2025 Year in Review
Hello dear readers, and welcome to the 2025 year in review! If you've been around for a while, you probably know that we like to do these as our final article for the year every year before we kick our feet up for two weeks and spend the holidays not thinking about the ever forwards marching need for content. Before sitting down to write these, I like to go back and read all the year in reviews that we've put out before. And, I've gotta say friends, that was hard this year. 2025 was a year with a lot of changes. I can safely say that we were wrong on pretty much all our predictions save for one, and it was the one I was hoping wouldn't come true the most. It's not all doom and gloom though. There's a lot of things that happened this year that I think were great. So, let's not delay any longer. Get your mug of cocoa, put the 4K fireplace video on the big screen, and let's talk about 2025.
I'm going to start low here, but I promise I'll pick things back up. It just feels worth acknowledging that this year we lost a lot of things in the community. Like, last year we gave special shout outs to 4 Twitter accounts that all were above 10k followers. I can still remember writing about it and being so excited. I could see social media as such a clear path towards engaging with larger and larger audiences. I predicted that there'd be an explosion of growth with at least one zoo passing the 100k mark, and a bunch more getting into the 5 digit. That didn't exactly happen. In fact, all four of the accounts mentioned in that article are banned. For how much I like to claim that Twitter is the most "tolerant" of the social media platforms, at the same time when you look at it like this I think it's clear to see the limits that tolerance has. You can be yourself, just don't do it too loudly. I think that other people are feeling it too, because the amount of new people I meet through social media just keeps going down and down.
We were also quick in the last article to call out Bluesky. A hope for a new platform that might give us space to exist without also supporting the politics of somewhere like Twitter. That didn't last very long. Zoos started getting banned from there pretty early into this year, and it didn't stop. Account after account gone. Especially any that were really trying to do any real community activism. Suffice to say, all the social media goals we planned out fell through pretty dramatically.
Especially if you count Discord. We lost the ZDP Discord this year as well. Nearly three thousand members. Three-ish years of zoo culture and history, all just gone in the blink of an eye. It was a grim reminder that even when you're told that you can exist somewhere, that courtesy only lasts as long as they decide it does, and then it's yanked away just as fast. Losing that space was one of the hardest moments for me doing this. More than the threats or the doxing attempts or anything, to see that we as a community built just suddenly be gone really really really hurt.
It wasn't just things that we lost either. It was people to. Not in that they died, not necessarily anyway. Just in that they drifted away. And that's normal, to be clear. People are always going to come and go. Especially on the internet. But, at least in my opinion it felt like there was a lot of going in the past 12 months. A lot of people disappeared when the Discord went away, and I was just never able to get back in contact with them again. But even past that, there were a lot of people that just around in zoo spaces less and less until one day I realized that I hadn't seen them in months.
Between social media cracking down, zoo spaces getting dismantled, and people just drifting away, my one big prediction from last year really came true.
To quote myself
"I think next year is going to be a year of sub-communities. Not in a hostile way or anything, just in terms of natural separation. There's only so big things can get before there starts to be a bit of cellular division. There already are different bubbles in the zoo community, like the forum bubble, and various different irl bubbles. But in 2025 I think we're going to see a lot more auxiliary groups start to form."
And while I do agree that necessarily in a hostile way, sometimes it's hard not to feel like it's a bad thing. It's bittersweet. Every group sub-divides when they reach a certain size. It's just easier to get into smaller groups, where people are more aligned with your thoughts on whatever the group topic is. Think about it this way. Say that you're into , and the is really obscure. If you meet fans of that , chances are it's so novel to meet other fans that's already a point of discussion that you all can latch onto in order to build a friendship. But, say that the is massive. It's scale. If you meet someone in real life and say you're a fan of and they say they are too, that's great, but like.. So is everyone else. The more niche something is, the more it's cool just to meet other fans. But when things get bigger, then maybe it's cool to meet another fan of the third specifically, or someone who's favorite same as yours, or someone who also the weird . Smaller details matter more.
