I do find it a bit weird wondering if a convention with 500+ attendees will be successful; that sounds like a very successful convention to me, especially as it was growing. It is below the mean number of convention attendees according to Wikifur's numbers (mean of 867 attendees) but that is skewed by a few very high attendance cons. The median number of attendees for a convention is 341, about 200 lower than the attendance of FA United.
In fact, super large conventions are primarily a US thing. FA United is ranked 50th in size out of 137 conventions which range from 11 000 attendees to only 12. That's two orders of magnitude! Furthermore, out of those conventions which are larger than FA United, 70% of them occur in the US. Of the conventions which are smaller than FA United, only 25% occur in the US.
None of that means that the convention wouldn't have had difficulties and COVID-19 has been hard on everyone. It might actually be harder for large conventions to keep going as they will have more costs and less flexibility. I only bring it up to disagree with the characterisation and implication that FA United was small and not successful. Many cons are much smaller and keep going for a while; as two examples, Zillercon (15-40 attendees) and Lakeside Furs (20 - 45 attendees) which are both in Austria both ran for over a decade. Lakeside Furs is still ongoing and, while I don't know if Zillercon is still running, it lasted at least 17 years.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I do find it a bit weird wondering if a convention with 500+ attendees will be successful; that sounds like a very successful convention to me, especially as it was growing. It is below the mean number of convention attendees according to Wikifur's numbers (mean of 867 attendees) but that is skewed by a few very high attendance cons. The median number of attendees for a convention is 341, about 200 lower than the attendance of FA United.
In fact, super large conventions are primarily a US thing. FA United is ranked 50th in size out of 137 conventions which range from 11 000 attendees to only 12. That's two orders of magnitude! Furthermore, out of those conventions which are larger than FA United, 70% of them occur in the US. Of the conventions which are smaller than FA United, only 25% occur in the US.
None of that means that the convention wouldn't have had difficulties and COVID-19 has been hard on everyone. It might actually be harder for large conventions to keep going as they will have more costs and less flexibility. I only bring it up to disagree with the characterisation and implication that FA United was small and not successful. Many cons are much smaller and keep going for a while; as two examples, Zillercon (15-40 attendees) and Lakeside Furs (20 - 45 attendees) which are both in Austria both ran for over a decade. Lakeside Furs is still ongoing and, while I don't know if Zillercon is still running, it lasted at least 17 years.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~