Despite the awesomeness and diversity that the furry fandom offers the world, there is a very narrow subset of furry content creation that has attained popular appeal within our community.
If you want to create and share furry art, there are at least a half dozen furry websites dedicated to furry art (including FurAffinity). If you want to watch people perform skits in fursuit, you have the Furry YouTube scene. If you want to watch furries play video games live, you have the Furry Twitch community (main hub: Furry Watch). There’s a thriving network of furries on social media websites like Twitter (which is where I’m most active). Hell, we even have successful authors who have published multiple books in our community (i.e. Kyell Gold).
But what we don’t see a lot of are furry bloggers. And I think that’s a mistake we should seek to correct.
Why Bother?
Social media companies are pretty terrible, and having your entire community centralized and dependent on companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter is at best a fragile equilibrium.
Ask yourself this: When was the last time someone attacked furries–in a thinly-veiled attempt to attack LGBTQIA+ people but using furries as a dog-whistle so their queerphobia can fly under the radar–on one of these platforms, and never faced any consequences (account suspension, content removal, etc.)?
How many times have your queer friends had their accounts suspended for telling bigots to fuck off, but the bigots’ accounts remain privileged?
The sad truth is that, when it comes to social media, we are not their customers. We are the product being sold to advertisers.
To put it bluntly: If hate speech is ever proven to make ad campaigns more successful, social media companies will explicitly allow it. But even more than that: You can expect these companies to punish us instead.
This is as true for Furry Twitter as it is for Furry YouTube, Furry Twitch, Furry TikTok, Furry Amino, Furry Facebook, and even Furry LinkedIn. (No, I’m not kidding.)
That’s why furries should consider starting, and maintaining, their own blog. Yes, even you!
Why Blogs Are a Game-Changer
Starting a blog gives you control over your own message, without being subject to the whims of a soulless corporation (and/or venture capitalists).
You can absolutely use social media to share and promote the content you would otherwise be sharing exclusively with those social media companies. But those apps and platforms will cease to be the primary source for the work you pour your time and heart into.
If Jack Dorsey ever went full fascist and decided to ban all queer folks from Twitter, approximately 75% of the furry fandom would disappear from their platform overnight–including the most popular furries in each niche.
But if you had your content hosted on your own blog, your online presence would survive his Thanos snap.
Furry Blogs Provide Clearer Self-Expression
Furry Twitter users: Raise your paw if you’ve never had a tweet get taken out of context or misread by another person, and had to deal with the consequences of said miscommunication.
Short bursts of information are not always a reliable means to communicate an idea. Some things require a lot of framing, context, and nuance to express clearly.
Sometimes Twitter users like to work around this by writing a series of tweets (sometimes called “tweetstorms”). But this is a brittle strategy at best: What if one of the tweets in your thread fails to load, or gets taken down by malicious users sending false reports?
Either way, if your audience is presented with your words without the intended context, who can blame them for thinking you’re a terrible person who supports something terrible?
Blog posts don’t carry this risk: Long-form articles are very all-or-nothing.
Yes, you can still write carelessly. Yes, your audience can still misinterpret something. But this is always a risk with communication. Platforms like Twitter exacerbate the inherent risk with technical failures.
Without Furry Bloggers, We’re Left Out of the Conversation
There are a lot of bloggers and citizen journalists in the world. Every once in a while, one of them covers our community in a one-off article.
Not all bloggers are well-intentioned.
If we want the general public to stop acting shitty towards us (and especially towards younger furs), letting those bloggers have complete control over the public perception of our community is a huge fail.
Is There Already a Furry Blog Community?
Yes, but it’s not very large (yet).
The only furry blogs I’ve seen in the past few months (n.b. since I started Dhole Moments in April 2020) include:
- Dogpatch Press
- Eduardo Soliz
- Furry Times
- Furry Writers’ Guild
- Fuzzballstorytime.com
- Radicoon Register
- Rune’s Furry Blog
- The Productive Wuff
- Tiger Tales
- YellowZebra Sports
The furry fandom has a population easily in excess of 1 million worldwide, yet only about a dozen of us are actively blogging in 2020.
But My Interests Are Too Niche, Nobody Will Ever Want to Read About Them!
You have no way of knowing that unless you try!
I mostly write about cryptography, which isn’t exactly the most popular topic to read about on the Internet. And yet:
Regardless of how boring you might think your interests are to other people, writing about them is a win-win because:
- Blogging is an excellent way to express your passion for your interests.
- Writing is a skill that tends to improve with experience and deliberate practice.
- You will eventually find other people who share your interests, especially if one of your blog posts ranks high on search engines for oddly-specific search queries.
There’s almost no reason not to blog.
(Laziness isn’t a valid reason; they’re extremely easy to set up and most of you were already sharing content on social media websites to begin with.)
How Dhole Moments Will Help
Whether you’ve been convinced to start a blog by this article, or already had one and have been neglecting it, I want to help you get started.
I recently created a category called Featured Furries in order to feature a post on Fuzzballstorytime.com.
If you’re a furry who wants to blog, let me know your blog exists and I will feature one article from your blog in that category.
Disclaimer: If you support racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. you are not welcome to be featured on Dhole Moments, and can in fact go fuck yourself.
Header art was made by me! Isn’t it terrible? Now you know why I commission artists instead of trying to draw stuff myself.
But I chose to use my own sketches to illustrate a point with this article: It doesn’t matter very much if you’re not presently very good at something. Sure, if you do it, you’ll certainly improve your skills, but more importantly:
Impostor syndrome sucks, and we do everyone a service by resisting it within ourselves. It’s okay if your earliest blog posts are a little shitty.
If you want to make an impact on the world, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to consistently show up.
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/15/the-world-needs-more-furry-bloggers/
My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…
I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize
— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020
Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019
Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018
Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others
In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.The kids loved it.
This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave
https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what
What’s there to hate?
The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass
Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press
90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019
SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016
Seriously.Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries
eSports Champions:https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed
Musicians:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed
Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.
Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.
The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.
Why So Curious?
If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed
Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?
Furry Fandom Documentary When?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembedAsh Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.
https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/
#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society