It's weird for us, because I don't want to say by any means that it's "" for you to just run into zoos. But for a lot of people they been in the community for a long time now. They get it. To them, someone else being a zoo doesn't have the novelty that it does for someone just learning about all this, and so they instead subdivide And again, I don't think that necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day, it's more flavors of zoosexuality that people can choose from, and more options are a good thing. But I also think it's just harder to see how big the community is when more and more people are spending their time in groups behind closed doors.
Okay, let's change the topic a bit here. I really love the New Year. While technically every day is a new chance to reinvent yourself, at the same time I think that the celebration of shedding the old and opening up to the new is really important. In fact, I'd argue that New Years is maybe the best holiday of the year, because it's the one that not only lets you have fun with your friends, but also that challenges you to determine who you want to be for the next year. It's a time where you can be very introspective, and take a step back to look at the bigger picture of the journey that we're all on. It's a new beginning. And I think that's the mindset that I'm going to take with me moving into 2026. Last year was hard. It was a time of chaos, of dramatic change. Of disappointment. But now that we're here at the end of the year, and I'm giving myself time to sift through it all, we're far from having lost everything. In fact, in some ways we have more than we ever did.
I want to take a second here to gush about the Zooey Dot Pub Matrix server, and about Zoo Space. If you already know about this sorry, but I do think it's something really important to talk about.
When the Discord was banned, we were really thrown into a storm. We didn't know what to do, or where to go. But the mods and the tech team all came together to really figure out our options. There were plenty of easy options. Make another Discord server and hope we get another three years out of it. Make a Telegram group like everyone else. Maybe try something like Revolt, where . We ended up passing on all of that to do probably the hardest thing. We decided to make our own space.
I think the easiest way to explain the difference between Discord and Matrix is like this. Discord was like we were renting an apartment. Sure, it was our place, but the landlords had a lot of rules, and they were the ones that owned it, so when they decided they didn't want us living there anymore they had the power to tell us to scram. might have gone through the process of in the first place, and helped out with , but was never ours. Not really. Matrix on the other hand is like buying a house. Except we're not buying a nice house, we're really just buying the land, and maybe the frame. Everything else we've got to do ourselves. We're the ones building the walls, installing the furnace, hooking up the wiring. We're also the ones that are now liable for this house. It's our name attached to the deed. In a lot of ways, it SUCKS to try and build the house instead of just renting. But we weren't given a choice, and so we built.
And now that we've had a few months, and we've got a roof in place, I think it's really starting to come together. Anyone who joined those first couple weeks can attest things were about as bare bones as it could be. But since then, we've added meta data stripping, installed a ton of moderation tools, created our own client, and even started bringing back our bot. And that's just the start. Now that we've got the basics done, we can really start bringing out the fun stuff. And, how awesome is it that we can do all that in a space where we don't have to worry about deplatforming at all? It's **our** space. **Our** home. And while we're far from the numbers we had in the Discord server, we're also asking people to move to a whole new town where they don't know the people or the culture, and we get how hard that can be. till, we're growing, and one day I know we'll be way past where we were on the Discord.
But, it's more than just our space. It's Zoo Space. Everything we're building can be replicated. We built the house, and so now it's so much easier for someone else to build their house next to ours, and to make our zoo home turn into a zoo street, which then turns into a zoo neighborhood. We officially had our first partner space open up recently, a Matrix port of Zoo Friend Zone. And while it's pretty slow right now, it's awesome that we were able to give them a backup they could set up now, so that if their Discord ever goes the same way ours did, they have somewhere they can migrate to safely. I like to think in the years and maybe even decades to come that Zoo Space can keep growing and growing until we can be a whole zoo city. A zootopia, if you will. And while 202 sucked, the year that birthed the start of all of this.
