Hello everyone,

I'm sad to announce that I've come to the decision that it would be best to archive this instance given the overhead in administration and moderation that would be required to run it correctly.

Please note that this announcement ONLY impacts yiffit.net and that I have no intention of terminating packmates.org at all.

There is several reasons for this decision but most of them are based on my inability to run the instance with the quality and care that I envisioned. Due to the nature of Lemmy, the necessary moderation effort, media storage costs and admin effort are considerably higher than for a Mastodon instance, for example. It's not a matter of donations, which many of you have generously offered over the lifespan of the instance.

What is meant by termination and archival?

Some time after January 3rd 2025, fulfilling my promise of giving at least 3 months notice, the following will happen:

• Yiffit will stop federating, all user sessions will be revoked and logins will be disabled.
• The site will effectively become a read-only version, giving access only to local communities. NSFW communities will be accessible publicly without need for an account although equipped with an age disclaimer and anything else necessary to display adult content.
• Remote communities and posts will no longer be accessible, thus remote instances need not worry that we would somehow cache any content which they would have wanted deleted if federation had been enabled.
• Local comments and posts from remote users will be preserved.
• There will be a way to receive and process personal account / data deletion requests for yiffit.net users or remote users who have submitted a comment or post.
• I will attempt to find a way to have the site officially archived in the Internet Archive or in any similar way.
• I will continue paying for the domain and hosting for an indeterminate period of time, especially since the storage costs of local content as opposed to remote content are negligible.

Technically there is a chance that we could come back at some point since I'll make sure to save the server's federation authentication keys as well as all local content, but I don't want users to count on it.

If we were to come back it would probably be in a form other than a Lemmy instance or anything else that I currently am aware exists out there.

If you want to post a farewell message, please feel free to send a comment below since everything will be archived and visible. Before archiving the instance, around New Year's Eve I'll create the final farewell message thread. Both this thread and the final farewell message thread will be pinned in the home page when the site is archived.

Thank you everyone for everything. I'm incredibly humbled by all the interest and users we've received over time and especially all the regular users who've kept posting constantly despite the downturn in activity.

This post will explain how you can create your own community on Yiffit, regardless of whether you are a local user at this instance or not.

Background: We have restricted the unsupervised creation of communities since that could potentially lead to abuse due to the limited moderating tools that lemmy currently has.

Via request, we will still allow you to create as many communities as you want and to manage them as you see fit. We just want to avoid malicious actors.

The silver lining is that this will also allow us to create communities for remote users!

How to request your own community

The process is very simple:

1. Make sure you have created an introductory post about yourself at !chat@yiffit.net. This is the only condition.
2. Send a private message to @Wander@yiffit.net with the text "COMMUNITY REQUEST" in all caps and then the following fields:

• Handle (all lowercase, no spaces, underscore allowed)
• Display name
• If it's a NSFW, SFW or Mixed community
• Whether everyone or only moderators can make posts

Note: you can create communities about nearly any topic. Non-furry and personal communities are more than welcome.

3a. If you're a local user, the community will be created for you, you'll be appointed as mod and then ownership will be transferred to you.

3b. If you're a remote user, the community will be created for you and you'll be appointed as mod. @Wander@yiffit.net will have to stay as owner since we can't transfer it to you, but we will not interfere with your vision or project for the community.

Community handles will be given on a first-come, first-serve basis. Community handles need to be unique, but there's no limit on how many communities about similar topics we create as long as they're not abandoned straight away and at least some effort is put into them to get them started. Thus, for example, if 10 people want a community about protogens but each with their own style of moderation, we'll be happy to accommodate you (although we might have a fuse blow due to toaster overload :P).

Despite the restriction on unsupervised community creation, it is still our intention to allow anyone to create any community they see fit as long as it abides by the instances's overarching rules

Welcome! This pinned post will have everything you need to get started as well as useful information about yiffit.net for fellow instance administrators.

First: please log-in on Yiffit.net or subscribe via a NSFW-enabled instance to be able to see all content. This link will give you information on how to be able to view NSFW posts.

Instance overview

With reddit banning NSFW subs via their API and possibly altogether, Yiffit aims to be a free and open alternative dedicated to sharing furry artwork, always with attribution.

Content: SFW & NSFW, leaning towards the latter
Federation: Enabled
Community creation: Enabled via request. Users can create and moderate their own communities!
Registrations: open, with manual approval to prevent abuse
Notable rules:

• No underage characters.
• All NSFW content must be appropriately flagged.
• All posts must have attribution and the DNP list must be respected.
• Sharing content that is behind a pay wall (piracy) is strictly forbidden.
• Real NSFW photos and videos are only allowed if they are related to the submitter (eg. a selfie). This is to prevent distribution of sensitive photos without permission of the people depicted in them.
• Posting via bots is allowed as long as long as it's within the established frequency limits.

While unusual if you're not familiar with furry nsfw artwork, this instance's content is safe and legal to federate with.

DNP, Takedown requests or inquiries can be sent to @Wander@yiffit.net (Fediverse) or wanderpackmatesorg (email).

If you're a moderator of a furry or yiff subreddit and would like to jump on board of the moderation team at Yiffit, please let us know!

Notable communities

Please note that you'll need to be logged in to this instance or any other federated instance which allows NSFW in order to view most of these communities. Lemmy.ml does currently NOT allow you to access adult content from their instance.

