Of the alt sites that are around, personally I think Weasyl is looking best. It has lots of good features, and the community is picking up a bit there. It's been around a while and it's pretty stable, rather than the various new ones that pop up, run out of money, and panic and go to advertisers or just shut down :(

I've been trying to work on a tool to automate syncing a gallery across to it, but it's not super pleasant yet.

Whoa that's incredible though, I hope the project starts shaping up soon! That would be insanely useful

Thank you very much for the suggestions!

Weasyl is on life support and will never become more active, Itaku is honestly the next best thing currently after FA.

Sad to say, weasyl has been on life support for a long ass time and likely will not pick up in any meaningful manner, no dev time is spent on it (in a discord server with Ikani, the owner).
Itaku is the next best thing after FA currently.

What do you mean? It's open source, the latest commits were 3 days ago: https://github.com/weasyl/weasyl
It's definitely not dead.

And Furbitron puts it as the 3rd most active behind FA and e621: http://furbitron.com/site-allbutfa-0030.html

Any new start website is only going to have the same uphill battle that killed the rest.

Charmander is the sole person putting any dev time in yes.. That's very much "life support" mind, that's Ikani's own word choice, the owner. Just because Charmander is putting commits for small stuff doesn't mean that the website will see much actual larger scale UI improvements etc.

Also, furbitron doesn't even have Itaku, pillowfort and many others.

Not to mention, a ton of uploads to Weasyl are from postybirb, meaning it's likely just done as a secondary gallery, it's kinda hard to gauge traffic properly only from post numbers.

There's folks in the chat offering dev time recently too. It remains that is open source, and hence can be helped by volunteers, unlike other sites.

And yeah, I've chatted with the furbitron dev, and I hope they'll add itaku soon, but it seems to have had 100k posts since December, which averages to 600/day in back of the envelope math. 300k since they launched in 2020.
Hopefully furbitron will add it soon! It's nonzero effort to add more sites to it, so I guess they add things as they come. And as they have time to do so.
(I keep wishing they would add post per day graph, even if that would be messy.)
I'm just always a bit hesitant about all the new sites that pop up, and fade away after 3 years or shut down when costs get high or panic about funding models.

But yeah, options is good! But weasyl is open source and has a decent amount of content there already. It's got a public api, it's got a marketplace and some discoverability, community tagging, blacklists.. Lots of the features that FA has promised for a decade and change.

I like it, but variety is good! I'm trying to build my sync tool so that it can be expanded to different sites and stuff. ^_^

Probably getting a bit too verbose/deep/detailed/whatever for a journal comment there, sorry!

It's totally fine, this kind of elaboration helps to fill in the gaps in my personal knowledge! I'm gonna need the fullest picture I can get if I need to suddenly decide where to hop ship to in an emergency.

Thank you both for your comments, I appreciate the perspectives going forward!

The kicker for me was when they felt the need to rant about how teenage pregnancy is a thing that happens in the real world because there was a rule that allowed characters 13+ to be drawn pregnant. But they backtracked fast but still allow actual minors in kink art as long as it's "non-sexual" and "SFW". Cause voring kids is waaay better then drawing adult characters that "look underage".

As for alternative sites, Imma agree with dr-spangle. Weasyl is looking pretty good. The only downside is there's no function to go through submissions but other then that it seems more stable. I've seen people use IB too but idk people are on the fence with that one and for the right reasons.

It's such bullshit, straight up.

I appreciate your perspectives on alt-sites, and I'll be giving these a look!

If you want sites with physically confirmable traffic, you're limited to Deviantart, here, twitter, facebook and tumblr. NSFW notwithstanding. Otherwise, you're entertaining a niche' of a niche' and your ability to reach people will plummet I'm afraid. You might find success on Itaku or newgrounds, which are also more commonly tried. I know this isn't the most confidence inspiring, but it's as honest as I can be :"D.

I have had a weasyl for like... I dunno. Since it started, but it's been fairly dead. It might have an uptick after this, but if the last like 10 years are anything to go on[just online in general], it'll just be a temporary wave.

god, true.
I do have old DevArt and twitter accounts for nsfw art... I'll just need to consider dusting those off, I suppose. (Even though I'm expecting twitter to snap in half any day now.)

I'll give weasyl a look too, in the spirit of things. A lot of artists I follow here have been throwing Inkblot links around, but that site looks pretty new still.

