Two years of anti-zoophile community moderation: Heika’s work with Laelaps on Bluesky

In Greek mythology, Laelaps is a dog that never fails to catch what it is hunting.

On Bluesky, tens of thousands of users use the Laelaps anti-zoophile labeler. This volunteer-run project collects evidence of animal abusers and enablers, publishes a list, and shows a label on listed accounts so you’re informed before interacting. A labeler utilizes third-party moderation service, hooked up to Bluesky features that help you choose how to use the platform. It lets you actively curate rather than passively consume what you’re fed.

This is the second anniversary of launching a list, the first anniversary of integrating third-party labeler service, and now the public evidence is just reorganized with its sub-categories for refined use. You can support it with ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/laelapsfyi

Laelaps started with a small team of furries and now reaches people from all walks of life. It sets a standard for community moderation that any group can follow. Founder heikadog (aka Heika, they/them) was interviewed by Dogpatch Press about the mission, methods, history, and impact of the internet’s most successful project in its niche. They say furries run the internet, and here’s more proof.

Let’s unpack three points about community moderation, and how furries are challenged to do it.

Start with knowing that every community and subculture is part of society, not an island, while each has its own unique history and challenges. This is ours.

(1) Furries love pride in community. It’s part of building our own spaces like a worldwide convention scene.

(2) This pride is packaged with long-held grievances about being misunderstood and mistreated. The reasons can be debatable. There’s real bigotry from outside, but there’s also a dogmatic tendency to blame “the media” by constantly referencing ancient bad fiction while ignoring deeply-researched, sympathetic reporting. Media-literate or not, if we demand good PR, it needs mature understanding that being in society means being imperfect, so it’s not just up to outsiders to fix our image. It’s our job to take out the trash without brushing things under the rug.

(3) There is longstanding conflict over an unresolved, home-grown problem: Abusers, particularly zoophiles, have used our spaces to network with each other since the early days on 1990’s MUCKs and Usenet lists. Behind pride and wishes for ideal image, we have no consistent wide-scale solution. The deeper we look, the more nuance there is:

• No group is immune to abusers from the dark side of all human behavior: churches, schools, and Boy Scouts have it…
• Internet privacy helps furtive abusers to form their own communities, like villages made of village idiots.
• Organized abusers gain opportunity and access to victims they don’t have alone, and their network effect isn’t just “a few bad apples”.
• Abuser groups start with isolation and liability that makes them cross over for acceptability and influence with groups like ours.
• The fringe of zoophiles in furry have enjoyed far less scrutiny than pedophiles get from mainstream society and the justice system.
• Zoophile-furry groups of thousands are here for cover like nowhere else; can you name any other group they use so boldly?
• Networks can be broken, and we don’t need to harbor zoophiles any more than churches have to tolerate pedophiles.
• Personal, individual opposition doesn’t address the impact of organized zoophile influence, including with friends in high places.
• Reports to higher places commonly fall through the cracks, no matter what laws and policies are technically for.
• Disorganized, scattershot callouts fall into clout dynamics, making a parasocial paradigm of superficial solutions.
• Cops don’t run our groups, we do — we can organize from the roots to deplatform zoophiles, it’s long overdue, and it’s been done before.

WE SEE YOU: Laelaps works like a vaccine against organized abuse.

For Bluesky users, the Laelaps anti-zoophile labeler shows up front what abusers don’t want you to know. This overcomes the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, where deceivers can get trust easier than they can be detected. Now you can consider the sources without manually screening every new interaction, and fact-check a list that’s responsive to appeals. As a list with transparency beyond others, the aggregated result speaks for itself.

A label doesn’t have authority of censorship; it leaves choices up to you, increasing your power of free association. Laelaps harnesses the power of participatory info sharing features that Bluesky intended for that, vaccinating the community with knowledge.

What’s it like to be unprotected? Organized abusers exploit your community, and you only get reactive, inconsistent awareness, while their network effect reaches beyond your personal choices. You are their doormat. Meanwhile, their networks generate victims, and that isn’t stopped by chasing isolated cases, but by tearing down their networks. Laelaps empowers you in kind, pro-actively countering network effect with strength in numbers that says “we see you, and you can’t hang with us.”

