Today I got talking with Resti about the dating expectations given to men and to women, and this got me onto the topic of F-list.
As a note to myself, and to condense down a longer conversation for reference, here, then, is what it was like to get play on F-list on 2014.
F-list is an erotic roleplay site, loosely affiliated with the furry community. I encountered it early into my transition and gained most of my experience with dating and online hookup culture through it. It is still online, but I don't know if it's the same place twelve years later; one expects the culture to have changed a bit over the years as people drop out of the meat market and new people come into it.
In order to advertise yourself and find play, you are given a profile. This has the following things in it:
You are not required to play the same gender as you are in real life. You are, in fact, actively required not to represent your real-life self - all interactions must be in character, it is a bannable offense to bring up your real identity. You also cannot post any image that could at all plausibly be you. Most players stick to hentai for illustrating their profiles.
I haven't played on F-list for around a decade now, so be warned that if you join now the culture may have changed.
You are stuck with one of the eight canonical ones. Each type of name has an associated color. Girls are pink, boys are blue, "shemales" and "herms" are purple, "cuntboys" and "male-herms" are green, "transgender" characters are orange, and "none" are grey.
In practice, the real genders are "pink name", "blue name", and "purple name." Orange, grey and green names are rare enough that it's actively hard to find one, while there is no shortage of boys, girls, or futanari (which is a different thing from a trans woman, we swear!)
The "shemale" designation, while it's fundamentally labeled with a slur, exists for a good reason - it represents the sexual configuration of "breasts, dick, no pussy, not a trans woman in a way that is relevant to the experience of play." I mean, do you really want to get deep into the Gender Mines while you're getting railed? Some people are into that, but many others aren't. "Herm" is this, but with a pussy as well.
The terms are functional, even if they're messy, so I'm going to let them be in this article, especially because I feel it expresses something of how messy gender expression can be on the ground. As a trans woman on this site, I played mostly pinknames and the occasional purple - never touching orange. I think there's a kind of freedom in that.
Blue names are usually considered relatively low-quality roleplayers. Skilled blue names may countersignal by presenting more feminine. (I had a torrid affair with a particular bluename who presented this exact way!) Blue name presentation can range from "femboy" to "Sir" to "guy who would send you a dick pic on OKCupid".
Pink names are unmarked. Everyone is assumed to find women more attractive than men, so playing a pink-name character is "the default." Pink name presentation also spans the gamut. Jinx and Ishaza are both pinknames, and they're pretty far in presentation from each other!
Purple names are assumed dominant unless otherwise noted, and are generally assumed to be a little more skilled. There is a stereotypical player-type called the "bitch-breaker" that mostly does power-play as a purple name, consisting of people worshipping them, fawning over them, and begging for the bitch-breaker to rail them. Popular bitch-breakers often incorporate elements of being ignored into their dominance, or require potential players to put in more effort than they themselves give to the roleplay. They then pick the players who sent the best fawns of the day as their toys. This does go to some dommes' heads, as anyone who's been in a kink scene for a while knows. Liath was based very much upon this broad template when I first created her.
There are multiple ways to find play, but the one I'm familiar with is F-Chat, a realtime roleplay IRC-like environment.
There are three main ways I used to get play on F-Chat.
These three things are good for different things.
1 is best if you are willing to play in relative public today and are looking for something quick, group-based, or something that matches the gimmick of a public channel. However, you're pretty much stuck with whoever happens to be in the room at the moment, and you're likely limited to relatively vanilla sex acts. However, it takes less courage to do.
2 is best if you want something relatively fast, but private, with a setup or core kink that you like. You will be able to find most things under the broad umbrella of BDSM fairly easily through this method, but the quality of the players you encounter may be less than stellar. The amount of courage needed here is moderate.
3 is best if you want someone for a longer-term roleplay or are looking for something that matches an obscure or harder kink of yours. You will need much courage and some persistence in this method, and to be willing to put in more effort, but it's the most reliable way to find longer-term play partners and people you really click with.
I'm going to explore each of these in more detail next.
For pick-up play to work, you have to pick the right channel. One that's relatively active and willing to engage. Some channels have high occupancy but low activity, and some have high activity but relatively few players. The latter is better in almost all cases.
Some channels will have a gimmick - some kind of bot in the channel that manages a game or other activity. (Strip Poker, Spin the Bottle, what have you.) Gimmicks like this are great, because they provide a Schelling point activity for everyone in the channel to do to break the ice before they get down to the boning part.
