Furry, Explained with Finn the Panther

[LEGACY] What is Furry Communication and How to Talk to Other Furries

• Finn the Panther • Episode 6

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In this week's episode, we talk about furry communication and how to properly talk to other furries! This might seem like a weird topic to go over, but you'd be surprised at the lack of essential communication skills that members of the furry fandom have. Also, one of the main reasons why people join the furry fandom is to meet new friends, but without proper communication skills, friends are hard to come by. So in this episode, we go over a little bit about how furries communicate, and some steps you can take to increase your chances of conversing with a new friend.

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Hey there and welcome to Furry, Explained! I’m Finn, a big black cat from the internet, and Furry, Explained is my show about furries and their culture. In today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing something that rarely gets spoken about in the context of the furry fandom: having good communication skills. Part of the whole reason why people join the fandom is to meet new people and find friends, but that doesn’t just happen automatically. It takes some time and effort to reach out to other furries and strike up a conversation with them. It sounds simple, but it’s a lot more complicated than you might think. Having good communication skills is imperative when meeting new people, and you’d be surprised at the amount of members of this fandom who lack some basic fundamentals when it comes to conversing with others, especially online. So in this episode, we’re going to go over the importance of good furry communication. We’ll talk a little about how the internet has played a huge role in the growth of the fandom, and list some of the services you can use to find new furs to talk to. We’ll then go over some steps you can take to increase your chances of meeting and conversing with someone new; giving you some strategies you can use to not only start a good conversation, but to keep it long-lasting as well. There’s our little outline for today so let’s get into it! Welcome to Furry, Explained and we’ll get started right… here.

 