Why not leave it to outsiders (the cops)? We’re often on our own to address a wide range of abuse beneath their priority, and if we are proud to run our own spaces, deterring abusers is our job. You can try it one-by-one for thousands of accounts… or you can have it at scale with community moderation, the smart way.

The community on Bluesky that zoophiles want too.

For years, Twitter (now X) was a main platform for furries, encouraged by permissiveness for things less common elsewhere. Its reach was a blessing and a curse. Twitter empowered artists, influencers and adult services — but imposed dependence on clout dynamics, rampant harassment, and platforming anything from nazis to zoophiles. It’s a great example of The Medium Is The Message.

After Elon Musk took control of Twitter, and around the 2024 US elections, toxicity pushed users to Bluesky as an alternative social network. In August 2025, Bluesky has only around a tenth as many users as Twitter (whose base is in decline and brand has lost its shine,) but many of 38 million registered Bluesky users are consciously hungry for something better.

Bluesky feels designed to mitigate toxicity with improved features like:

• Robust blocking, to dispell harassment and dogpiling on quote-posts.
• For You vs Following feeds, to somewhat quell algorithmic clout dynamics.
• Options for third-party moderation, to improve the old ways of manual block lists.

As users left Twitter to greener fields, Bluesky became a desired destination for zoophiles to set up shop and grab influence. Early adoption can have outsized impact. It’s worked for them elsewhere, with zoophile forums, blogs, and podcasts making self-validating feedback-loops. Why not grab this opportunity?

The origin of Laelaps in the transition from Twitter.

For Heika, the furry community was a joyful path to friends and creativity, but as toxic influence seeped in, frustration came with it.

Go back a few years. Twitter was enabling zoophiles to openly spread animal abuse media and propaganda, and harass what they call “antis” while reaching for acceptance. They even gained clout with popufurs who used fursuits and sex to pull tens of thousands of followers. Lax moderation left few methods to respond, except appeals for community pushback — callouts.

As Heika experienced, callouts have wildly inconsistent results. A typo can get rabid dogpiling, while abusers in community space can get willful ignorance. There’s the superficial idea that the community doesn’t accept abusers, shown by occasional, dramatic clout-falls; but you can’t call out networks, and many people apathetically accept the status quo to stay comfortable. Apathy feeds punishment towards those who rock the boat. Callouts are accused of “clout-chasing”, but the flipside is how clout-powered backlash makes lying stronger than the truth.

Community feels joyful until suppressing problems becomes smothering. That’s how it feels when justice is frustrated and one is alone in pushing back. The solution is to organize. The transition from Twitter could utilize improved Bluesky functionality for better standards. Would history repeat, or could we take a different path?

Development of Laelaps on Bluesky.

With can-do attitude, in July 2023, Heika decided to start a zoophile account mutelist. One inspiration was a defunct Twitter, zblocklist. The mutelist was just a Google Doc at first, but it quickly gained teamwork to add criteria and eliminate possible bias. Twitter was suffering API changes and activity decline, while on Bluesky, the old way of manually importing CSV files was improved with public access to share lists directly. The list launched while Bluesky was still in Beta, with account creation only by invite codes.

From the first day of public use, there was backlash at the list from popular furry sources. This quickly led to adding more evidence about popular furries on the list, with FAQs to help users. As Heika explains, it was only around the first year of Bluesky’s growth, with thousands of furries among only hundreds of thousands of total users. Discourse spread quickly, and this may have started one of the first furry discourses.

Backlash also prompted another early move. In the brief time of being a Google Doc, there was vulnerability to mass reporting under guidelines that limited its use for public evidence. This led to using GitHub to host evidence still readable by anyone.

As the list scaled up by orders of magnitude of users on and using the list, it got inefficient; an organizing bottleneck. “We needed a better way to maintain but make it more transparent”, said Heika. Tapping into developer ecosystems got advice to make the list a labeler. That’s what full-fledged third-party moderation service does, which was adopted in July 2024. The decentralized concept of Bluesky lets elements be handled offsite, like hosting data on a different server that is displayed for subscribers as list-categorized labels on accounts they see while browsing. It required paying for a server and connecting to the back end of Bluesky moderator service (unofficial, public use.)

