So... I firmly believe recreational reading of long-form works is a dying thing. I am not happy about this, and I have full faith it can easily STOP dying at any point, and more than likely will eventually stop dying and start growing again.
Unfortunately myself and a lot of other authors are working during this period of decay.
So we look to various places to find an audience, or to find people to share our passion with, or to find people who will read our works, and to find people whose works we want to read.
And so I see people making discords. Forums. Entire blogs dedicated to this endeavor, sharing and being shared with. And lots of us would like to participate, myself included.
But... I've noticed a problem here. Nearly every single attempt to do so leads to one of the same few outcomes:
It feels too cliquey - This is the big one, and the most prominent. Oftentimes a server will open up and they invite people in, but that server was founded by 3-4 people, who (rightfully) support each other closely, which leads to them (wrongfully) supporting each other almost exclusively. Others then form their own cliques within these servers, and while they may have some cross-interactions such as a "Nice!" or a "Glad to see you're working on it!" here and there from one clique to another, the end result is that 2-4 people focus on themselves with the odd encouragement tossed elsewhere, while another 2-4 people do the same, then another 2-4 people do that too, on and on, instead of forming a proper community where everyone interacts with everyone. I'm not innocent, but I'm working at it, and I just wish more people would too, as I don't see it happen often.
It dies out - This is the second biggest issue. A server starts, the server owners don't get the KIND of authors they were hoping for (either they wanted lewd, or they wanted purely wholesome, or they wanted fantasy, or sci-fi, or whatever, and didn't get that) so they distance themselves and then the few other members fade out due to lack of interactions (and therefore lack of reason to stay) or the cliquey-ness is SO bad that it actually drives away new members and causes the server to never get off the ground in the first place.
It's too exclusive - Some folks avoid issue 2 by limiting the size of the server and who is allowed in. But this has the effect of driving away not only authors that don't fit their criteria, but also authors who disagree with that criteria even though they themselves fit into it. Which inevitably leads to those who DO get in realizing it's just a circlejerk of all the same genre and all the same people patting each other on the back for not being "those other writers" and being "different from the other servers" by... Only letting in more of the same.
I get that nothing's perfect. No server can be a community that has 100% equal interactions on all sides from all parties regardless of interest and habit. That's just not how it works. It's not how people work.
But it would be nice to see a real, proper attempt at it.
What's worse is when your genre is niche.
I don't write human stories. I just don't. I have ONE long term story involving a human and guess what; most of the cast are not human. I have ONE short story (with two versions) that feature a human. None of the other cast are human.
They're furry. I write furry fiction. I know a LOT of people who write furry fiction.
Y'know what sucks? All authors struggle to get readers. All niche authors struggle even more. And this isn't a "woe is us" thing, it's just a matter of the audience being smaller. That's perfectly fine.
The struggle here is that when you join a group under the pretense of "We love all original fiction, we offer critique when asked, we support and encourage it all!" and then you give it a shot, and the result is "Oh you write furry fiction... Hm." and it never gets looked at, or "Oh that's awesome, it sounds super interesting! Uh... No thanks, I don't really want to read it though", or worse than that, "Sorry, we're full up on members and even if we weren't, we're mostly a fantasy- Oh we know you write fantasy but it's not the right kind of Fantasy so it would be a no."
It's hard to look at the announcements and advertisements of these discord groups as anything other than "If you write what I and all my friends write, come join!" rather than the welcoming, supportive space they call themselves.
Maybe I'm ranting, maybe I'm just salty, idk
I've got one discord group I love dearly for this sort of thing. They're supportive, even when it's not their bag, and they actually interact as friends, not just writers, and it's lovely to see.
But sometimes I wanna interact with more furry fiction authors. Swap works. Discuss things that human-story authors just... Don't? Things that just don't apply, or things that the usual author just doesn't have interest in because it doesn't matter in any of what they'd use.
And there's plenty of human fiction authors out there that would do so anyway, hell I know a couple (from the server I mentioned), but
Talking to furry authors is different, because they directly know the exact struggles, they personally relate to them.
"How do you write headphones over fox ears, what did you do for backpacks on winged characters, do you do hollow bones for your avians or just give them stronger wings" and so on and so forth.
I wanna meet more furry authors.
But there doesn't seem to be a place for furry fiction in like... 99% of the servers I've tried.
The only other server that's been proper supportive is a dedicated furry sever I'm in, but I have no idea how much I should throw out there into it, considering I'm still getting my bearings as to where I belong in it.
Just the thoughts going through my head right now.
