So a Social Media Platform Dropped Us
Social media is one of the most important inventions that has come from the age of the internet. You can visit one website and find out what all of your friends are up to, what a stranger entirely around the world thinks is a funny meme, what current events are happening globally. Social media gives us the ability to participate in a conversation with everyone else that uses said social media, albeit a constricted and stunted conversation but still. Before that point there were group chats sure. IRCs you could connect to from wherever you'd like to, as long as you had a connection to the World Wide Web there of course. But that was so much smaller in scale. Now it's pictures, videos, posts, tweets, DMs, likes, from millions of people who are all occupying the same space as you. It's like a bar that's bigger than the size of most countries, and the bouncer is letting everyone in who shows up.
And as zoos, that's very cool. If we were at a bar in real life, even were it amongst friends, we'd still probably have to be pretty concerned about our speech lest another patron overhear us and then suddenly there's trouble. But when it comes to the bar that is social media, we're able to scream at the top of our lungs about how much we love smooching dogs, and we don't care who overhears us. In fact, being overheard for some people is the whole point. Because for every few people that say "Oh eww gross," there's one that slips us a note as they walk by saying "me too." Outside of trying to change the minds of people that disagree with us, or pushing any of our specific causes, just being able to give people hope and show other zoos that they aren't alone by just making jokes and posting to platforms makes using social media awesome.
Unfortunately, it's not like all social media is just cool with us. In fact, most social media platforms ban us on site. Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. All of those are firmly against zoo accounts on their platforms. There are lots of smaller social media platforms out there that might be zoo friendly (someone see if the Zoos For Trump guy tried doing his thing on Truth Social, or someone teach us how Tumblr works so we can find out if they're cool with zoos or not right now), but really the big ones for zoo friendliness are Twitter, and Bluesky.
Well, were, anyway.
A bit of a history lesson for those of you who don't pay attention to the tech world. Twitter has been around for a long time, and for pretty much all of that time it was relatively zoo friendly. I've known about pretty open zoo accounts there for years and years. And while most of those accounts were pretty small, and of course they banned straight up porn, at the same time you could just exist and do your thing and it didn't seem like it really mattered.
At the end of 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. And while Twitter was a publically traded company and there wasn't really an "owner" that he was buying it from, in a more practical sense he was buying it from Jack Dorsey. Jack was the founder of Twitter, and while technically he'd stepped down from the CEO position by the time Elon bought the company, he was still heavily involved in the process, and got paid out incredibly lucratively. Jack didn't rest on his laurels for long though. He hired a team and immediately got to work on a Twitter competitor, which he called Bluesky.
As Twitter scrambled to try and stay afloat under the new management, plenty of other competitors made a push to try and capture some of that market share as well. But really, none of them made as much of a splash as Bluesky did. I mean, it was just going to be Twitter 2.0, right? The chance to start fresh and build from the ground up with decades of learning under the creator's belt. Who wouldn't be excited about that? Even the branding felt indicative of this move. Twitter's logo was a pale blue bird. Bluesky uses almost exactly the same color scheme, the sky is where birds live, and the new logo is a butterfly which as we all know is another flying critter. The site grew fast, with plenty of people unhappy with Musk and the changes he was making to Twitter, and happy to have an alternative.
This, of course, included plenty of zoos. Many people around the community were extremely unhappy with the clear right wing bias and thinly veiled nazi ideology shown by the new head of the company. And, of course, since he was setting the tone for the site, more and more of the biggest and most active users started becoming people similar to him. Very quickly, Twitter became somewhere where you could increasingly gain traction by openly mocking trans people, pushing racist ideas, celebrating the repeal of queer rights, fearmongering, and doing all the other things that bigots tend to enjoy. It became a running joke that plenty of people were leaving for "bluer pastures" to get away from this sudden intense cultural shift.
So that was the situation as of about a week ago. Elon was turning Twitter into a right wing hellscape, Bluesky was basically the same as old Twitter with some new tweaks, and zoos were all migrating to that new platform.
But then something started to happen. Zoos started getting banned from Bluesky. At first, it was a rare thing. You could presume that someone might have posted a picture they shouldn't have, or taken a joke too far. But then the number of bans started increasing, and more of those bans were happening to accounts that didn't really do anything. The reason given was always the same. In fact, it was always merely the same two words: "promoting bestiality." It didn't matter if you were actually doing that or not. To the Bluesky moderation team, to exist as a member of the zoo community was to commit this act. For a while we were hopeful, thinking it might just be an overzealous ban algorithm based on reports or something. But appeal after appeal went unanswered, and more and more accounts got banned. And finally, last week, we were hit too. The Zooey Dot Pub account (that does nothing but post our article links) was banned. That's not to say that their reason isn't true, we've definitely promoted bestiality here and there. But I think it shows that they're serious about trying to keep zoos off of their platform. Our ban comes right on the heels of Brass and Jin (two of the Zoo & Me hosts) getting banned as well. At this point, if you were only on Bluesky to follow your zooey friends, your timeline is probably looking pretty bare at this point.
