Real quick, I wanna start off by saying: I'm cool with anyone liking, producing, community-based projects, and material in general they want. (Looking at my favorites shows I have no right to critique anyone.) I just wanna share my funny story from the past 12 hrs. I've been on this website since the mlp boom (2010-12) and somehow Fluffy_pony few under, and never even made a blip, my radar untill last night. And honestly it kinda hit me like a truck.

It all started with [ ID: 4573859 ] this recent post. I thought it was a cute oc and it made me wanna check out the artist's gallery here. I thought it was a bit weird that some of their stuff was in the negative dislike range because it was tame enough. I did find it weird because if the artwork is polished enough, it can usually overcome a dislike deficit regardless of the kink or fetish. But I did notice a small-moderate types of malice or restrictions to making (what I thought was) an OC. My first clue of things being a little deeper that i initially thought was the comment on one of the artists pieces "fluffy_ponys that are to be adopted need to be neutered." So since I, personally, had not seen this artist and I've not been made aware of the tag Fluffy_pony it was a new thing someone was starting on another website and was just being archived here on e6. Another thing that caught me off guard was where the tag was located. One of my favorite tags is furred_dragon so I wondered how there was any furred/fluffy/etc I wasn't, at least, a little bit familiar with. Then I noticed it had a copyright and a species tag. With a small glance to the right, I notice that (what I thought was a new thing) fluffy_pony has 2k+ uploads. A bit of a surprise, but hey, with this first example being pretty cute I'm excited to see what's next. And that started my dive into a new rabbit hole.

I was immediately greeted with a page full of nothing but surprises honestly. Rows upon rows of images of cruel treatment of these ponies, Like ratios in consistent negatives, and most of the art being an unpolished but consistent style. So my next thought was "if a lot of this art looks, mostly, the same then it's gotta be a Chris Chan kinda thing. Started by one person and gained popularity for one reason or another. So I decided to check the wiki and it states that it's been around for as long as I have on the website like 2011! And I really hadn't noticed it for a whole decade! But also 2k images uploaded over 10+ years ain't much so I did figure it was a niche group of people but they were dedicated.

To wrap it up I decided to check the forums for information on this tag. I know anything with consistent dislikes will have people arguing and discussing. And long story short: their main community website is having an identity crisis. Deleting art and mods all giving different answers as to why. Honestly it was interesting to stumble across something that has a long history but very recent drama. It a bit of a roller coaster ride to learn about this niche group. Gore is one of my few blacklisted items so that probably explains why this didn't garner my attention much. I just found this whole thing funny from an outsider looking in.

TLDR: Fluffy_pony is not the cute tag I thought it was...

the community has really been having an identity crisis since like 2015 which is essentially the end of the golden age of fluffy pony. the death of the booru and the subsequent creation of fluffy-community and now the anti-anthro/"porn" ruling has really only solidified it. the community was too insulated for too long, partially out of necessity and partially out of fear of rejection. at this point fluffy pony as a whole is a zombie of what it once was, eating itself from the inside pieces slowly falling away until it will soon no longer exist.

I'd love to see some kind of comeback, but I don't see how that could ever be accomplished, especially when a lot of the seminal works of the community are either totally lost or are in a state that makes them difficult to consume. with The Fall of Cleveland the 85 chapter epic that serves as the fluffy pony bible, the basis of the entire fluffy pony universe is currently only available as a series of fucking Reddit posts.

sipothac said:
the community has really been having an identity crisis since like 2015...

Thank you for the insight. So the Fandom started from, what i could call, a passion project. But still pretty heavy gate kept, the plot is thicc

sammy301 said:
It all started with [ ID: 4573859 ] this recent post. I thought it was a cute oc and it made me wanna check out the artist's gallery here. I thought it was a bit weird that some of their stuff was in the negative dislike range because it was tame enough.

Is it wrong that I laughed at reading that line? I've seen it for tons of controversial subjects. Yeah, some actively disable their blacklist to downvote content they don't like.

"And that started my dive into a new rabbit hole." Yeah, this is how I got started, to be honest. Saw Peacethroughpower's uploads.

There are 'boxes' for different extremes. This community has ALWAYS had issues like the 'identity crisis' you mention, from what I looked into. Some put "fluffy_pony -rating:safe" on a blacklist line. People need to tag their stuff better like the gore tag you mention. At least uploaders seem to do that now.

