to staff it may concern...

Coco
Artist -
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

i just want to let you know that there are people out there who think you’re making the right decision to be more strict with rule #0. even if they aren’t saying it, we’ve been watching. anger is louder than praise, as i’m sure you’ve seen first hand recently as well as over the near decade that derpibooru has existed.
 
i want to let you know that there are people out there, especially new members of the fandom, who are looking for a place to call home. many of these people would feel more comfortable using this site and participating in the community if the staff here were more dedicated to removing hateful art and protecting marginalized people from discrimination, often because these new members of our fandom are part of a marginalized group themselves.
 
i sympathize with how difficult and time consuming the process of ensuring the happiness of your users is, as i’m close friends with moderators of a website that has dealt with and is dealing with similar issues to the one that derpibooru is facing, staff infighting and the drama it causes included. they have confided in me many times how frustrating it can be. your work is arduous and never ending, but one that is so important to the continued life of derpibooru, as well as the pony fandom as a whole.
 

 
i’d like to give you a personal account, if you’d listen to me wax longingly for a bit.
 
i’m in a close-knit friend group of about ~60 people who mostly all met in 2010-2013 on a web forum not unlike this one, conversing about our shared interest in a (then) new cartoon that had a level of quality and care put into it that was uncommon, especially for the time.
 
as we got to know eachother more and more over the years we came to realize that we had more in common than our appreciation of colorful ponies. most notably we realized that almost all of us were, for one reason or another, members of groups which are systemically marginalized by our respective countries, and that we liked to watch ponies as a way to escape from the society that had caused our struggles. watching ponies gave us a hopeful glimpse into a world where everyone is happy and healthy, a world to strive for.
 
all of us have account here, because derpibooru is such an incredibly useful website for cataloging and sorting the best art the fandom has to offer, we even use derpibooru’s api for our discord bot. however, most of us don’t elect to participate in the forums or other community events because of the this website’s community’s reputation for being so hostile to people like us. i don’t think i’m alone when i say that this hostility is part of what drives people to create new communities elsewhere like discord, deviantart, twitter, etc.
 

 
in conclusion, now that mlp:fim is over, and the quality of gen 5 is yet to be seen, the pony fandom needs to be as inclusive as ever in order to keep it alive and healthy, and i’d like to see derpibooru be a key figure in doing just that.
 
in the spirit of the show, we need to make more friends, not less. that can’t happen if there are people who actively spread the message of division and inequality on this site. thank you for reading, and thank you for the work you do.
 
/)*(\
TagAnon
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

@Coco  
Admins, you have indeed had it rough this past week. And I appreciate the stands you’ve taken, the arguments you’ve had, and the patience you’ve come close to losing.
 
I don’t have the OP’s badge because I didn’t make an account immediately after the original Ponibooru shut down, but I remember Roboshi favoriting just about everything (I think he made an exception to G1 content) and the community coming up with names for newly appearing background ponies in the show (which carried over to here).
 
However, I find the OP disingenuous.
 
If the OP is as much an old fart as I am, then the OP’s vision of the fandom is narrow. This was the fandom that was birthed on 4chan’s /co/ and wormed its way into the diseased heart of the “internet hate machine” that was /b/ and thrived. Yes, the rest of 4chan hated our guts, you just had to have thicker skin and ignore the haters.
 
Yes, the fandom has always connected all manner of disparate people from all over the world. Brazilians, Austrians (anyone else remember Pori?), Dutch, Koreans, Russians, Poles, Japanese; long-lived general threads full of Spanish-speakers as a testament to its Latin American audience before it got banned for illegal posts. One of our earliest polls indicated more people identifying as trans than female among all the males. It’s cured people of depression and indeed forged new friendships out of fandom.
 
But to claim, “most of us don’t elect to participate in the forums or other community events because of the this website’s community’s reputation for being so hostile to people like us.”, sounds really off. Anons from /mlp/ frequently accused Derpibooru of being a mandatory hugbox, even as they continued to use it and annoy the mods. For every drama llama of questioned gender (ex: Purpletinker) brought up on this site, there have been based and socially upstanding trans contributors (ex: Jitterbugjive). As racially insensitive as Applejack’s Plantation was/is, the art community lampooned it several times over - a much healthier response than pure condemnation in my opinion.
 
And while the backlash to these recent racially-charged real-world crimes has impacted nearly all of us, and perhaps given some of us the courage to finally confront complacency, it has also motivated opportunists both IRL and online; least of all the moralizers so enamored with change with such shallow views of history.
 
We have a long-standing artist with a controversial name. TSP even uploaded some of the earliest images under that tag. Where are the concerns? What’s in a name?
 
There was another nazi artist who truly did make images in the vein of nazi propaganda. The early users made a game of ‘find the swastika’ that the artist would hide in their images. Everyone’s been myopically focused on the present Aryanne and her stereotyping, yet I haven’t seen these brought up once. Does it matter anymore though? The nazi motif and the swastikas are nowhere to be seen in the artist’s more recent uploads. Perhaps the artist grew up (I legit don’t know, never followed them up) and stopped being a nazi? Does that potential growth matter to the moralizers?
 
(As an aside) Per new site policy, this arist’s old stuff should be subject to review. I’m not sure if a hidden swastika counts. There are old edits that have removed the swastikas, so maybe keep those?
 
Based on the OP’s post history, the OP has little faith in free speech and dismisses the arguments that have supported it out of hand. 4chan is a cesspool, it always has been, “pissing into an ocean of piss”, as the old image macro went, but odd gems do emerge from it and it has always hosted the fandom’s contrarians from Derpibooru to Ponychan. For the OP to have claimed to be around so long and to have views so shallow, to have been “a part of the community” yet not participate (outside of a small niche), to find a place to call home while driving others out of it, I say be wary. Make new friends, but get to know them first.
Background Pony #1898
@Coco  
New people should not have a problem not seeing art like you describe since the default filters hide it. And as far as I know, comments and forum posts have always been moderated rating-appropriate, so that that message of “division and inequality” should not be encountered.
cdpaliden
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).

