Crap there’s a lot to remember here.
It started at the end of May last year along side the BLM protests. The mods came down on images criticizing the movement and people mass-downvoting pro-BLM images, forcing filters on people mass-downvoting without telling them they were doing it and shadow-banning people.
That stoked the flames but the real shit storm came towards the end of June. Suddenly they put in a blanket ban on nazi content and for a lot of artist’s that was the last straw. Dozens of artists banned together to put themselves on the DNP List in protest, it came out just how little transparency the mods had with their dealings and the fact that almost all of them had secondary accounts that weren’t listed as staff but still had full moderator tools enabled, and a whole bunch more shit that I’m probably forgetting.
The stance was temporarily reversed and a new site admin was named only for one of the other admis to completely undermine them, re-institute the ban on nazi imagery mere hours later and then give the new head admin the boot immediately.
A lot of shit went down after that and it all gets hazy for me in terms of order of events. The private Derpi Discord chat got leaked and we all saw a lot of unflattering shit they’d been talking behind the user’s backs, the amount of scheming some favorite users had been up to during the whole event to undermine the anti-censorship group, we found out that the Mystery Badge was a secret badge for mods to monitor users they either knew or suspected of being 4chan users. We found out just how crazy the site’s owner, TSP/Teaspoon/TheSmilingPony is.
At some point the nazi ban was fully reversed but they also swore to re-evaluate how they’d been enforcing rule 0 and make sure that no nazi images were in violation of that in terms of hate images. We all agree their definitions are still too loose for anyone outside the Derpi mods to understand. To what credit I can give them, when the topic of banning nazis was raised again after the January Insurrection and again a few weeks ago when a neo-nazi MLP fan shot up his work place made headlines the mods didn’t try and use it as an excuse to ban them full stop, so there’s that at least.
During the reversal a bunch more artists who wanted all nazi images banned went full DNP and had all of their stuff removed from Derpi including a lot of people who hadn’t used the site in years, hadn’t used it before, or left the fandom some time ago.
The Alt boorus started cropping up around the end of June, beginning of July with a focus on preservation, archival and mod transparency.
I don’t know that much has happened since August last year. We’ve had people jumping between boorus, there’s been a lot of concern that the Derpi mods would eventually merge Derpi with their new furry-focused booru that already had a no nazi images policy from the get go but that still hasn’t happened, and said furry-focused booru has been struggling to carve out a niche for itself in an already saturated fandom.
There was also attempts by the pro-censorship side to get Derpi’s patreon suspended when they walked back the anti-nazi policy, I think the Twitter crowd attempted to report them to the FBI or some shit to get them taken down, that same crowd made several similar attempts against Ponybooru, I don’t know if they’re still trying or not.
Several 4chan artists put together one of the most successful artpacks to date and the money raised from it went to saving a rescue horse, the Twitter crowd desperately tried to get it deplatformed, they failed but they did force it to switch hosts a few times.
The whole ban on nazis was revealed to be pointless anyway, several people crunched the data and found the amount of images with nazi’s, swastikas, or oc:aryanne had been dropping significantly over time even accounting for the fandom’s shrinkage. The controversy actually caused all those numbers to spike again temporarily.
And that’s everything I can remember. Derpi’s still a good place if you liked it before, but we’re now all aware that the mods might be holding the sword of Damocles over our heads at all times and they’re still not applying the rules very fairly or evenly for images removed under rule 0 or 3. They’re still playing favorites by letting certain users who are friendly with the mods get away with shit they should be getting penalized for. At least we have life boats in the form of the alt boorus if anything goes down.
Sorry if I’m forgetting anything. It’s been awhile since I had to sum things up and there’s a lot to remember and it got a little difficult to keep it all straight with the usual game of telephone this info has gone through.
I still don’t even get why they went after nazi stuff from the start. I don’t remember their being any significant neo-nazi presence or anything with the BLM protests. Seems pretty fucking random to me.