So, what do I mean when I say “furry communication?” You might’ve originally thought we were going to talk about some slang or jargon that furries use, which, to be fair, there is a fair amount of. And while we might do an episode on that later, what we’re actually going to be talking about is... in all honestly pretty straightforward. We’re going to talk about good communication practices for speaking to really anyone in general, but specifically, members of the furry fandom. I feel like it’s important to go over because it’s a rarely discussed topic when it comes to the furry fandom in general. I’ve only seen the importance of good communication among furries talked about in a few other places, despite the real importance I think it has to the health of the fandom as a whole. And I get it, talking about...talking may seem weird or unnecessary since it’s easy to assume that everyone knows how to talk to one another. But there is a difference between just talking, and good communication with others who share an interest with you, and that difference can lay the foundation for finding your next best friend, your new friend group to share inside jokes with, or even your new partner. One of the strengths of this fandom that separates it from others is the wide range of different types of people who are interested in the idea of furry. There are young furries, old furries, and furries from all races, backgrounds, genders, countries, and creeds. It’s one the most diverse groups of people you’ll find, with the interest in anthropomorphic animals tying them all together. Due to the wide representation the fandom has, communicating with other furries is not that much different than talking to anyone you might find on this planet of ours. You might just have something a little more fluffy to talk about than the average person. If we take a brief look at the history of furries communicating with each other, you can easily see the large influence the internet had on keeping the fandom intact as a whole. The furry fandom’s big explosion in popularity happened in the 1990s, mainly due to the wider adoption of people’s access to personal computers and the internet. This era of the internet gave way to what are considered some of the first social networks, where people from all around the world could meet in a central location on the internet to talk with others. This led to online virtual environments quickly became the most popular places on the internet for furries to meet and communicate. Many of these environments were called MUCKs, spelled M-U-C-K, which is an acronym for… well it really depends on who you ask. Some will say it’s for Multi-User Created Kingdom, others swap the word “created” for the word chat, while still others insist it stands for Multi-User Construction Kit. But disregarding that dispute, a MUCK is an online role-playing game environment, that is text-based and accessible through the general internet protocol or a variety of MUCK-specific clients. MUCKs allow players to world build by creating objects, rooms, and environments, all through text, with each MUCK having its own set of rules and policies on things like how much members can be in or out of character when communicating. These online environments, along with UseNet newsgroups and other online forums on places like GEnie, CompuServe, and Delphi, allowed fans of furry to meet, greet, and communicate with each other no matter what the distance between them was. Nowadays, even with the expansive growth of furmeets and conventions, the internet is still one of, if not the primary way that furries talk to each other. And while the medium has fundamentally stayed the same, the interfaces in which furries communicate with one another have completely transformed from what the 90s had to offer. There’s so many to go over and I’m not going to hit them all, but let’s start wide and end narrow with some of the more popular services that I consider the primary ways furries interact with each other online. That starts with what I like to call “many-to-many” communication services. These are things more akin to traditional social networks, where a website serves as a platform for many people to talk to many other people. These are things like Twitter, TikTok, and Discord, which while not specifically designed for furries, have strong communities within those platforms that are meant for the broad furry audience. There are also some sites that are furry specific; places like FurAffinity, FurryLifeOnline, and FurryAmino (which I don’t think is officially dead yet), are very similar to traditional social networks, just with a furry-specific spin on them. There are many people on these sites who can host conversations for many people to respond to, you know, very standard social media type stuff. Then there’s the group of services I like to call “one-to-many,” where one person is providing a space for many to interact with. It may sound confusing at first, but these are places like Twitch, the game streaming platform, or YouTube, the video hosting site. These are places where there’s one host providing content and communicating out to many people. This either happens synchronously, like streaming on Twitch, or asynchronously, like posting a video on YouTube. The furry Twitch and furry YouTube communities are extremely strong, and those places are where a lot of people are introduced to the fandom and many of its more popular content creators. You can also technically put podcasting in this category; I am communicating content as a single person to potentially many listeners (I say potentially because I purposely don’t check my stats since I’m not doing this for the numbers, I’m doing it because it’s fun). Unfortunately, the furry podcasting community isn’t nearly as strong, but I still think it’s a gap in the market that I hope other creators and I can start to fill. And finally, there’s the one-to-one group of communication services, which are exactly what they sound like: a single furry talking to a single furry (all the single furries). This can be done through the direct message feature of a variety of “many-to-many” services, but the one app that almost all furries use for direct communication is called Telegram. If you don’t know what Telegram is, think of something like WhatsApp, or iMessage, only with a paper airplane icon, and a much stronger sticker ecosystem. It functions exactly the same as those services, though it just so happened to be the one that furries decided to use. Personally, I eventually want to do a deep dive on Telegram and its relationship to furries, though I don’t think it would fit the format of this show all that well so it might be a bonus episode or something else worth experimenting with. But the premise is the same, you message a single person, and in theory, they message you back. Now while there is some overlap amongst these categories (you can have group thread in Telegram or DMs on Twitter), these are some of the main ways that furries these days communicate with each other over the internet. And while a majority of them are text-based, you can find furries using platforms for voice and video communication as well. Heck now that virtual reality is starting to become a lot more democratized, we’re now seeing things like VRChat exploding in popularity for getting as close to real-life, face-to-face communication as technology will allow us. But there’s still no real replacement for that face-to-face communication, so when people try to say that virtual cons have shown they can replace real conventions, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Furmeets and conventions aren’t going anywhere and despite the technology we have at our fingertips, nothing is going to replace the feeling of hanging out with other people in person at a meet or a con. Those physical forums are still the best way to interact with other furries, and technology is still far away from replacing the authenticity of communicating with others when they’re physically right next to you. But as much value as these places to meet other furries bring, they don’t do the work for you, far from it. It’s up to you to put yourself out there to try and find new people to bond with over the topic of furry. And even though nothing’s guaranteed, there are some ways you can go about your communication to heighten your chances of finding your new best friend or even your new family. So let’s take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll go over how to talk to other furries in a way that should lead to a positive experience for you and anyone who wishes to speak with you. We’ll be right back.

 