A year in, the mutelist was superseded by the Laelaps labeler. A year after that, Laelaps used a pro helper to reorganize listings. It has always had sub-categories where you can subscribe to any or all of them, but now the evidence is clearly categorized.

Methods and facts about Laelaps

To estimate Laelaps users, it’s hard to get statistics directly from Bluesky, but the Clearsky service has some third-party info. You can view users 100 at a time, and manual scrolling saw roughly 15,000 using the list for blocking in early 2025. (This doesn’t count using it as a mute list or subscribing to the labeller.)

Besides Heika, there’s a small team that started with pre-existing sources of proven work. They are consulted 1-on-1, with no group chat by design. Consultants are inherently trusted based on past results, and also, ability to mess up and take accountability. This is not for the kind of callout behavior prone to using attention to rile up zoophiles, or quote-dunk and unproductively increase their reach. The mission is to inform and raise organizing, not conflict. This narrows the scope, consolidates experience, and brings better work with more persistent results.

To reorganize the listings, applications were invited to find a suitable volunteer. Seven applied, and one software engineer was chosen. According to Heika, “we saw a spectrum between technical expertise and people who like Laelaps conceptually, and this person balanced that well, linked previous work and didn’t overestimate their time for work on the project.” The list was sorted and reordered by categories according to a styleguide, with an expanded table of contents.

As Heika explains, Laelaps differs from other lists in its team work, methods, and marketing. “A lot of it initially was posting about it a lot and telling people, it was annoying but you kinda have to be. I was providing something unique: a blocklist with archived, easily verifiable evidence, and now it’s a moderation service with 4 separate lists!”

Initial users were mostly furries, and it was made by people in/adjacent to furry, but it’s not specifically a furry list and has many other users. Heika says “I make that distinction because the association is sensitive, and that’s deliberate marketing”.

There’s also how specific it is. “It’s a difficult thing to replicate 1-1. We have internal resources that help us spot zoos as they update their profiles to include dogwhistles like the zeta symbol (ζ), and scripts that show people who follow enough open zoos above a certain threshold. We lock our stuff down so people can’t get an idea of how to go around our methods,” says Heika.

Criticisms and commentary

What about getting a label wrong? Let’s review discourse from the day Heika’s list went public, when two years of development were still to come, but some minds were already made up that it’s all wrong.

“Decide YOURSELF”

• Is it thinking for yourself to avoid organized information, and prioritize reflexes and feelings?
• Will you pro-actively investigate which bad actors use your community as cover, or just get mad about being told?
• What about including due diligence, known patterns, some people’s deliberate complicity, and more evidence at your fingertips to decide yourself?
• Do you care more about fear of labels ruining lives, than abuse ruining lives, while abusers casually rebrand and get new accounts?

Running a list just on Bluesky is limited to a specific niche that doesn’t stop anyone from using other platforms, or rebranding like anyone else. The upside is how rebranding often doesn’t work there, when people on the list have insular circles and habits that tell on them. Accounts have DID — a decentralized identifier tied to an account that stays the same if a handle changes, so they would have to remake an account.

Blocklists are most criticized for bias, and lack of method and transparency. That’s why the founding concept of Heika’s list included an appeal process. An appeal can be done directly in-app. (Heika mentions a limit of the system where you must subscribe, so there’s always been a Google form too). They’re handled with a team chosen for ability to take accountability. Of course appeals can be denied; it’s up to the criteria.

Past complaints of wrong labels pointed out to Dogpatch Press have checked out as disingenuous, with no appeals submitted. Many critics only attack the list concept, and don’t even try pointing out problems they could change and improve.

With furry discourse, among the top subjects Heika sees: “if a furry specifically hated blocklists, they meant this one.” Anti-blocklist sentiment often comes down to “I heard my friend say…” or outright defending sketchy friends. It’s loaded with the reflex to retort fake news about evidence. When blind loyalty causes denial, criticism that “the list might mess up” boils down to nitpicking to hide the bigger picture. It’s like being anti-vaxxer towards the epidemiology of abuse in community space.

