How did you first find out about Furries?

Circa 2010 i was feverishly googling “tiger girl” looking for pictures of elvish girl in the forest with her pet tiger, you know, that kind of fantasy art; and i found some obscure forum where someone posted a furry drawing of a tiger girl, and someone commented ‘can someone please draw a furry that isn’t trying to be sexy’, and i’m like ‘what’s a furry’

And i've been circling around the fandom ever since. A couple things happened to make me join: more SFW spaces opened up in the fandom, i got less sex negative anyway, and i dropped out of concept art school so i had nothing to do with myself anymore.

The backing in through unknown related searches sounds kind of like how I put terms to some of my kinks.

.. I work in IT, does that count? ^^'

Anything counts, No wrong answers. Hell, if someone said "this thread" I would congratulate them on being one of the 10000.

Sometime when I was in 8th or 9th grade, I was telling someone in IRC about how I see myself in my mind vs how I actually look as well as my obsession for "animal characters" like Robin Hood and such and they were like

"Oh. You're a furry!"

"What's that?"

"Someone who likes anthropomorphic animals."

"Anthropowhat?"

"It means 'like human.' When you make a fox talk or a dog that has a human body."

"So if I want to see Robin Hood banging Little John I can search for 'furry porn?'"

"...I mean, I guess."

Was looking at spicy flash games, found that one about seducing a fox girl on the beach, got confusing feelings and now here I am, many years later.

Somehow that doesn't surprise me based on your name here.

I don't remember exactly. I read a lot of books about dragons and werewolves as a kid, and I eventually found the VCL board through internet osmosis. I imagine nowadays it's a lot less confusing to get started.

Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VCL. Wow that's a throwback lol
I don't think I spent much time online probably until high school, I think that's when my family got DSL. I never really participated in any boards or IRC channels, or any internet culture in general. It wasn't until after I was well into college that I think I did any learning through internet osmosis. So in the having access to the internet sense, any online community is probably easier than when I was growing up. Also, If I'm reading the wiki correctly, I was familiar with the Swedish admin of VCL on FA as foople. I liked their writing. RIP

Sometime about 13 or so years ago I was on Reddit and learned about the Yiff subreddit in an askreddit thread about weird subreddits. I did some more looking into what furries were after that. I realized I liked the art (and porn) a lot and a year or so later I made a sona for myself and started to rp with some other furries I had met on TTT. I fell out of RP quickly but loved having a fursona for myself.

Its always interesting the different order things happen in. My "other" Reddit account (same name as this one here) is 6 years old, but my FA account is 10. Still no fursona for me, but I did make a cool moth my profile picture here.

I guess I passively knew about furries ever since I attended an anime con that had a few attending. 2013, I think? Five years later I joined a furry community on Discord with a friend as a joke, made friends, was peer pressured into designing and drawing myself a fursona because those friends wanted to draw art for me, and now I'm a proud degenerate. 😁👍

I was a horny 14 year old whose tastes kept running up against the laws of physics. I discovered pretty quickly that furry artists were much more willing than non-furry artists to draw things that were impossible in real life. It wasn't long before I started adding "furry" to my searches for that reason, despite not really being into them, and it wasn't long after that before I discovered e621 and its excellent search-by-tag system. At last, no longer would I have to embarrassingly try and fail to describe to Google Images what I wanted to see. As a bonus, it wasn't affiliated with Google and didn't collect any user data if you didn't log in. Couple years go by, I keep coming back there, I notice I low key prefer the look of anthro animals to my fellow human beings when it comes to naughty pictures, think nothing of it, keep going back there. Discover the furry community which seems pretty welcoming, especially the SFW side, and their memes are hilarious. As a bonus, a shocking number of them are also neurodivergent, like me. Couple more years go by and suddenly I have a fursona.

TL;DR: came for the porn, stayed for the community.

Sometimes I look back and wonder how my life would have gone if I had discovered a different booru first, or if e621 had had an age gate at that point in time (which total mama's boy 14 year old me absolutely would have respected). It probably would've been a helluva lot more boring.

14 year old me predated e621, and FA. My first horny searches were for anything in a harness; sky/BASE jumpers, rock climbers, utility workers, draft animals. Discovering pony play, and other kinks was pretty quick, but it wasn't for another 6-7 years when I was trying to get ideas for a skit for trying out to be my college mascot that I discovered furies. I wonder if I was 10 years younger what the path of discovery would have looked like. Still no fursona, but I found a cool picture of a fuzzy moth I'm using here. Other than here, I just lurk in the background.

Some of the first implementations of google images were a great way to bypass age gates, and other things, it was basically a proxy. Sites didn't redirect you to the landing page if you had a direct link, so if I didn't see the landing page there was no age gate to lie to.