Local communities

!meta@yiffit.net - Discussion about this instance
!furry@yiffit.net - SFW furry artwork
!chat@yiffit.net - Casual offtopic posts / chatting
!memes@yiffit.net - Furry memes
!yiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - General Yiff / Furry porn community (all orientations)
!gfur@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Male solo or Male/Male anthro
!lfur@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Female solo or Female/Female anthro
!bdsm@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Bondage & domination / submission yiff
!stories@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Written stories
!feralyiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Yiff images containing at least one feral / non-anthro character
!paws@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Paws, of course!
!petplayyiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Petplay Yiff
!vore@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Vore Yiff
!nudes@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Gone Wild / Selfie nudes
!petplay@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - IRL Petplay discussion
!anthroids@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Anthro Androids / Synthetic furries
!andromorph@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Anthro males with vaginas (aka c-boys)
!ancientyiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Ancient Yiff (2010 and earlier)
!yiff_irl@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ - Yiff IRL memes
!femyiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ Femboy Yiff
!shinyyiff@yiffit.net ^NSFW^ Rubber, latex or similar

At this point in time not all communities have content, since Yiffit was created very recently.

Remote communities

These are run by pawb.social, a fellow furry instance. An account on Yiffit will allow you to subscribe to Pawb communities and viceversa. If you've got a local account, you can follow the link below to simply click and subscribe.

!tech@pawb.social - Furry technologists
!transfurs@pawb.social - Transfurs
!musicians@pawb.social - Furry musicians
!virtualreality@pawb.social - Virtual Reality
!furry@pawb.social - Furry
!transformation@pawb.social ^NSFW^ - Transformation

Instance rules

1. You need to be +18 years old to sign up, view content from or send messages to this instance.
2. All submissions that are not original content must include attribution in the title.
3. All submissions that are not original content should include a link to the artist's gallery or profile. Please note that this should be a page managed by the artist, not a link to e621. Fortunately you'll find link to valid sources on e621 itself.
4. Links to the artist's gallery or profile should not link to pages that are known to be problematic or be dedicated to hosting content featuring underage characters in a NSFW situation.
5. Submissions from artists in the DNP list are not allowed (see list below).
6. NSFW artwork featuring underage characters is not allowed.
7. AI created images are currently not allowed. Once the instance grows large enough we'll ask for user feedback on how to approach this matter and hear out our user's opinions.
8. IRL NSFW content is allowed only if:

• It is related to you in some way (a photo of yourself, a photo you took, etc...)
• You have permission to share the photo
• Every third party in the photo is either blurred out, non-identifiable or you have their permission to publicly share the photo with their faces visible.

9. Do not post anything that was published behind a paywall and which was not publicly shared by the artist.
10. If you are an artist, you can advertise yourself in the !commissions@yiffit.net community. There you are free to post links to your Patreon or similar and share links to e-commerce platforms or pricing pages.
11. More extreme content should be posted under its own community instead of using the general communities.
12. Aside from underage characters, there is a ban on extreme gore, snuff and similarly sadistic depictions that include some for of mutilation, non-trivial amounts of blood and death. This ban is currently indefinite but will be removed once lemmy has better moderation tools and we have a way to ensure that our site is not used to glorify problematic behavior. The ban on underage characters and characters that can evidently be mistaken of being underage is permanent.
13. No discussion of anything potentially illegal or which could get the instance in trouble. If in doubt message @Wander@yiffit.net.
14. No soliciting, advertising or dog-whistling regarding prohibited or illegal content.
15. No toxicity, no hate speech, no harassment, no brigading, no kinkshaming, no bigotry, etc...
16. No discussion of politics in local-instance posts and comments. There's other instances better suited for that. Feel free to use this instance's account to engage in remote content involving politics as long as it doesn't fall into the restrictions of rule #15.
17. If you believe that any content violates the rules, please file a report.
18. Use the !meta@yiffit.net to discuss ideas and improvement suggestions.

DNP List

The following artists have expressed their desire to not have their artwork shared even with attribution. Please respect their wishes:

0. It is a safe assumption that anyone not wanting their artwork shared on e621 wouldn't want to have it shared on here. Please follow e621's DNP list as a baseline
1. Please also make sure you check e621's conditional DNP list.
2. (There are no more entries due to Yiffit.net being very new)

FAQ

Q: Where does the name "Yiffit" come from?
A: It's a wordplay on a) reddit, which will ban access to NSFW subs via third party apps soon, as well as b) "Yiff it (fuck it), we'll run our own community with trading card games and femboy foxes"

Q: Who or what is the mascot?
A: It's a Hyena, due to "Yeen" and "Yiffit" starting with the same language. They have no name yet! Suggestions are more than welcome!

Q: Can I create a community for a specific type of content?
A: Yes, and you'll be able to moderate it according to your rules as long as it doesn't violate the overarching instance-wide rules. Also, you will need an account on Yiffit.net to be able to create a new community.

Q: Can I create SFW communities as well?
A: Yes, your success my vary since we're not a generalist furry instance but you are free to create SFW communities about any topic as long as it follows the overarching instance-wide rules.

Q: I don't have an account on Yiffit and I'm not fit for moderating a community, but can I still suggest a community so that you can create it?
A: Yes, if you create a post at !meta@yiffit.net, you can request to the staff the creation for a new community you'd like to see.

Q: I'm an artist, can I advertise my commissions on here?
A: Yes! Please send me a message at @wander@yiffit.net and I'll create a community for commission adverts!

Q: Can I create a bot that posts automatically?
A: Yes, but it should be limited to one submission every two hours per community and it needs to include attribution at least in the title. We might increase or decrease the bot posting frequency depending on how it goes.