A small place for critters tired of modern social media.
Also check out critters.gay!

Also check out critters.gay!

Critter Cafe is an independent social media website. It's primarily a place for critters looking to be themselves online, without the stress of numbers or algorithms. We aim to be a cozy place where critters tired of mainstream social media can come to hang out.

Critter Cafe is a part of a network of independent social media sites that allows you to follow and be followed by people from other sites.

Unlike critters.gay, which runs on Sharkey, the Critter Cafe instance runs on the Mastodon // Chuckya software, which provides a more traditional (Twitter-like) social media experience.

Staff

Critter Cafe is run by:

• pebble - director
• squirrelo - tech specialist
• cozmo - network infrastructure
• tuna - moderator

What do we offer?

• Emote reactions
• 5000 characters per post
• 10 custom profile fields
• 30 poll options
• 1000 characters per poll option
• Markdown / HTML formatting support on posts
• Most numbers are hidden with web css - this does not affect third-party mobile apps or web clients. People from other instances can see how many people you follow, but not how many follow you.

Extras

• Critter Cafe icon set available here

Credits

• Banner art by forest
• Modern theme by Freeplay, cafe color variant by pebble
• Eggbug emotes by nocturne.works
• Yingmotes by Myno
• Neofox, neocat, drgn, wolf, bunhd and floof emotes by Volpeon
• Therian & Anarchy Pride emotes by rachaelspooky
• Mutant Standard emoji licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
• Capybara emotes by Anubi
• Blobhaj emotes by heather! horns!

Disclaimers

• Critter Cafe is hosted on a privately owned and run server
• Data is backed up daily to a remote location
• DNS is hosted by Cloudflare, domain is registered with Porkbun, email is hosted by purelymail
• In the event Critter Cafe needs to be shut down permanently, everyone will be given at least 3 months notice.
• Check here to see the current status of the site
• We do not pay hosting fees as the server is hosted on our own hardware, however this comes at the cost of a longer downtime duration in the event of an incident as we are responsible for the hardware ourselves

Critter Cafe launched publicly on 2024-09-17 after cohost announced it would be shutting down

1. Be respectful of others' boundaries
2. Harassment is not tolerated - this includes making "callout" posts. If you must, make such a post elsewhere and then link it here.
3. Absolutely no sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other forms of systemic abuse. This includes defending hateful people.
4. When it comes to defining what constitutes "systemic abuse", the opinions of the marginalized are given priority at all times.
5. Sexually explicit imagery and text must be marked as such via content warnings
6. All sexually explicit images must exclusively involve consent-capable adults. ("Consent-capable": If asked whether they'd like to pose for an adult photo, they would be capable of responding "yes", and that "yes" would not be able to be construed any other way. )
7. Any porn of a character that's under 18 is strictly prohibited.
8. Uploading imagery generated by machine learning algorithms is not allowed
9. The staff of this website reserves the right to revoke any user's access without warning, for any reason, except as limited by law. This will, however, not be used liberally.
10. -- IMPORTANT -- When signing up, include a link to your existing profile on another site/instance and/or your personal website. If you do not have existing online presence, please briefly share why you picked Critter Cafe as the place to set up.

1. mastodon.swee.codes: limitation