The bigger picture can have an organized, actively improving, always-perfectible solution. While Laelaps develops with that goal, backlash makes it harder to move the needle, and it’s not all just protecting the status quo. Some backlash is even nastier.

Zoophile counter-organizing targets Laelaps with harassment

Predators smelled early opportunity while Bluesky was still in Beta, with account creation by invite codes. These codes were coveted by the notorious Furry Valley abuser cult, who took them by scamming users in art related Discord servers. Heika was one of first to post about it.

Soon, other targeting started coming on line…

As the list became known, zoophiles circulated stickers at Furry Weekend Atlanta that boasted “blocked by heika”. This behavior shows how generally, community for abusers has to stay insular, but has conflicted motives to reach for notice. They use marketing like podcasts to gain sympathizing, coach talking-points for justification, and even groom pliable victims into being zoophiles (or simply for more prey, who sometimes come out to tell their ordeals.) This grows a validation-cult, and these feedback loops push conflict with those who stand in the way.

There’s also attempts to exploit the system. Heika notes “there were several incidents of people going out of the way to make feeds using our assets to pollute the discourse, or our operation and network.” On Bluesky’s back end, blocklists aren’t separate from other kinds of user lists. It’s the same protocol: “That’s a bit of a problem with a hyperspecific niche community. They used feed generator services to copy our lists so zoos could connect to other zoos.” Zoophiles made their own labeler to reverse this one, and hundreds met overnight.

Heika made the next move: “We reached out to Bluesky moderation and got well ahead of it.”

The impact of Laelaps: support of Bluesky Trust and Safety gets zoophiles evicted

Heika’s report to Bluesky about the pro-zoophile labeler described appropriation of work as a form of harassment. Heika followed up with direct messages, explaining: “I’m mutuals with the head of Trust & Safety, but I don’t use it often.” The response: “they are reversing your labels?”

Watchers discovered the pro-zoophile labeler was banned, as well as the account owner, who did the favor of publishing ban emails on a zoophile blog.

The zoophile blog plays a refrain of unfairness, begging for sympathy, and denying promotion of animal abuse. It gives rosy-hued justification about good zoos vs. bad zoos. That’s a common hairsplitting tactic; see also attempts to switch the word pedophile with Boy Lover or MAP.

Laelaps issued a statement about taking extra steps to protect users and cull a potential network effect.

You can see zoophiles posing as the real victims of moderating their counter-harassment. Heika addresses the spin:

“In my view, being an open zoophile (i.e. making it your public identity online) makes you inherently part of the problem regardless of whether you ‘practice’ or don’t. There’s only so much ‘activism’ you can do when your entire community is predicated on violating the consent of a being that fundamentally cannot consent. I remember one occasion where we were asked to incorporate contact stances for pro or anti-contact, since zoophiles use our work to network, and my response to that was something like, ‘we didn’t make our labeller for zoophiles, and we’re not going to use the language of the enemy.’”

Bluesky Trust & Safety specifically took action to change the network effect, and it’s public, notes Heika: “I have not seen this with any other moderation service to date.” Many participating zoophile accounts have been banned, less obviously, but they are clearly being held accountable for promoting animal abuse.

The impact continues when another Bluesky staffer mentioned Laelaps in a blog post, not endorsed or paid as a community volunteer project.

It makes Heika proud: “This was a result of our dedication, and part of the journey. Backlash really influenced the evolution of Laelaps, but we notice a lot less now in the fandom because we stuck with it.”

They keep trying, but action is getting more and more decisive. There was an impersonation attack while the article was coming together:

A message about complicity, and undoing it with dedication and teamwork

It took 2 years to develop this organized response to organized abuse. What if all the work was reduced to abusers being unwilling to show themselves?

Heika takes stock: “Nobody else provides proof like we do. You can’t edit archives… and complicity in the network effect is why the interacts label exists. It’s our most controversial, but it most applies to the gateways… Laelaps works the way it does and has been so successful because the backend is so dedicated, with a team of assistants that have very specific expertise.”

