I don't understand FurryNetwork.
I don't understand why it was created, what niche it was meant to fill, and why artists who leave Fur Affinity decide to use it instead of other alternatives like Inkbunny, SoFurry, or Weasyl.
Yes, it's still in public beta, but it lapses into a multitude of modern web design foibles that harm its use as a serious image gallery. Here's a big ol' list of the grievances I have with the fundamental design of the website:
- Low information density to visual clutter
Like many modern websites, FN is designed with low information density to be easier on the eyes, but this comes at the expense of having a less complete immediate overview of a given artist's statistics and posts.
When you land on an artist page on FA, the first thing to be displayed is their custom text dead center at the center of the page, often used to show personal and commission information in simple textual form. With FN, your immediate attention is split between profile information, big fat thumbnails of artwork, comments on said artwork, and following messages, akin to Facebook's or Twitter's social network 'feed' style; it's mess of information generally not relevant to most viewers, since you're more than likely viewing the artist's page for their work or commission info, not because you want to see their every action.
Moreover, if an artist has many thumbnails on this feed, the feed stretches further down than the rest of the page's information, resulting in an awkward off-center section with no buffer around it. FA's way around this is just not having a feed and having pre-determined sections of information, the most important of which is displayed closer to the top of the page. Art posts are confined to small thumbnails on the middle left, and you can navigate to the artist's gallery from there. It's simple, straightforward, and it wouldn't hurt to mimic.
Also, it's silly that the 'Following' and 'Follower' section is comprised of profile thumbnails rather than text. With thumbnails, you don't know who anyone is at a glance; anyone could steal any artist's profile image to imitate them, and you wouldn't know until you either click through or hover over the link to their profile to see the URL. I get it's nicer looking than raw text, but it's just not a user-friendly design choice from a pragmatic perspective.
- Sticky header
Do I even need to explain? Sticky headers are the bane of screen real estate, and they feel unnatural, clinging to your viewport while the rest of the page moves when you scroll. While FN's is not as grievous as Twitter's, it does result in increased visual clutter that's largely irrelevant to most of your use cases. Both e621 and FA do not have headers which stick your viewport while you scroll, and them doing so would immensely hamper my enjoyment of using those sites. After all, do you really need to see the header so badly when a simple press of the 'home' button catapults you to the top of the screen?
- Dynamic image loading/infinite gallery scrolling
The 'Loading more results' section at the bottom of the /artwork/ page lacks any form of throbber to denote that the page hasn't frozen up, a big problem when it takes over a second to load the next batch of image thumbnails. While some form of animation would give users more visual feedback, it would be preferable overall to incorporate means of navigating through mountains of artwork, such as denoted page numbers with options for how many thumbnails to view per page.
The primary benefit of this for the users is the ability to quickly search for older images if they're undertagged without sitting through potentially minutes of an infinitely scrolling page, like Twitter forces you to do; it's infuriating when you want to seek out something to gloss over or archive elsewhere. Another benefit is that should you click on a thumbnail to view an image, it allows you to view the page which the thumbnail was featured on again when you hit the back arrow, rather than require you to scroll down for quite some time to spot it again.
- Cramped gallery view
This is the unfortunate result of having a non-collapsible tag searching pane and not one, but TWO sticky headers, the one present on the profile page, as well as an additional pane to tabulate between artist page, gallery, and commissions. This is a far cry from what I'd consider serviceable for users accustomed to being able to see more at a glance. Compare this to the amount of thumbnails I can see with a normal laptop monitor on FN and other websites:
FurryNetwork: 3 rows, 5 columns e621: 4 rows, 6 columns Inkbunny: 3 rows, 6 columns (with default 'large' thumbnail size) SoFurry: 5 rows, 7 columns Fur Affinity: 3 rows, 6 columns Weasyl: highly variable
SoFurry uses small, but discernible thumbnails that do their job. FurryNetwork on the other hand is behind all but Weasyl in this department, since Weasyl made the strange decision of having all their thumbnails in wildly different sizes (a decision I don't understand, at all).
A remedy for this would be making the search sidebar collapsible (allowing for 6 columns, on par with InkBunny's default mode), but even then, viewing the gallery would still feel claustrophobic due to the two sticky headers, permanently sacrificing viewing comfort to avoid the mild inconvenience of pressing 'home' every once in a blue moon.
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Ultimately, these grievances and other minor factors make me wonder WHY people find FurryNetwork so appealing. Dedicated social networks like Twitter and Facebook provide ample wiggle room to promote your artwork, and Fur Affinity--despite the drama--is still designed decently in terms of UI from a casual user's perspective. Combined with the other sites mentioned, there seems to be no valid reason to use FN.
So, can anyone elucidate to me what the draw of FN even is, given the aforementioned nits?
Updated by null0010