Touching Grass Isn’t Enough: The Furry Fandom’s Issues Are Structural

The problems with the furry fandom today are not as simple as,
“Furries need to touch grass!”

Unfortunately, whatever you’re seeing that makes you want to say such a thing is probably a structural problem with multiple compounding factors.

I will elaborate.

But first, for anyone who feels lost, I need to explain where we are and how we got here.

One of the downsides of furries continuing to use Twitter in 2026 is that they’re being boiling-frogged into the worst versions of themselves. If this never broke containment, it would merely be a digital version of Gu. Alas, it spills over onto every platform.

I’ve previously opined that, as furries leave Twitter in search of other platforms, BlueSky deserves to win the popularity contest (partly because I didn’t expect Mastodon to cope with a sudden deluge of users).

Unfortunately, every platform slowly became a different kind of Hitler, so there is no morally superior social media selection to be made.

Fortunately, I’m not here to preach about morals or take a stance of superiority. Instead, I want to highlight a pattern that many of us have recognized, draw a clean line between observation and impact, and then talk about some ideas for what we can do about this mess.

Root Causes

1. Society’s Third Places Are Virtually Nonexistent

The concept of a Third Place comes from sociology. That is, a place other than work and home that people can just vibe in.

We don’t have third places in America, these days.

This is not uniquely an American problem, but I can only speak to it from an American perspective. A recent write-up on Singapore’s new government-run dating service leads me to believe they have a similar issue, for example. Other countries might be less affected by this.

Every time I travel to Europe for a work-related event, I’m always surprised by how long everyone lingers at cafes chatting with each other, and even moreso, how tolerant the employees are of it.

The erasure of third places probably didn’t start with the removal of teenagers from shopping malls (using “loitering” laws to punish them for not spending [enough] money), but that was the evidence that first clued me into the phenomenon nearly twenty years ago.

When evangelical Christians try to tie social ills to lower church membership, they’re not actually wrong: The church was, historically, a “third place” to a lot of people. But the problem is much broader than just religious centers, and thus the solution shouldn’t be to prioritize any particular faith system.

This affects furries for one simple reason: We are part of society.

2. The Cameras Are Always On

In my generation and older, we developed social skills through what social scientists loosely call “experimentation”.

It’s normal for kids to go through “phases” where they try out new hobbies and interests. But it also used to be normal for kids to try new conversational habits, jokes, and so on with their peer groups. If the jokes didn’t land, they’d feel embarrassed for a few minutes but adapt and everyone would move on.

We don’t live in that world anymore. Someone making a crass joke has to calculate the risk of becoming the Main Character of Social Media for the day, which can lead to doxing, stalking, facing life-altering consequences, and even having their home swatted.

And it’s not necessarily the case that anyone’s friends are going to immediately try to cancel them into oblivion for the minor social offense of suggesting that a gay friend who likes dad jokes should adopt the drag name Ra-pun-zel (because they’re about to “let down their heir”). But you can never really predict what will be the Unforgivable Sin for the Online Mob today, so it’s better to just keep quiet.

And then they enter adulthood and discover that people who were not socially stunted by social media platforms don’t carry the same internalized shame they do, and thus the discouse propagates.

3. The Furry Fandom’s Growth

I wrote Furries Are Losing the Battle Against Scale in 2024, to highlight the impact of a 20-30% Year-over-Year exponential growth on the furry community as a whole.

It’s difficult to understate how much this affects everything going on right now. While convention attendance doubles roughly every three to five years (depending on the venue), con staff and volunteering grow linearly (if at all). This is not sustainable.

This has another consequence I didn’t call out in 2024: Your specialness in the furry fandom is inversely proportional to how many furries there are. When you combine this with root cause 2 (the cameras are always on), you get an exacerbation of influencer-brain.

The tactics that would make you stand out among 100,000 furries, and the tactics you need to get the same proportion of 1,000,000 furies talking about you, are very different.

You don’t have to be a self-proclaimed rockstar to fall into the same trappings of ego.

4. COVID-19 Lockdown

I cannot explain it better than TikTok user @msaleshadiva:

A similar dynamic plays out in this webcomic_name comic, if you don’t like videos:

A similar concept in computing spaces is the notion of the Eternal September: What used to be an influx of new users with poor netiquette every September when school starts became an endless deluge once the Internet became a household commodity rather than an academic curiosity.

When a subculture or counterculture becomes populous enough that it threatens to subsume pop culture, a lot of social friction occurs. This leads to cranks whining about furry pilots on the Senate floor as much as it leads to Twitter mobs trying to dox a new fursuiter.

5. Platforms, Algorithms, and Incentives

One of the more frustrating aspects of existing in 2026 is algo-speak.

It starts with the use of stupid euphemisms to talk about a subject without the censors (read: advertisers) realizing you’re talking about those subjects, so that you can practice free speech on a centralized, corporate controlled platform without losing ad revenue (which is often the creator’s entire incentive for participating).

But then it leaks out into the audience and shapes how people speak about things. For example, they’ll start saying things like “unalive” instead of directly talk about suicide. This doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it makes it harder for people sensitive to these topics to filter the posts out before they see them, especially if they have involuntary Pavlovian anxiety responses to such material (a.k.a. “triggers”). Instead of simple, honest, and direct communication with appropriate content warning keywords so the “Muted Words” feature works properly, people will go as far as to type their algo-speak, filter-evading euphemistic bullshit into images… and then not include alt-text, which fucks over the people with visual impairments to boot.

