Announcement here: https://zooey.pub/solidarity-but-also-im-leaving-the-zdp-team/
Zoophiles, publicly, are a very small community. It’s always deeply sad to see someone go, especially someone who contributed so much to it.
I wish you well, Alissa Dogchurch. May your future be zooey and bright.
Some (small) additional links, found with a custom search engine. Javascript-heavy sites are currently unfindable. I can crawl from a given start point, if there are zoos who know additional sites.
These were found from a crawl using the resources listed at https://zoopride.net/#resources – A good site for things that are still around.
Recently, I’ve been leaning more towards Markdown editing; the Gutenberg editor is… fine, but not really ideal on tablet, which is where I do most of my writing. To that end I installed the "Markup Markdown" editing plugin to be able to edit my posts in this simpler form, unfortunately I’ve discovered that this creates two conflicting formats. I can’t just turn it off if I need to edit a Gutenberg post – It needs to stay running to power the newer posts, or they simply appear as raw Markdown text. I had a critical site error caused by one of my old (Gutenberg) posts, and I think it was due to the interaction. Ahh, this may be exciting.
Markdown is still better though, fuck visual editors. I’ve never once seen one that worked properly.
(This is a letter I wrote to the zooey.pub crew about our community – I’m posting it here to have some of my thoughts recorded.)
This is a response to Tarro’s March article, "The Slow Death of the Universe", despairing of ever growing the zoo community. I don’t think it’s because of a lack of interest or effort. Instead I think it is a symptom of a larger problem: The internet itself is dying, in favor of centralization and lockdown.
Seemingly everyone is relying on a handful of central services, all of whom are cracking down more and more all the time. It’s hard to get traction when we’re actively policed off of every major website. ZooTT is technically on Bluesky and Twitter, but half the staff has gotten banned one time or another, and you can’t have honest zooey discourse without catching one too.I want to listen to more zooey music, but putting "zoophile" in your band’s description gets you banned from Bandcamp, I have no way to find it. Heck, I’ve lost track of the number of websies that don’t even let you search for “zoophile“. We want community, but the services we depend on for it have spent an enormous amount of effort to shut us out.
The key is the old internet, and the Fediverse. We need more self-hosting zoos! We need zoos with Wordpress blogs and personal pages, Mastodon servers and XMPP chatrooms. I also want to grow the community, to make more webpages. I run a zooey blog that’s just… my personal blog. (philozoofur.com) Right now, I’d love to have engagement, but I don’t know that my hosting provider will not take it down if it becomes well known. I don’t know who provides zoo-friendly hosting, and serving from a personal computer requires additional steps and a DMZ host to get a public IP address anyway. It’s not clear to me how the large zoo resouces are even run.
Still, at the end of the day, there is cause for optimism. There are far more zoos online now than there were in the early days of the internet, this should be possible. If we can find a way to empower individual zoos to create, we can absolutely grow the community further. With increased ability comes increased creation, and with enough of us, no one will be able to take us down. If you do know of hosting you are comfortable pointing towards, I’d be happy to write up some kind of tutorial for getting a blog set up! I too want there to be more zooey spaces in the universe, and I would be thrilled if I could help contribute to the larger community in any way.
~Philozoofur
PS. Wordpress has an ActivityPub plugin, by the way! You can connect to Mastodon with a Wordpress blog. It’s jank, but you can do it. So far it’s the most… utilitarian? Way we’ve found to connect. No dependencies on needing zoo-friendly server owners, and no need to run a dedicated Mastodon server. Mastodon zoos can follow me at @[email protected] – It’s the social media of the future! 😉
Going from “The Wannabe Zoophile Intelligentsia“ to “Deeply in Love With Horse Ass“.
Why? Because horse ass is great, and more people need to know it.
It’s funny. Here I am, writing for an audience, but sometimes I wonder how people would even find this blog in the first place.
I’m sure it has been crawled by search engines, but I don’t know what you would even search for. Ideally we come up when you search for “zoophile blog,“ or similar.
But I don’t want this place to be one-note. There aren’t a lot of zoo blogs, period, and a lot of them spend most of their time explaining the basics of zoosexuality, for obvious reasons. It an be really useful to be able to point to a post and say “here is how I explain this in my own words.“
There’s a lot less about just being a person (who happens to be deeply in love with horse ass).
I was actually considering making some tech posts recently. I’ve mentioned this site is self-hosted, and I have a fondness for setting up weird projects. It would be incredibly funny to be picked up as the google search snippet for setting up wordpress or something. (I’d need to figure out how to set a readable background template, though! The straight green-blue background is deeply satisfying to my zooey butt, but also not the best for code snippets. I think with white background I may shift the rest towards the traditional colors? It is so hard to figure out how to modify default themes, though, if I figure that out I may post a tutorial.)
This would, of course, reduce the search engine’s chance of finding us, because when the hell is the most relevant search result going to be “zoophile tech blog“? It’s anti-content, everything I have read suggests every lever on every major website is tuned to provide a recommendation stream with a single topic.
I’m far too distractable, I guess. If you visit and want to do us a favor, leave a comment! It’s how we know we aren’t speaking into a void, and we appreciate that.
Holy crap, Wordpress blogs get a lot of spam. I’ve not gotten a single comment (expected, this blog is niche as heck), but I’ve gotten a few dozen spam comments from some weird social graph\crypto scam websites.
I just want a nice place to post about zoo culture, and occasonally get very horny about horses. I’m not here to scam my readers. Maybe someday we’ll have a thriving comment section, but until then, I’m not filling it with crypto links!