So let’s talk about how to talk to other furries. Now you might be asking yourself “what exactly do you mean by that, isn’t talking to others pretty cut and dry?” Well it’s fair to think that, but you’d be surprised at amount of good communication skills that members of this fandom lack. And let me be clear, I’m not here to roast anyone, everyone’s journey of having strong communication skills is different than others. And that includes me; I’ll be honest the whole reason why I like podcasting rather than being on YouTube or Twitch is that I get really nervous in front of a camera. But I believe I’m deft enough at communicating with others on and offline, and we’re going to go over some things that you can do to maximize your likelihood of striking up a good conversation with someone. Oh and I guess I just alluded to it so I’ll start with this disclaimer: you could follow everything we’re about to talk about to a T and still might not make a new best friend right away. Communication with others is complicated and, much to my personal dismay, there’s no formula or list of instructions on how to make good friends because if there was, I’d just tell you to take a look at that. But we’re still going to make an effort to give you some tools and tips on making you a great communicator for not just the furry fandom, but for people in general. To set the scene a little bit, we’re mainly going to be focusing on online communication, since I think it’s more applicable now in the current state that the world is in, and interacting with other furries in person is a whole different beast that involves other things like physical interaction that I want to tackle separately. But let’s say you find a person or a group of people that you want to strike up a conversation with. The first thing you might think you should start with is something like “Hi!” or “Hello.” But let me stop you right there, that’s actually one of the worst ways to introduce yourself to a space, especially online. Why? Because you kill the conversation before it even starts. Just think about it, if you text someone hi or go into a chat room and just say hey, you might get a hey back, but a majority of the time you’ll just get ignored. And the people ignoring you aren’t being rude, it’s just that you’re not bringing anything to the table worth conversing about. A conversation is a two-way street and if you’re going to be the one starting it, you have to put in the initial effort to give people something that’ll catch their eye and prompt a response. This is especially ineffective online because there’s a lot to keep track of, especially in a crowded online environment, and it’s very easy to gloss over a message of just “Hi” or “Hello.” In fact, quick story time here, during one of my previous summers while in college, I interned at a company that used a team communication tool, and one of my coworkers set up a bot on his end of the messaging tool that actually checked if the message you sent him said anything like “Hi” or “Hello” or “Hey.” If it did, it not only didn’t notify him that he received a new message, but the bot instantly sent a message back saying something along the lines of “I don’t respond to “hi.” Please try again.” And I don’t blame him, we all had work to do, and just saying “Hey” wasn’t enough for him to stop what he was doing and respond. So there’s my little rant about how just saying “Hi” just doesn’t work, but what should you do if you’re trying to get a conversation going out of the blue. Now to be clear, I still think you should start with some form of greeting, but immediately after, the best way I can describe the next course of action you should take is to ask what I call a powerful question. To me, a powerful question is one that forces the respondent to think before giving you a reply. Usually, this means it’s not a question that can be answered with a single word. So even though saying something like “Hi, how are you!” is infinitely better than just saying hi, it still limits the conversation by not offering
 much substance to your question. Someone can quickly respond to that by saying “good” without even thinking about what you asked or, more importantly, who you even are. In my experience, powerful questions start with one of five “w”s: who, what, where, when, why, or how, which doesn’t start with a w but there’s an exception to every rule. Starting a question with one of these words typically leads to a powerful question that is worth some thought and a detailed response. So instead of “Hi, how are you?” ask something like “Hey, what has your day looked like so far?” You are essentially asking the same question, but that subtle difference in how you ask it will usually prompt a much more thorough response. So instead of just replying “good,” the person on the other end might lay out a list of things that they’ve done that day, which you then can take and springboard off of to continue to conversation. Like if they said something like “I got up, ate breakfast, and am now scrolling on Twitter,” you can choose any one of those three actions to talk about and keep the conversation going. Now I know asking powerful questions may sound less like a conversation, and more like an interrogation, but just getting people to think about the response they give will go a long way to potentially having an extended conversation with someone. And to help it not sound like an interview, you can add some personal input in between your powerful questions. Like let’s say you find a really cute fursuiter on Twitter that has the same species of fursona as you do. Instead of saying “Hi, I really like your suit” (which they probably get 100 times a day), ask them a powerful question about their suit or their species. Something like “Hey! I’m a german shepherd too and love your suit! I know there are so many canines to choose from, but why did you choose a GShep for your fursona?” Did you feel the difference there? That’s a solid way to strike up a conversation with someone whom you’ve never spoken to before. Quick intro, subtle compliment, and a powerful question that will make them think before giving you an answer. But all that stuff we just went over is for the initial phase of starting a conversation from scratch. How do you keep that momentum going with your newly found discourse? Well, there are a few things that I would always keep in mind, but the first thing you should always be is respectful. Being mindful of things like how a person wants to be identified or any vocabulary they might not be comfortable with is fundamental to whether someone wants to continue talking with you or not. Secondly, it’s important to exercise a good amount of patience when trying to conversate with a stranger, especially in an online setting. Remember, the person on the other side of the line has a life too, and they can’t be online 24/7 and if they are, that’s just not healthy. Give them some time to respond to your messages since if they don’t reply to you immediately, most of the time they’re not ignoring you, it’s just not a good time for them to get back to you. And if the individual in question is relatively popular, they may have hundreds of people messaging them, all competing for the limited resource of that person’s time. To put that into perspective, let’s do some basic math here. If someone has a pretty large following, they may end up getting 60 messages a day. And let’s assume they’re all good, powerful questions, meaning it will take them about four minutes to think and respond to each of those messages. 