I also want to point out that even if our reach on social media got hit, we're still not doing bad at all when it comes to website engagement. This year the magazine actually still ended up growing, even with everything else. In the past 30 days, we ended up having more than 16,000 unique visitors to the site. Which, to be clear in this day and age of the internet is a pretty healthy amount of visitors. Getting people to visit sites is hard when everyone just wants to , but I guess people out there really are resonating with what we have to say. I'm so proud of the team for being able to do what we're doing, and I don't want everything else going on to take away from the fact that the main part of who we are, this online magazine right here, is still doing great, and I couldn't be happier.
So, now the hard part. Where do we go from here? Normally I like to say that I'm pretty good at seeing the path things are going, but last year didn't go so great. 'm going to try again with a few big predictions. First of all, let's talk numbers. Right now at time of writing the Zooey Dot Pub Matrix server is at 374 members. I think next year we're going to grow a lot. y this time next year we're definitely going to be over a thousand. I'm going to more specifically guess somewhere around 1200. It's a lofty goal, but here's why I think it's reasonable. I think the trend with zoos getting banned from traditional social media is going to continue. It's unfortunate, but I don't think any current platforms are going to change their mind and say "yeah zoos are cool". I also don't see any new social media platforms getting big enough to compete with the giants. I think the best we can hope for is that they just ignore us, but I think they're doing that less and less. And, I think when get ousted, we're going to still be one of the only in town welcoming people.
I think we're going to see a lot more small zoo representation in weird places. 2025 had the shitty 2018 leaks documentary, and that really awesome Taboo Science video, but there wasn't a lot else. I think that's going to change in 2026. Not all of it is going to be good representation mind you, but there is going to be an increase in people looking to talk about the topic. I think it's just getting to a point where it's too big to ignore. People are more aware of the existence of zoophiles than they've been before, and I think that's not going to change any time soon. I just hope we can hit that point before we're totally excommunicated from the mainstream internet.
I also think we're going to start finding more allies outside the zoo community. Not other zoos, but just people who see the arguments from both sides and decide they want to stand with us. I think it's easy to forget when you're living life as a zoo, but from a logical perspective we're just correct. Yes there's nuance and all, but most arguments against us break down when faced with real criticism, and I think there's a kind of person that loves taking apart shitty arguments, and we're going to see more of those come through in the year to come
Last but not least, I want to predict one more thing, and it's a bit of a doozy. I think there's going to be serious issues in the furry fandom this year. I think this sorta coy will theywont they that we've been playing forever is going to come to a head in some significant way. I don't want this to happen honestly, but I think it's likely. The zoos in the furry scene are just getting too , and especially with the Erotic drama that just went by I think the puritans within that community are only going to get louder. They've seen they can affect things if they yell loud enough, and so they're going to keep yelling. Maybe it's more actual anti zoo statements from conventions. Maybe it's feral panels getting banned. Maybe it's something more serious. Regardless, I think there's going to be a much bigger conversation around zoosexuality in the furry fandom this year.
Part of me wants to end this by saying that at least there's no way next year can be worse than this one, but that would be disngenuous of me. Not just because it can always get worseut because as much as this year sucked, I think it was also important. We were never going to survive forever on the web. Really, if anything, I'm grateful for the time that we did have to advertise as openly as we did. But this was where it was always headed. Private networks and more peer to peer advertising. Things are only going to get harder from this point out, but I don't think anyone ever thought it was going to be easy. The best that we can do is just keep moving forwards. 2026 is going to be the birth of a new generation in the zoo community. It's going to be the start of something. I can feel it coming. And I'm excited to open the door to the new year and see how that takes shape.
Thanks for coming along for the ride, dear reader. ave a happy holidays, and we'll see you again in 2026.
Article written by Tarro (December 2025)
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Special thanks to all the people who make Zooey Dot Pub possible! None of this would work without you all, and I'm so so so grateful that you spend so much of your time believing in the dream we all have together. Thanks for being a part of this, you mean more to me than I could ever possibly manage to show.
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