Creating a deplatforming-resistant home for the zoo community

The Motivation: After discord banned the popular zooey.pub discord server despite strictly following all platform rules, it was clear that we needed a space for our community where we wouldn't need to justify our existence and where we could build on without the risk of being suddenly deplatformed.

The Process: We studied multiple self-hosted solutions, including XMPP, Stoat, Secure IRC and Matrix. We ended up choosing the Matrix protocol as it ran on simple HTTP traffic, the federation model was privacy friendly and it is also extensible, allowing us to make new features available to our users as long as the used our custom client "Zinny". Currently, Zoospace is home to half a dozen well-moderated and curated zoo communities, the largest one (zooey.pub) with almost 1000 members.

Next Steps: We are now focusing on finding community leaders who want to join Zoospace, whether hosting it directly by us on by a third-party homeserver. We are also working on a dashboard which will simplify the user's onboarding process, removing much of the usual hurdles associated with joining a matrix community as well as adding quality of life improvements and new features geared towards building a stronger and more resilient community.