some twitter gravedancing / sincerity in online conversation

That was one of my biggest issues of many people moving to or exclusively posting on Twitter - it's way too easy to get swallowed up by the constant stream of content, it's nigh-impossible to actually find anything, and you have to navigate a place that is considerably more volatile and hostile to get there.

While hindsight is 20/20, it's a little disheartening to see a bunch of people wipe their Twitter pages off the face of the net due to the change in leadership - all that art, all that history, poof! A dreadful reminder of why one should not keep all of their eggs in one basket. Always have a bunch of backups!

It's funny to think that we were furious when Yahoo did that to Geocities, but now people do it to themselves out of spite and in protest.

there is an important difference between the two cases:

in the case of yahoo and geocities, a large company that found itself in dire financial straits due to its own incompetence chose to obliterate the legacy of tons of thoughtful work created by millions of people over decades as a cost-savings measure to save an unbelievably small amount of money relative to the stupid stuff they were spending money on, like buying tumblr at several times its reasonable value and then destroying it.

in the case of twitter, it's not the individuals to blame - it's the new leadership. there are two key factors at play:

1. elon musk bought a thriving, active community and entirely reshaped it deliberately and in the open to push right wing and dangerous content. the site is primarily supported by advertising revenue, and the value of the ads is dictated by twitter's ongoing DAU/MAU numbers, so providing content with which people interact (or that they can browse on the site) is putting money directly into the pockets of a man who is openly engaged in a campaign to hurt people in our community.
2. the terms of service change (taking effect today) entitles twitter wholesale to use anything you create on the site as training data for grok, which of the major generative AI platforms is by a wide margin the least ethical, as its "free speech," anything-goes lean allows you to create nonconsensual or deliberately misleading content of public figures or in the style of specific artists.

make no mistake - the new leadership is forcing people to delete their accounts. you cannot make someone contribute to things that actively harm them (the them being trans people, women, immigrants and artists, primarily) and then blame them when they choose not to interact with you anymore.

i, too, felt a pang of sadness when i logged into my twitter account to delete it after leaving it dormant for years - but there is no denying the fact that i was forced to do that by circumstances, and would not have if i was not made to feel like the other option was worse.

I seem to be in the minority in that I never found Twitter to be addictive. Seeing a stream of every more-or-less disconnected thought that went through some people's head just left me... wondering if they had a point, I guess? It's not like a thread, where there's a topic that starts it and (most) everything comes back to. So, not getting that infamous dopamine hit from it, it just kind of left me bored. Ditto Gab, Telegram, Mastadon, BlueSky, and essentially every other "send a group-text to the globe" platform that follows the pattern. I have an account on most of them, just to dip my toes in once in a while and see if anything has changed, but so far no dice.

I vaguely remember FaceBook being better in the beginning, but I never posted much. I couldn't imagine myself having anything important enough to say that people I wasn't meeting in person later that week would want to hear it. So I did the typical "follow my family and a few old friends", until one day it kind of felt like a pseudo-stalking the lives of people I hadn't actually spoken a word to in the five years since I last saw them. I don't even know if my page still exists, having not been logged in since 2010 or so.

I think that's what makes forums like this so distinct. Things aren't so random, even in the "General Discussion" section. Each section has a theme, and each thread has a topic. Thoughts can still range pretty far and wide, but it's reasonably certain this thread won't drift off into discussions of which brand of oil is most cost-effective, like folks posting in the Automotive section would be interested in, or even onto your latest beautiful art piece, which is getting all sorts of attention over in the Art and Illustration section. It certainly won't feature multiple pictures of what someone had for breakfast (unless someone here is looking to troll me for mentioning it. ).

Even better, all of these sections fall under a furry umbrella. That one over-arcing theme that means everyone posting here has at least one shared interest we can all connect with. Reddit might have become the de-facto replacement for forums (I don't know what anyone else's impressions on that place are at the moment), but it suffers the same problem of disconnect that all the platforms above do, at least to my eyes. Wading through everything just to find anything, let alone something that actually interests me is... tedious, at best. Communities never really seemed to come together there like they do on forums. (Or maybe that's just me. Always take me with a grain of salt.)

... And wow, I did not mean to go on this long. I swear just seeing a forum again is playing havoc with me. TL;DR: I agree with the general sentiment of the OP, and just cannot truck with modern so-called social media. This place is like a real bed after too many nights spent on someone else's couch.

This comes completely out of ignorance on my part, is there a specific reason why FurAffinity isn't being considered as the prime choice for online furry interaction by newer generations?

Exoduses aside due to previous controversies and passing of the original owner, I see FA being taken into consideration as a posting site only by older fans (I don't want to misuse the term "grey-muzzle" here because I'm not referring to a certain demographic, I'm talking about people who have known the fandom since a certain number of years) while people who are just now approaching it stick to social media only and completely ignore FA as a hub alternative.

How come? Is it a form of "online lazyness", as in when someone new finds an interest on a certain board they don't go around the net to find additional spaces anymore? Or is there a common say/unwritten rule between "young'uns" to just avoid FA entirely?

I don't condone many of FA's choices of management and moderation, but as far as simply being a web place where you can store a gallery and interact with others pertaining to your subculture, it still seems to be the most appropriate place. The fact that it'd never train any kind of AI on its users or it has no algorithms for submission popularity should at least get a positive reactions from web denizens.

personally, i like FA as somewhere to put my stuff. like what's been stated, social media makes it so impossible to find anything. be it with useless tags or the inability to separate art from whatever else someone's posting. my biggest gripe with browsing the site is that i can't blacklist any tags, though. there's just certain things i REALLY don't want to see that happen to be common, and it's annoying to have to exclude things in my search query every single time.

i'm def on the younger end, but the more active userbase seems more like people who have been around a while. i wonder if some people avoid it because of the er.. reputation of being mostly nsfw? or some other personal gripes. who knows. it's been the only place i posted my art for the past couple of years until i poked my head onto bsky recently. i'll prob just keep using it same as always, though.