You all screamed at me to shut up when the wave of NAZI Pones came in years ago, and I protested it that it was in bad taste, violating rule#0. Now I reiterate the line so often delivered to me for years.
 
We have a blacklist, use it.
JaggedCarpet
Happy Derpy! - For Patreon supporters

I think they should make a tutorial video using very plain English, maybe with pretty shapes or something to keep their attention, for people who can’t quite grasp the concept of filters. You don’t like something? Filter it. Not that hard. Everything could’ve been avoided if everyone filtered the things they don’t like instead of suddenly caring about something they never cared about before.
Background Pony #8C56
@JaggedCarpet  
But filtering it too hard for the people who are wining about it so much. People who can’t use a filter on what was an art archive site to not see what they want have fucked us all over.
Background Pony #B714
well, for the new people who are looking for a place to call “home” don’t get to comfortable because in a few years, you’ll to be banned too from this site by an even more radical movement.
Background Pony #8D6B
ITT: people missing the whole fucking point.
 
“Just filter it” doesn’t change the fact that it exists.
 
The problem is the fact that Nazi bullshit is posted at all, not whether or not someone on the individual level happens to see it. You can’t “just filter it” when it comes to the toxicity and hate that hate symbols are inherently bagged with by definition. Flying a swastika flag isn’t always about whether or not Jews see it, it’s also about signalling welcome to other Nazis, or at least signaling that this is an environment willing to hear out Nazi ideology. There’s no “just filter it” for the whole atmosphere that this creates. There’s no “just filter it” for being scared that you’re among people who, at best, don’t care enough about the idea of genocidal discrimination to bother drawing a line and giving that shit a hard NO at the first sign of sprouting up as an idea again.
 
It doesn’t even matter if there’s no literal, actual Nazis. What really matters here is the callous disregard for the hurtfulness those symbols create. What matters is the message: that the supposed “free speech” of shitposting edgykids, even when we all know they have absolutely nothing of any legitimate value to express by slapping swastikas on things, are more important than the very real scars and traumas left on real people in the real world by a real political movement that really murdered millions of people.
Background Pony #8E30
It doesn’t even matter if there’s no literal, actual Nazis. What really matters here is the callous disregard for the hurtfulness those symbols create.
 
There have been a number of Jewish and other ethnic creators and users coming out and saying “this does not offend me.” Your argument that these people need “protection” is not only stupid for getting offended on their behalf, it’s also incredibly patronizing.
Background Pony #B714
@Background Pony #8D6B  
because if you remove their simbolism they’ll just leave…
 
I’m pretty sure that real nazis pretty aware of the reputation of all their simbolism, and if they are smart and actually want to promote their so called ideology, they would not go all over the place posting swastikas and hate speech everywhere, I’m actually beginning to think that the whole anti nazi movement is actually the pro nazi movement, before all this shitshow only a few people knew of the existance of aryanne, now everyone does.
Frosku
Wallet After Summer Sale -
Artist -
Perfect Pony Plot Provider - Uploader of 10+ images with 350 upvotes or more (Questionable/Explicit)

Vox Exercitus
It doesn’t even matter if there’s no literal, actual Nazis. What really matters here is the callous disregard for the hurtfulness those symbols create.
There have been a number of Jewish and other ethnic creators and users coming out and saying “this does not offend me.” Your argument that these people need “protection” is not only stupid for getting offended on their behalf, it’s also incredibly patronizing.
 
Orthodox Jew here, I don’t like Aryanne, it’s why I have her on my filter list. It really is that easy.
Background Pony #007A
It doesn’t even matter if there’s no literal, actual Nazis. What matters is the message: that the supposed “free speech” of shitposting edgykids, even when we all know they have absolutely nothing of any legitimate value to express by slapping swastikas on things, are more important than the very real scars and traumas left on real people in the real world by a real political movement that really murdered millions of people.
 
Oh look, some accidental honesty. They don’t care that there aren’t any “literal, actual Nazis”, they just want to control your speech and fabricate bullshit reasons to do so. Thank you for your admission, fellow background pony. We need to stamp out these fascists everywhere they try to worm there way in, and you’ve just shown us why.
Background Pony #2B93
@Background Pony #8D6B  
Just filter it, FFS. Otherwise you are literally being a busybody trying to police what other people may enjoy. I’m sick and fucking tired of busybodies like you who feel the need to control content.
Background Pony #F238
@Background Pony #8D6B  
Oof. You’re gonna hate to see some of the other tags on this site then. Especially the ones related to violence and sexual abuse. There may not be any murderers or rapists on this site but the images do exist and scores of people have suffered at the subject matter of those images.
 
And you might just lose your top over the foalcon tag.
cdpaliden
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).

@Background Pony #8D6B  
These (kinds) of images have LITERALLY been on the site for 5+ years. Where has this outrage been for the last five years? Where is the outrage for the snuff porn? Where is the outrage for the foalcon?
 
That’s right, this is manufactured. You’re jumping on a bandwagon of censorship, safe and secure behind your background pony tag, while you tout that you have the high ground because you are fighting hate and intolerance…WITH hate and intolerance. Today you censor the NAZI’s, tomorrow you censor the Communists, before long you are censoring the anarchists, and the next you know, no art is allowed to be posted without the permission of the inspector-general of Derpibooru. I say no. We have rule #0. We have a blacklist. USE THEM**.
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