And that sucks. That really really sucks. Because what's left is X the everything app. Sure, that X still includes zoos, but when it also includes actual nazis it's hard to be excited about it. Especially when using and supporting the site directly supports someone who seems to actively be trying to destroy democracy and take away human rights.
For a lot of zoos, the new solution has been to just give up on social media. Stop using it all together, and stick to Discord servers and Telegram groups where they can just hang out with other zoos away from all the outside noise. And I certainly don't fault anyone for doing that. But just because the platform has gone bad doesn't necessarily mean that we aren't still benefitting from using it. It puts us in a really tough position. We don't want to support Elon, or be on a platform bigots are so proud to use, but at the same time we're still getting those notes slipped to our table from people that pass us by, saying how happy they are that they found us and that we exist. We're still getting our articles seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of people. We're still able to try and show a different side of zoosexuality to people who only know us as "animal abusers." The reason that we're there hasn't changed, even if the platform itself has changed around us.
As for Bluesky, their change in policy could come down to a number of things, and some people are still awaiting an official clarification of why their policy now includes banning zoos just for existing, even when that didn't seem to be the case before, and even when it definitely doesn't seem to actually be written out in their rules anywhere (one of ZDP's informants is monitoring that situation with interest). But until we have a more official answer, here's my theory.
You remember Jack Dorsey? The guy that left Twitter to start Bluesky? Well, he was a big free speech advocate much in the same way that Elon is, except for Jack it felt much more honest. In an interview he gave shortly after leaving Bluesky, Jack said that his whole motivation for the new company was to try and make a platform that was entirely decentralized, and fully not responsible for the content that people post. Think of it more like an email provider. If you send something illegal over gmail, you can't sue Google for them providing the email service. Jack's whole vision was to create a platform much like Twitter, where anyone could post anything. But, users then would have the tools to be able to filter out content much better, and create bubbles for themselves. In our bar analogy, it would be like being able to hire a personal bouncer to keep people you don't like away from your table.
In the end however, money won out over ideology. Whether or not you agree with Jack's vision, it was clear that the rest of the board members didn't. They quickly realized that Bluesky was a hit, and rather than gamble on this new concept, they decided to just play it safe. Jack didn't like that, and ended up leaving Bluesky as well in the middle of last year. I don't think zoos would be getting banned if he were still there. And of course, because nothing can ever be easy, Jack is now a huge investor in Nostr, another social media network built around being super decentralized, with heavy connection to blockchain technology. And the new Bluesky management? Well, platforming zoos is not playing it safe, and so we get evicted.
All of this makes me really frustrated. I hate that we have to choose between the weird nazi guy platform, a smaller platform where we won't have the reach we need, or just to give up and use nothing at all. I've talked a lot with a lot of people about this, and there just isn't a perfect answer that I've found. It sucks that so many platforms see us existing as a threat to their ecosystem, and more importantly their advertising dollars. I was really hopeful that Bluesky was going to be the answer to that problem. But it's not.
It's my hope that there's going to be more and more Twitter competitors as that site keeps driving itself into the ground. But are they going to be zoo friendly? Are they going to be able to generate the audiences that we need in order to practice our zoo advocacy effectively? Now that Bluesky exists, is that just going to be the new default Twitter alternative, just with us no longer allowed inside? The world of social media is always evolving, but for us all we can really do is hold on tight and hope that the places that grow are places we can grow in as well.
I like to end articles with positivity and solutions, but it's hard to find with this one. The only real solution I can think of is early adoption. Maybe if we can get into one of these smaller social media platforms early, we can speak more directly with moderation to verify that we're allowed to be there, and then contribute to the platform activity enough that they don't go back on their word if they do end up growing. But doing that is such a gamble. You never know what site is going to do well, and spending your time and energy on trying to grow on social media is hard enough without the idea that the platform could just die in the back of your head. Plus, maybe in the future some members of their staff just leave and other people who don't know us join, or an advertiser threatens to leave if the site doesn't clean up its content, and now all of that work was for nothing. Maybe it's worth it if you're someone with time that likes to explore weird corners of the internet. If you do, let us know how it goes. Until then, we'll just keep doing what we can with what we have.
If you were someone that accessed our content from Bluesky, you can find us on Twitter still, as well as our Discord server. We've got an RSS feed if you're over the age of 40, and we actually just launched a Telegram feed where you can get updates on all the new articles as they come out. Right now the bot is cycling through our old content just to make sure everything is added there, but once everything's posted you'll be able to follow it and get a ping every Saturday and Sunday when the new content goes live. You can find it at @ZooeyDotPub.
I know that getting banned off of social media is something that we're not alone in dealing with. There have even been plenty of zoos that have been banned from Twitter too for pretty ambiguous reasons. I just wanted to say here at the end, if you're a zoo that's also been deplatformed from Bluesky, Twitter, or really anywhere else, keep your head up. I know that it can feel really isolating, but don't forget that there still are plenty of places that exist for you. You're not alone.
Thanks for reading.
Article written by Tarro (February 2025)
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