This type of imagery seems to be endemic in the world of text- and image-based ActivityPub, a similar set of "mascot" images greeted me when I first installed P

This type of imagery seems to be endemic in the world of text- and image-based ActivityPub, a similar set of "mascot" images greeted me when I first installed Pleroma and was greeted by a female fox-hybrid (which I quickly removed from the server). I have not noticed any higher incidence of furries in the world of Peertube (which I've been running for years now) or Pixelfed (an Instagram clone which I've been experimenting with for a year or so) so it seems to be mostly limited to the "Twitter-alternatives" side of things. The distributed nature of these systems makes it possible for many subcultures to create their own "islands" of ActivityPub-linked nodes where furries roam the land and/or anime-avatars abound but I do feel that the prevalence of these subcultures has turned off many others from the likes of Pleroma and Mastodon because they deem them to be tainted in some way.