“I’m hoping other curators would take this approach to working in hyper specific niches, but you realize what a gargantuan task it would be to ask of people.”

Not many other furries are making blocklists, but there are userlist feeds that serve communities about science, for example. Heika says: “Furrylist is THE big one. I’m close to an engineer; they have their own internal reporting. If Laelaps labels an account, it shows in the Furrylist backend.” Some of this influence also extends to furry communities on Discord.

Community organizing is one field for work. There’s also tech development and corporate policy outside. What if lists like this generate a lot of reports to handle? Think about how Bluesky’s best practice is to not mention Laelaps. It’s like the Catholic Church not talking about services that mitigate child abuse claims, and hopefully, not generating them. So, it’s important to have a service like Laelaps run by the community, with awareness of what it does and what happens without it.

How the mission of Laelaps is having success in the wider world

The network effect may start with superficial online behavior, but it comes out in real life.

Heika tells how zoophiles signal and verify each other, and get inducted. There’s zeta codes (ζ), flags, and lots of private contact. “A source claimed to be approached at a con to physically network in real life, because they had been labeled on Laelaps.” Stickers are clues about con meets and room parties. Some live with each other. There have been reports of hundreds gathered at a ranch.

Labeling doesn’t stop that, “but greatly raising awareness of what these are, helps by itself”, says Heika. Journalists and professionals are noticing. “Language around this has started to change, they are taking animal abuse more seriously as cybercrime.” People in the community who used to sympathize have had to catch up and get more sensitive about abuse. It’s not just social media effect, it’s social effect.

They always want acceptance, but Heika has seen their reach get stifled. It goes with Bluesky having much less quote-dunking culture than Twitter. Their influence can hit a wall while fringe “paraphile” spaces notice it too. There may be no complete end to it, but limiting reach can discourage trying up front. Heika says: “When their platforms are actively fucked with, we notice because they make podcasts and blogs about it.” It’s like treading water when they get set back, have to start over, and get tired. There’s even social engineering that leads them to get themselves suspended.

Laelaps has become known as a threat, with zoophiles feeling pushed out and posting that they can’t keep it up. Getting banned from Bluesky has led to abandoning entire identities and giving up on their publicity.

Listing also sometimes goes beyond labeling, to reporting abusers by email for official handling. Heika says “a lot of zoophiles openly ID as pedos, and this gets manual reports behind the scenes. We give established criteria like explaining coded language they use. This can get them entirely off any account they have.” What about reporting to police? That’s categorically different; this is about network behavior not actionable by police, and if there is criminal evidence, it won’t be made public to tip the wrong people.

Who watches the watchmen? People will still have their mind made up if this is good or bad, but if they’re on the fence and taking time to think about it, it can give time for abusers to make more victims. If nobody watches, is it restoring neutrality or letting communities be doormats? Heika has no doubt: “One of my favorite terms is community self defense”. That’s not just for furries, it’s for anyone.

Thoughts from Heika

Heika is young but gaining can-do experience, a creative hobbyist, and “I call myself a community moderator”. Heika actually hasn’t been to furry cons, but traveled to meet peers at San Francisco Pride and New York for the premiere show of The Furry Detectives docuseries, the AMC production about furries investigating zoosadists.

The Furry Detectives interviewed Heika as a source representing a new generation. (It didn’t make the cut, but may show up for season 2…) “I’m not a true crime person, but I love the show! It’s delicate to see a balance of community as positive vs. problems within. I also appreciated meeting a queer editor on the show, who talked about preserving subcultures as national treasures.”

Laelaps is a big project. Could it lead to a profession with Trust & Safety? Heika thinks “a downfall of T&S is working at the general level enforcing all community guidelines. There’s a high chance of messing up if you work sitewide and don’t know intricacies. The cool thing about Laelaps is knowing a specific niche inside and out.”

After backlash fades, support makes a lasting reason to do it. A witness of grooming by zoophiles sent this thanks for all the service.

Like the article? These take hard work. For more free furry news, follow on Twitter or support not-for-profit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. Want to get involved? Try these subreddits: r/furrydiscuss for news or r/waginheaven for the best of the community. Or send guest writing here. (Content Policy.)