Good pick-up play looks like four to ten active people in a room, a pair of which hit it off and are encouraged by the others to get it on. This may then lead to a larger group scene, or several pairings going on. Whatever works in the moment!
The whole point of pick-up play is that it's spontaneous, involves people you've probably just met, and gets you boning fast. But that same lack of familiarity means you can't get very kinky with it. Most people on F-list are up for vanilla sex most of the time (since if they didn't want to fuck they wouldn't be online on an erotic roleplay site.) But trying to incorporate kinks you have in common from each other's profiles in the middle of a spontaneous bone session isn't the wisest idea - it slows things down at best, and at worst it can lead to Problems.
You may also have to settle for someone who's not of your most preferred gender, appearance, personality, or play skill. Them's the breaks when doing pick-up play.
Advertisement involves formulating a fantasy you find compelling, sending it to a giant chat channel that moves at about 200kph, and hoping to reel in a bite. You can only send one chat message every 20 minutes, so you'd better make it count.
There is one sexual roleplay advertisement channel on all of F-Chat (because this way people don't have to check multiple locations, it's a Schelling point) and it is full of WILD stuff. I have seen people advertising to be permanently turned into their partner's pair of panties, as a tame example. Many of the advertisements are bigoted or taboo (in ways that even raise my eyebrows), and there's also all the stuff that's more accepted by the left as well. It's got everything, in one big soup.
Experiencing this channel and realizing that nothing really bad happened because of it was one of my eye opening moments, because there was a truly wild amount of Not My Kink going past, and to my knowledge it didn't harm me or anyone else in that group chat. I never quite managed to fully adapt to that environment, but it definitely knocked some of the stolidness out of me.
In any case, you send your message and you wait. If you're lucky, you quickly get a bite, their intro is of acceptable quality, and off you go to the races. You use your pre-prepared scene idea and from there it's mostly just getting sticky - nothing complicated but being yourself and having fun.
However, sometimes you'll get no bites for several repetitions, particularly if it's a quiet time or your particular fantasy is less common - or you might get a roleplayer whose intro is badly misspelled, failing at grammar or capitalization, or badly tone-deaf to the style of play you want.
It's considered polite to turn someone down verbally if they don't click, but you can also just not respond if you are not feeling so generous. This is a bit of a dick move in my view… but it doesn't mean I haven't done it sometimes.
The advantage of this method is that you get what you advertised for. If you were looking for specifically a pinkname you will get a pinkname. If you were looking for specifically bondage you will get bondage. Assuming anyone bites, that is.
In general, this method is best for play that's low commitment but private. You adjourn the scene to DMs, rather than doing it in the ad channel. But it's hard to find partners for rare kinks via this method, and it's not reliable in finding people you click with.
This brings us to our most intensive method…
Kink search uses the in-built F-Chat search tool. This allows you to find every person online of a specific standard gender, standard kink, and an orientation that includes you. Custom kinks are also searchable but because they aren't standardized you will have a rough time finding the exact phrasing you want.
Using kink search, you load perhaps a dozen to two dozen profiles of people you're interested in, go through their images, kinks, and intros, and pick out the ones you like.
If you're searching for a common kink, probably there will be a small handful of players you find interesting. If it's a rare kink, like for example genital destruction, then you might only have one player to reach out to. If it's a really rare kink, a non-standard one (and F-list's standard list of kinks covers a huge number of kinks) then you might have to enter it as a custom and you might not find anyone with it. Them's the breaks!
I have in fact been in this situation once or twice, such as when I was searching for the kink of prostate popping (getting railed so hard it breaks your prostate and makes you impotent and unable to maintain an erection.) Truly a F-Listian kink, that one; I picked it up off another player's profile.
Anyway, let's assume you found some people. Once you have your candidates, you write a tailored approach for the one you like most from the stack. You reference some things from their profile that you liked, specify which kinks of theirs you're interested in, cross your fingers, and hit send.
About half to a quarter of the time you'll get nothing. No response at all. The rest of the time you'll get a bite. Your interlocutor will message back, perhaps with some more details of a proposed scene. At which point you get negotiating…
There is a common failure mode that you can trip into here, which is unfortunate but real. This is to negotiate the scene for so long that you never get around to the actual sex part. Talking about what you'd like to do to each other can be intoxicating and can quickly expand to fill all available time. More experienced players will try to keep some limits preventing the fantasy from infinitely expanding.
But if you do everything right, this kind of connection can produce some very intense and very fun scenes, with a truly quality roleplayer on the other end holding an equal share of the scene. Most of my longer-term relationships on F-list were made through this method.
And that's what getting play was like on F-list circa 2014!