As annoying as that is (and, make no mistake, this trend does piss me off), it’s not entirely their fault. When your media diet consists entirely of people who will say “PDF file” instead of “pedophile” (or “paedophile” if they’re British), it takes a lot of unnecessary discipline to not mimic their tendencies.

Platforms have incentives. That use Recommendation Systems for content discovery (i.e., most of them) lead to maladaptive behaviors. Outrage, scandal, and spectacle tend to dominate people’s attention.

The owner class doesn’t care about the harms caused by their systems. They only care about their quarterly earnings report, because maximizing shareholder value is their north star for any decision they make.

What Can We Do?

The most important step into solving a problem is correctly identifying that you even have a problem to solve.

Sometimes, despite what frenzy has been whipped up online, there isn’t a problem to begin with. Let’s talk through some examples:

• Someone had a bad take?
  Don’t engage with them. Unfollow, mute for 30 days (if your platform allows it) or however long it takes for things to cool down, don’t approach them at cons. Either they’ll learn, or they’ll double down. It’s not your problem either way, is it?
  
  You probably don’t need to go further than that. We all have the same 24 hours every day, why waste them on someone you dislike?
• Someone had a messy break-up?
  Were they breaking up with you?
  Was anyone raped, assaulted, or worse?
  
  No??? Then there is no action necessary!
• Someone is being a Christian Nationalist / white supremacist / [insert other hate group here]?
  Remove them immediately. They are a problem, no matter how nice or polite they seem. Remember the parable of Nazi bars.
  
  But otherwise, this problem is trivially solvable and doesn’t need a lot of deliberation, no?

When you do actually have a problem worth solving on your hands, look at the behavior you want to discourage and try to figure out the root cause. It might be one of the five I listed above, or it might be something else. My list is certainly not exhaustive!

But it’s pretty easy to see how:

1. The lack of third places;
2. The lack of judgment-free social experimentation in folks’ upbringing that won’t forever haunt them on social media;
3. The explosive exponential growth of the furry fandom (which is itself a messy problem to contend with);
4. The knock-on effects of COVID-19 lockdown which led a lot of “normal” and popular youths to get involved in niche fandom hobbies (including, but not limited to, furry); and
5. The incentives of social media platforms

…can lead to a conflux of downstream problems including many of the annoyances we deal with today.

Depending on the problem you have in mind, a different set of causes might be behind it.

Fortunately, each of these problems is solvable, and you don’t have to be a Person Of Influence to enact most of them.

Unfortunately, none of the solutions are “easy.”

Low-Stakes Third Places For Furries

I mentioned this in my Scaling Issues blog post, but we need a lot more smaller, lower-stakes hang-outs for people in our community to hang out.

Conventions are great. I’m not telling anyone to stop going to conventions.

I’m saying that you should aspire to do more meetups, movie nights, bowling alley ventures, arcade escapades, and so on with your local furry groups. Maybe rent a pavilion at your community park, or pool money and rent an AirBNB for a weekend. Throw a barbecue. Be cringe and free.

Who knows? You might even become friends with more of them.

Whatever works for your local scene, I recommend not putting most of it on social media. The more poorly socialized a critter is, the less they’ll appreciate being bullied by strangers.

Small Community-Focused Efforts

If you’re going to conventions, consider volunteering for a few hours (even if it’s only on a day when you had nothing else planned anyway).

The scale issues I’ve been talking about for years are going to get worse, but everyone who steps up to relieve pressure from the convention organizers helps keep the fandom together while they figure it out.

If you’re familiar with the history of fandom discourse, take the time to explain the debates we’ve already had and the rough consensus we’ve settled on to newcomers. You were probably upset or curious about this at one point in your life too. Better to explain it once than watch people stumble over the same roadblocks and end up bitter over it.

If you’re not familiar with the history, please listen to your queer elders. We aren’t trying to police you or your fun. (We just ask that you don’t try to police us.)

The more people are willing to listen to each other, the less likely they are to shout.

Everyone being community-minded, even if only a little, will help make the fandom a more tolerable place for everyone worth tolerating.

Understand The Monster That Social Media Truly Is

The “go touch grass” sentiment (which I’ve also admittedly engaged in a few times over the years) is rooted in the idea that the other person is terminally Online and needs to quit cold turkey by going Offline for a while. Since grass is Offline, the act of touching it implies being offline. (People with grass allergies, sorry for any confusion.)

But you don’t need to do anything drastic or extreme.

Social media, for all its ills, can connect you to other people with shared interests and compatible personalities.

But under no circumstance should you EVER let the platforms control you or who you’re friends with. Recommendation systems are not the only algorithm at play in social media. Sometimes your friends will be shadow-banned or otherwise penalized and you’ll see less of them. One day you or them might abruptly get banned for “inauthentic behavior” (n.b., this happened to my After Dark Twitter account years after I stopped posting on it). These decisions will be made for irrational and arbitrary reasons.

Also: Not everything needs to be public, and you do not owe anyone a “face reveal”.

Focus On Real Problems

When I rallied furries to raise funds to save the Ridgeland Library from their homophobic mayor in 2022, that succeeded because it wasn’t just a furry problem, or even just a LGBTQ+ problem. Free speech and libraries are intertwined in America.

In a similar vein, while “who’s that new fursuiter?” is squarely answered with “who cares it’s none of my business”, there are real problems in the furry community. We have personality cults like Furry Valley running amok. We have sexual offenders like Jacob Kovar being protected by Colorado furry groups.

Closing Thoughts

We can, as a community, do better. We just have to understand what is causing a lot of the problems we see day-to-day and take steps to fix them.

Header art: CMYKat + many social media posts screenshotted into a collage of sorts, then deep-fried into obscurity.