So like, again if I'm being brutally frank using numbers (and not like personal preference), twitter might be struggling but it hosts the most human traffic of any website on the internet rightnow with the exception of maybe facebook. It's been generating a lot of "drama", but I don't think the physical numbers have truly changed or fluctuated much. I can't confirm this as I haven't researched it in months if not a year or so. I dare say, even if it's loud and annoying with doomscrolling, twitter is most successful outside of a patreon. If you can uphold one of those, they seem to be the happiest leway between a site like FA and something like twitter. However it's all algorithm, so you'll have to post "consistently" ins ome form. (like 2x daily even if you're just reposting old content).

As a PERSONAL preference I fucking despise most of these and for art I want like... a deviantart style site with all the tools, but freedom to post what I want :"D. #, that likely will never happen with current political environments :"D. Internet PROVIDERS get to pick what's online and whether or not they want the legal responsibility of possible "child pron", human trafficking, and other undesirable content that happens in places where ANY adult content is hosted, because even if that type of behavior is 1%, the liability is insurmountable. Even reddit operates this way, they do not allow adult content hosted DIRECTLY on site, because they can't afford the liability either. SO they'll just say no to ALL nsfw content as a way to avoid this. This means that responsibility is on creators DIRECTLY to monitor, contain, and maintain their audience :"). Which is insane, because I have as much control as they might. Even less. This is also why places like FA are having to update. The source of the updates are the providers re-working past rules.

I wish this type of conversation was more common, because all these decisions trickle down from gov. sources. FA's rule is frustrating, but it's the same most places, fa is just catching up! Deviantart is/has been using similar criteria, all be it written by a paid legal TEAM so it's not got nearly as many loopholes or abused reportings :"D. Go figure XD!

Also small add, sorry for talking your ear off on this :"D <3

No worries at all! These things do need to be talked about.

Being an artist that creates nsfw art is getting more and more difficult no matter where an artist manages to do it online - all because we're still operating in a society that views sex, sexual topics, and sexual entertainment as inherently negative things. And as everyone knows; it's not enough to just not like something, you have to hate it irrationally and treat everyone who does like it as a filthy fucking sinner who wants to harm you, your kids, and anyone else you need to justify taking livelihoods away from them.

I hope we can exit the sexphobic age soon, and stop treating nsfw content creators like criminals because some normie sees bdsm content and goes "ew"

ALso tbh people really dunno how to seperate a real pedophile from them just being over-scared. Not to say that's bad, but the fearmongering is fuckin real. That goes for "zoophilia" and allthat shit. We are coming off an age where "just say no" shit was THE thing. People are so afraid of safe sex that they'd rather just not help at all. The reality is many people are projecting their fears :'D. If they experience shit and then acted poorly or feel they did. Be it "didn't do enough" or didn't catch it in time or whatever, they just become over-active. You see it in "antitrans activists" in the political sphere openly bashing trans people when they literally are trans OR actively masturbate/cum to that material.

I think the two most common reasons people even go to therapy are sex and money :"D. Go figure. The two things people need the most help on :"). I'm hoping the youngest folks rn growing up in more educated spaces will help. Hopefuly by the time I'm 45 the environment will improve.

I mean I JUST saw people on twatter arguing that Beauty&Beast was about zoophilia and that bell fucks dogs? And I'm like.. "these motherfuckers don't know this is based on two real HUMANS....". It's a mess. But the only way we win is by being very vocal and opaque. <3

WE GOT THIS. Just up the gremlin power x 80.

Uhhhhh... there's a # replacing a link I posted and an entire sentence. Good thing I can't edit my comment lol.

It's suppose to say " Like this journal here points out, that will likely never happen.
this is the link https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10556022/

True, but I think OhellaDarian is looking for an art gallery, and Twitter does not meet the bare minimum there.

Well yes, sure, but they're also asking for some solid advice and honest criticisms so I was just throwing in. If they want to make money on art (which to SOME degree yes) then it's still in an artists best interest to be armed with that information. If they do or don't use it is up to them. They do deserve to know what sites are dead :"D. Or relatively so.

Also for the record I very literally pointed out I PERSONALLy dislike twitter for an art gallery. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Vagueness is a tool of authoritarianism." They know what they're doing. This is why I always demand when rules/laws/etc. are set in motion that it be clear and concise and have little to no room for 'interpretation',

Wholeheartedly agree.

A lot of people have been recommending itaku (https://itaku.ee/) but I would just use Twitter.

I appreciate the insight, thank you!