like the wild west where it's "shoot first and ask later". We want to have a solid foundation and let other instances get to know us better before we venture into those areas.
I hope you can understand :(
Clarification on some rules
Finally, I wanted to clarify one rule and give a heads up to a new rule for the /c/yiff community.
- Regarding linking back to the artist's gallery or profile Please keep in mind that we need to do our part in giving attribution to the artists without whom this whole instance would not exists.
When you link back, please don't link to an e621 post. We want to give the artists direct traffic by linking to their profile, gallery or post on FA/Twitter/DeviantArt etc...
Fortunately e621 does have source links (which is what I have been using). So, instead of copy pasting the url from the browser this can simply be fixed by copy pasting the url to the artist's gallery or post which is listed in the left column (at the bottom) of e621.
- Regarding communities like /c/yiff and others which are not gender-specific and which are moderated by me, it would be a good idea to start adding the gender pairing in the title.
For example: [M/M], [M/F], etc... Once this change goes live it'll be explained in detail in the sidebar so don't worry!
This rule will not be applicable to any community that is not moderated by me. I want to give you all the freedom you want in how you run your communities, so it's up to you.
And I think that's it for now. Please let me know in the comments what you think about these changes. It would mean a lot and I depend on your feedback to be able to steer things towards the right direction.
