Many of the most annoying and pervasive problems with the furry fandom–from the cyclical nature of Twitter discourse to the increasingly frustrating issue of furry convention main hotel registrations selling out immediately after opening–are entirely predictable if you know even a little bit of mathematics.

And it’s going to get worse. If you don’t believe me, read on.

“But Soatok, my whole thing is being a dumb animal online. Why would I know any mathematics?”

This video from Colorado professor Albert Bartlett is a must-watch:

Gimme the Numbers

WikiFur has historical data on furry convention attendance. Let’s start with the list of furry conventions with the highest attendance in their most recent year.

Convention	Year	Location	Attendance
Midwest FurFest	2023	Rosemont, Illinois	15,547
Furry Weekend Atlanta	2024	Atlanta, Georgia	15,021
Anthrocon	2023	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania	13,644
Furry Fiesta	2024	Dallas, Texas	8,001
Further Confusion	2024	San Jose, California	5,826
Megaplex	2023	Orlando, Florida	5,189
Anthro New England	2024	Boston, Massachusetts	4,482

Note: We can make a similar analysis for most furry conventions that have historical data available.

For ease, I’m going to focus on the more popular events.

Additionally, I’m going to take the average of percentages just to smooth out the variability Year-over-Year and make simpler statements.

Using averages like this is normally a risky move, especially if a statistician might one day read your work and get cross with you. I’ve provided more granular data in a Google Sheet.

• Anthrocon saw an average of 14.2% growth year-over-year since 2000. If you only focus on the past decade (which includes a dip during the pandemic), their growth rate was 12.6%.
• Midwest FurFest grew by an average of 17.9% since 2000 and 17.8% since 2014 (omitting the cancelled year).
• Furry Weekend Atlanta grew by an average of 26.3%, or 25.9% if you only look at 2015-2024.
• Texas Furry Fiesta saw an overall growth rate of 31.8% since its first year (2009), and a growth rate of 17.4% over the past decade.
• Megaplex was grew 24.6% each convention, with a 25.2% growth since 2014.

Okay, if you haven’t watched the video and aren’t good a math, that maybe sounds like sustainable, healthy growth for a community, right?

Well, let’s use the past 10 year average growth rate to make some predictions.

• AnthroCon attendance grows by 12.6%, which corresponds to an attendance doubling in 5.5 years.
• Midwest FurFest? Doubles in 3.9 years.
• Furry Weekend Atlanta? 2.7 years!
• Texas Furry Fiesta? 4 years.
• Megaplex? 2.7 years!

If the growth rate keeps up, for example, we can expect Furry Weekend Atlanta to have approximately 60,000 attendees by 2035 (11 conventions in the future).

If you think the FWA elevator wait times were long this year, just let the current growth rate keep up. Especially if their staff are short-sighted enough to sign a multi-year contract with the current convention hotel.

What About Furries That Don’t Go to Conventions?

We see exponential growth in the furry fandom outside of convention attendance, too.

I'm not sure the registration data from FA would be super helpful, but… yes, it tracks. Here's a sample data set.

2023 average daily reg'd: 1442
2019 average daily reg'd: 952
2015 average daily reg'd: 658

— Neer | dragoneer.bsky.social (@Dragoneer) March 8, 2024

I’m sure there are many other data sources we can consider, but the conclusion is likely to be the same elsewhere.

What Do The Numbers Mean?

Simply put: The furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.

We are seeing year-over-year growth rates exceeding 10% (a benchmark which represents a doubling time of 7 years, as that video up above was fond of pointing out).

Given that the world population is growing at 0.8%, it may be tempting to assume that, in a few short decades, the entire world will be furry. That is not the case.

Exponential growth cannot continue forever. You will always run headfirst into some sort of carrying capacity or limiting factor that impedes growth. Every exponential curve eventually becomes an S-curve.

Where Are We Headed?

Based on the numbers presented above, let’s think about what risks the furry community could be aimlessly blundering into right now.

I must stress that this is not a realistic threat model of the future, but an examination at what could go wrong.

Awareness of the risks could be sufficient to actually mitigate them before they manifest.

Or perhaps these words will fall upon deaf ears, and things could go more-or-less exactly as I will describe in this section.

Or maybe I’m entirely too optimistic and things will get much, much worse than I can imagine.

This is all to say: The future isn’t written yet, so who the fuck knows?

But we can make a somewhat educated guess on the trajectory we’re on. So let’s do that.

Know Your Limits

What limiting factors could the furry fandom’s explosive growth encounter in the near future?

That’s a broad question to ponder, but one possibility that comes to mind is that while there is an exponential growth in furry participation (i.e., convention attendance), there is not an accompanying exponential growth in the quantity of conventions themselves.

(Nor of convention staff, for that matter!)

The demand for convention attendance is a bull market, but the supply is more-or-less static.

THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE.

If things continue at the same pace they’re currently marching, conventions will become increasingly overcrowded. But the problems will not stop with just that.

Rooms at the main convention hotel will become accessible only for the wealthier and/or more technically savvy, rather than for all furries.

Convention registration costs will rise, to little benefit for attendees. Some of that money will be spent on big, non-fandom performances from celebrity headliners, which will drive some non-furries to attend as well, further exacerbating the crowds.

All kinds of systemic, structural issues in society at large will become more pronounced within our community.

Registration, elevators, the dealers den and artist alley, and even the fucking stairwells will have unreasonable lines of people waiting to use them.

When confronted with this stress, people will take out their anger–which is caused by a complex mess of factors stemming from this relatively simple mathematical observation–on comparatively simpler targets. Slightly more literal than usual scape goats, if you will.

A lot of ageist, classist, ableist discourse will emerge from the fault lines of our ever-expanding community.

There will be calls for more gatekeeping, rooted in nostalgia for simpler times when there were fewer of us to try to accommodate.

Convention staff will eventually buckle under an exponentially rising amount of pressure. People will burn out. It won’t be pretty.

Meanwhile, Drama YouTubers (or whatever platform or vestige they adopt in the future) will be collectively increasing Orville Redenbacher’s quarterly sales with the content they can farm from this discontent.

“That sounds bad; surely other furries are aware of this explosive growth?”

Of course, but they mostly think it’s a good thing. For example:

What Can We Do About It?

I don’t know.

I agonized for a long time about how to write this section, and I don’t have any good answers.

I mean, sure, I have some ideas that might help in some way. A couple of them are:

1. Embrace Virtual Reality. It’s much easier to scale up VR servers on the fly than it is to just accommodate thousands more furries. No reg line to deal with, either.
2. Focus On Smaller, Local Events. While it’s kind of cool that tens of thousands of furries will descend on the same city for a weekend to attend the same convention, it would also be cool if there were more local events. Not just weekly or monthly meet-ups, either. I’m thinking of picnics, barbecues, etc. “Think global, act local,” as it were.

However, neither idea does anything to alleviate the fear of missing out that can accompany large conventions.

Additionally, artists may depend on large conventions as a way to network and grow their audience, which is necessary to make their commission income sustainable. These ideas wouldn’t really help them at all.

Solving this problem is outside my wheelhouse. I’m not a social scientist, by any means, and this feels like the sort of problem they would be more successful at tackling than a computer security and math nerd.

Who knows? Maybe to an expert in another field, the solution is more obvious and known to be effective.

Or maybe nobody really knows, and we’ll have to make something up as we go.

Regardless, being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So if I can do nothing else, I hope to ensure that the folks that enjoy my blog are made aware.

Beyond that. my plan is to let people more qualified think about what (if anything) to actually do about this potential mess.

Until next time.