"TLDR: Fluffy_pony is not the cute tag I thought it was..." Understatement of 2024 nomination?

sipothac said:
the community has really been having an identity crisis since like 2015 which is essentially the end of the golden age of fluffy pony. the death of the booru and the subsequent creation of fluffy-community and now the anti-anthro/"porn" ruling has really only solidified it. the community was too insulated for too long, partially out of necessity and partially out of fear of rejection. at this point fluffy pony as a whole is a zombie of what it once was, eating itself from the inside pieces slowly falling away until it will soon no longer exist.

I'd love to see some kind of comeback, but I don't see how that could ever be accomplished, especially when a lot of the seminal works of the community are either totally lost or are in a state that makes them difficult to consume. with The Fall of Cleveland the 85 chapter epic that serves as the fluffy pony bible, the basis of the entire fluffy pony universe is currently only available as a series of fucking Reddit posts.

Really? Wasn't most of it mirrored? Or was that the Snake Daddy thing I'm thinking of?
Wakeup call this week about having all eggs in one basket, sigh..

alphamule said:
Really? Wasn't most of it mirrored? Or was that the Snake Daddy thing I'm thinking of?
Wakeup call this week about having all eggs in one basket, sigh..

most of it's still around somewhere, it's just extremely inconvenient to access. the big mega.nz archive seems like it has most of the drawn archive and there's a pastebin account that seems like it contains a lot of the text posts.

but these still don't seem to contian everything, like, there was an artist called dambusters, and their art does not seem to be in the MEGA. there was also some half-off-topic/half-meta speedrunners fanart that Kibbles-n-tits posted, that is now lost to time as he did not post it to his tumblr.

and also, there were definitely more text posts on the booru than are in that pastebin, like, there was a greentext story that I had personally archived to the booru, I'm not seeing that in there. not to mention that pastebin lacks all of The Fall of Cleveland as well as Giant_Neckbeard's other stories.

sipothac said:
most of it's still around somewhere, it's just extremely inconvenient to access. the big mega.nz archive seems like it has most of the drawn archive and there's a pastebin account that seems like it contains a lot of the text posts.

but these still don't seem to contian everything, like, there was an artist called dambusters, and their art does not seem to be in the MEGA. there was also some half-off-topic/half-meta speedrunners fanart that Kibbles-n-tits posted, that is now lost to time as he did not post it to his tumblr.

and also, there were definitely more text posts on the booru than are in that pastebin, like, there was a greentext story that I had personally archived to the booru, I'm not seeing that in there. not to mention that pastebin lacks all of The Fall of Cleveland as well as Giant_Neckbeard's other stories.

Downloading time...

https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory/ <--- 404'd :(
http://web.archive.org/web/20230311095509/https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory/

sammy301 said:
(Looking at my favorites shows I have no right to critique anyone.)

You're well within your rights if the fetish you criticise is objectively worse than any fetish you have. Just make sure it follows the rules.

alphamule said:
Downloading time...

https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory/ <--- 404'd :(
http://web.archive.org/web/20230311095509/https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory/

oh, that's my bad https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory should work, I accidentally left the extra / when removing the page number and didn't check if the link worked.

wolfmanfur said:
You're well within your rights if the fetish you criticise is objectively worse than any fetish you have. Just make sure it follows the rules.

there's no such thing as "objectively worse" on here; it's pixels on a screen, ink on a page. ignoring pieces made with malice and infringing works, everything on here is value neutral in regards to its moral value.

sipothac said:
oh, that's my bad https://pastebin.com/u/fluffstory should work, I accidentally left the extra / when removing the page number and didn't check if the link worked.

there's no such thing as "objectively worse" on here; it's pixels on a screen, ink on a page. ignoring pieces made with malice and infringing works, everything on here is value neutral in regards to its moral value.

Oi! Then how the heck did the archive link work?! Yeah, thanks. That'll take a while. Still waiting on G-R on Mega. Already got A-F. Best to break it into sub-2GB chunks, I think. At least it's self-resuming. Done.

BTW: All the https://pastebin.com/raw/* links are archived at that post. Most of them were done on 2023-03-11.