Growing the Zoo Community

(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 @philozoofur – It’s the social media of the future! 😉