A major oversight when developing MyFursona
We've faced a name conflict with "MyFursona"; as KovuTheHusky founded the original MyFursona website back in 2008. Kovu eventually responded and acknowledged the project but retained ownership of the name, leading us to rebrand the project name to reach a broader audience.
This was originally in the first post about the beginnings of MyFursona, but it was too long to add and would make its blog entry instead.
When I was working on a project to index all furry websites and place them on a website. (I swear, I wasn’t inspired by that one site where it curates spicy sites) I used WikiFur to grab all the data for all the website articles and while I was browsing through the category, I was stunned to see the MyFursona article on WikiFur!
In summary to the article: MyFursona was a social media platform founded by Kevin Breslin or his online alias KovuTheHusky and is the only platform to hold fur meets. By May 2009, it had 5,000 registered users before shutting down in 2011 for internal staff issues. The project was relaunched as MyFursona Eden in January 2013 and has been inactive to this day.
Kovu's response
Knowing all about this, I had to notify Jason about this and contacted Kovu both on X, through email, and even via Telegram. After 3 months, Kovu got back to Jason on October 21 via Telegram!
MyFursona has been something that has been on-again off-again for over a decade now but it is still something near and dear to my heart and something I intend to actually put time and effort into.
I'm chair for Furcationland and I'm very involved with helping run Furpoclapyse too. Those two keep me busy but after FP this year I have concrete plans for MyFursona.
I'm a fan of what you're doing but I intend to hang on to the MyFursona name, domains, social media, etc.
Sorry for the very delayed response but as I said, FP keeps me busy and this year has been especially rough.
— KovuTheHusky, via Telegram
What does this mean for us? We need to come up with a new name and something to reflect a more general audience, not just limited to furries in mind if we don't wanna escalate things and a dispute over a name. Though, we're still keeping the logo that Nebula designed last year.
Kovu's a busy person, he's been running furry conventions he mentioned back and forth for months. Although Kovu mentioned that he still retains ownership of the MyFursona name. But for the sake of this blog post, I'm still using the MyFursona name until we've come up with a new name for the project that Jason and others have been working on for the past year.
Comparing Kovu’s platform to ours
In my assumptions and terms of tech stack used: Kovu's MyFursona back in 2008 was written in PHP and probably self-hosted, and accessible DDoS mitigation services like Cloudflare didn’t exist back then, which I guess explains why the WikiFur article about MyFursona, explains the downtimes for “unknown security hole” or a security vulnerability; and the huge influx of users registering to the platform.
Its source code is proprietary and is secretly kept by Kovu. However, they have an organization on GitHub they use for issue tracking.
Our version of MyFursona, is written in Next.js, and we, of course, rely on services such as Cloudflare, our CDN and DDoS mitigation, and Vercel, our deployment platform; to host the website knowing that we have full control over deployments, security and do regular pentesting, A/B testing, stuff like that. In addition of have the luxury to expand to mobile users and have a dedicated desktop client shortly!
Our version of MyFursona is completely open source on GitHub; the web platform is licensed under Apache version 2 (previously MIT licensed).
Feature-wise, Kovu's MF is a social platform similar to something like FurAffinity through the use of threads and blog entries. Whereas ours is more art-focused where artists can manage their fursonas, adopts, and commissions; as well as the ability to tag photos akin to something like Facebook does.
Conclusion
I'm so relieved that Kovu finally responded and I'm glad I stumbled on the MyFursona article on WikiFur. To be fair, it was a major oversight, as Jason was completely unaware of the name until I notified him about the matter.
If we didn't know any better and just stuck to the MyFursona name and it grew in popularity, chances are that he would notice it and ask us to change the name eventually. Either way, we would pick a new name that reflects a more general audience rather than being specific to the furry fandom.