60 messages times the 4 minutes per message it takes to respond is 240 minutes spent responding to messages. 240 minutes is 4 hours or is one-sixth of a person’s day. That’s a lot to ask from anyone, and it’s super easy to get overwhelmed with that many people requesting your attention. So if someone doesn’t get back to you immediately, most likely they just haven’t gotten around to your message yet. But the inverse of this idea is true too, the less “popular (air quotes)” someone is, the more likely they’ll see your message and be willing to speak with you. But I will tell you this, people will begin to ignore you if you start to be annoying, and being annoying usually means messaging them constantly to see if they saw your original message. Now you might have a different philosophy than me about this but honestly, if I send someone a message and they don’t respond for a while, I usually wait about a week before sending a follow-up. And again, even that follow-up involves asking a powerful question, something like “Hey, just checking in, how’s the week been treating you?” And if they don’t respond for another week after that, I just drop it and move on. At that point, there’s no need for me to waste any more of my time, energy, and effort trying to talk to someone who’s that busy. If they do come back later and respond, I’ll be happy to start up the conversation again, but you never want to be that person that constantly sends messages wondering if the person on the other end is there or not. The world demands too much of us already; it’s not cool being an extra burden to someone else. But, with that being said, the last thing I would remember to keep in mind when conversing with others is to be yourself! Be proud of who you are; even if you don’t think so, most of the time you are actually cooler than you may realize, and having a conversation with someone might bring out that reality. Plus everyone hates talking with someone who’s fake; it’s not worth the effort trying to be someone you’re not, and it will damage any relationship you may find yourself in in the long run. But if you get some back and forth going with someone, and you sense the conversation is starting to die down a little bit, again powerful questions are your friend. You might have to start from scratch with a completely new topic but hey, we’re all furries right? Use that to your advantage and start talking about something from there. Add some personal nuance before asking a powerful question about something related to the fandom. In general, I would keep the conversation surface-level for a little bit; don’t try to get too deep into someone’s personal life until you both have built a little bit of history and trust over the course of your conversation. It’s also best to keep certain subjects out of conversation for as long as you can avoid it. Things like religion or politics can be very polarizing to talk about, and honestly, I don’t even talk to friends I’ve known for decades about that kind of stuff, so it’s best to keep those at bay. Oh and also, don’t just straight up ask someone to be your friend. It really puts them in an awkward and honestly unfair position. Friends aren’t something that can be manufactured on the spot; good friendships develop naturally over time, and with good conversation practice, you shouldn’t need to ask that question to anyone. But other than that, the conversation should flow pretty naturally, as long as you and the other party keep up their effort to maintain it. Now, listen, I know there’s a big elephant in the room when it comes to trying to talk with other furries or other people in general. Social anxiety is definitely a real thing that pretty much everyone goes through sometime during their lives, and it’s hard to get over. And I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I’m some therapist; I have no training in that field so take everything I say and use it as one of your many strategies for trying to be more comfortable in social environments. But I will say this, no one gets better at anything without practice, and in my experience, the furry fandom is one of the safest and most accepting groups of people to try and talk to. People in this fandom are very open to meeting new people and accepting of who people are, mainly due to the strong diversity this fandom has that I was speaking about earlier. Also, because we’re all furries, you instantly have a good list of things to talk about; fursonas, movies and TV shows with anthro animals in them, and other things of that nature. And while I never struggled with severe social anxiety, one thing that helped me get over my nerves of trying to find friends in the fandom was following the same plan every single time. This involved being patient, asking powerful questions, and making sure I was putting my best, authentic self forward when speaking with others. And yeah, it’s work, there’s a lot of effort involved, so much so that I actually still take notes in a notebook on what worked and what didn’t when starting different conversations with different people, and every time I did strike up a successful conversation, I always congratulated myself for that achievement. You’d be surprised at how much that self-congratulations goes towards improving your self-confidence and comfort level in social groups. And trust me, all of this effort towards being a good communicator, especially in the context of the furry fandom, is well worth it. I now have some great people in this fandom that I can call friends, and always have a place to turn to if I need someone to talk to. And things are just getting started; once furmeets and conventions become a thing again, those bonds that have been made through the online world will only be further solidified in person. And really there’s nothing stopping you from finding your next best friend, roommate, or even soulmate in the furry fandom; that’s part of what being a furry is all about! You’ll be well on your way to finding out just how great people are in this fandom, once you establish great furry communication.

 

Alright, that’s it for this episode of Furry, Explained! Thank you so much for tuning in and listening, I really hoped you enjoyed and maybe learned something new today. As always if you want to continue the conversation about conversations, or have any other feedback for the show, you can find me on Twitter! I’m @FinnThePanther, and a link to my Twitter is down in the show notes along with the references I used when creating this episode. If you like the show and want to support it, the best way you can do that is to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts! If you’re on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, make sure to give the show a rating and review as well! You can also tell people about the show and I’d really appreciate it if you do. We’ll be back next week for another episode of Furry, Explained but until then, stay wild out there. Peace.