Furry doesn't feel welcoming anymore
It's all about drama and canceling other furs over the most minuscule of things like liking ferals, being a puphood, being into bdsm or being abdl is a big one I talk a bit about. Literally my last post was complaining of how quickly you would get blocked and banned from discord servers for being abdl (trend that bled into furaffinity). Furries weren't always like that trying to find reasons to get mad at each other, back when politics wasn't overruning the community around 2007, it was a lot calmer and nicer, we would just talk about anthros and stuff and roleplay, nowadays I don't even have the energy for it.
Furries get canceled or mass blocked left and right. For example, Virus-20 made a journal explaining that somebody asked him to block another person who was seemingly problematic to which he said, he wouldn't participate to the witch hunt. Later in the same journal he explains that an artist he liked blocked him and he doesn't even know why. Honestly, why are furries like that?
Speaking of, I remember seeing somebody on a furaffinity journal (I don't remember which one, might be the one made by Virus-20 that I mentioned earlier) saying that they were looking for roleplay partners, but were instead blocked. I had to explain to them that furaffinity is not exactly the best place for roleplaying and that there is f-list, rolechat, rprepository, etc that are better suited, they then told me that they couldn't use f-list (I think or it was rolechat?), but they would look into the alternatives I offered. That's all it took guys, it's not an impossible task to have a little bit of empathy and to explain something to someone. If your first answer to somebody asking to roleplay is to block them, then I wanna know who you are so I'll make sure to never bother you because holy moly what an hecking overreaction this is.
This sucks, especially when furry is used as an escapism from the hardship of life. Folks just don't want to be bogged down constantly with shitty stuff happening to them.
By the way, this mean-spirited attitude and making shit out of a molehill is why furry has so much drama, well besides the real ones like Kero the Wolf several years ago, it's important to take care of problem people like zoopphiles and stuff. I wish it was just bad people getting targeted, but sometimes folks who didn't do anything will get targeted over some nothingburger and that's on top of furries being a lot more antisocial these days.
I think most of the blame can go to tumblr, twitter and (now) bluesky which both brought its toxic culture of shaming others, shunning or excluding others and its block culture which encourages blocking everybody who even dares to look at you wrong. I don't mind blocking douchebags I do it too, but I don't block others for being themselves, being a bit rude (ETA: not naming names, but I said "This song is decent imo" on bluesky and the reply was "Damn this song is ass". I know some people who have blocked me on furaffinity, due to the way I speak no less, who would have absolutely blocked the guy the moment he replied this way to them, Imma just saying. Do note that rudeness is kind of infectious because he is on bluesky after all, going over that very soon in this post) or for some other arbitrary offense or microaggression they didn't think of. I typically act a slight bit more antagonistic and argumentative than usual on bluesky even if outside of it I generally stick to myself. Of course, any websites that is toxic will get under my fur and make me wanna act a bit rebellious as a I dunno a coping mechanism I guess maybe? So if you know me at my best, I may act like a different person on tumblr and bluesky which means I'm not always the most pleasant and I do know for a fact almost nobody is pleasant on bluesky. Tumblr is kind of a walled garden, so I generally don't interact with the political bullshit because it never gets shoved into my timeline, I just get fanart, furry stuff, porn and writings. These sites are to blame for the current furry culture.
Heck, another thing I've learned is there are furries (usually younger ones) trying to hunt down other furries or write long-winded exposés (documents on google drive or google docs) on them who did nothing wrong like BetaEtaDelota who got recently outed as a babyfur. So some of the blame can definitely go to the way younger people act nowadays, starting from zoomers all the way to gen beta.
Basically, what I'm saying is holding bad people accountable is one thing, while being a crybully is another. That's the thing right, these folks I'm talking about are usually assholes who call random people pedophiles, zoophiles, nazis, fascists, tankies or whatever other buzzword they know, and they know they're being douchey, but they don't care to change.
This is made worse by autism or politics (especially far left politics, right-wingers typically trade off their antisocial behavior and sass for bigotry, so they appear calmer, rare positive I can give them, not all of them though just to be clear, magapedes are just as mindlessly hateful and loud as the far-left) and both of these have so far been slowly merging with my community. This is not a problem on its own and I don't think furry would be fun in the first place if it wasn't for the weirdos and sex positive queer leftists, but this aggressivity seems comorbid with neurodivergence and activism. I kind of wish they would leave the hateful behavior out the door and reserve it for bigots at most, but nope!
Keep in mind I'm not apolitical, I'm left from center and I don't believe I'm neurotypical, but the difference is I am older. Maybe this is why I don't actively make an effort to shit on everybody in the community 24/7?
Just felt like tossing it around, I hate the incessant drama over stupid shit, I hate the block first ask questions later culture and I hate how vitriolic some furs are. For comparison this feels extremely rare in explicit adult communities like fetlife, not saying it doesn't exist or there are no douchebags, but it feels significantly rarer than in the furry community.