My wacky cartoon corner

The issue of small social media and forums

This post has been edited on the 25th of October 2026

This post specifically describes things like mastodon (or just the fediverse in general), any forums whatsoever no exception, livejournal, f-list, e621, tcrf, tvtropes, wikifur (in fact, it applies to most wikis, even Wikipedia is sometimes culprit of this behavior), flayrah, furaffinity, gamebanana, nekoweb, more nekoweb, and adult/fetish spaces too as opposed to something way bigger and mainstream like X, Tumblr, Deviantart, Steam, Youtube and Bluesky (not to say it never happens, but it's relatively rare). to some degrees it affects "servers" and "groups" on such bigger sites like facebook's communities, reddit's subreddits, or telegram and (especially) discord servers. It's a freaking meme at this point that subreddit moderators and discord server mods are huge jobless dorks.

Reddit mods vs Discord mods

I know there are other communities that likewise had allegedly poor moderation practises including newgrounds, cohost and pillowfort, but I'm not gonna discuss them in this blog because I have never used them and I don't know anybody who used them plus 2 of them are either defunct or in the process of shutting down so I have no opinion on them, but be aware that they fit the shoe.

The biggest problem with small social spaces is that whoever's at the top tend to treat those places as fiefdoms and ensure they operate a certain way within specific parameters, no idea how to better explain this, but for example let's say if an admin hates meat, they'll make it their priority to make a big fit about it while putting anyone who isn't vegan on a (usually mental) shitlist. <- Note it's a purely hypothetical scenario I made up in my head, but several sites, groups, communities and servers I've gone to operate just like that except the "meat" part changes to something else.

Anyhow, I'll get to those details later, I wanna set the stage right now, so I'll be discussing how broadly these spaces operate and how they impact how anybody interacts with them. For example, take how personal grievances are handled...

If you get on someone at the top's bad side they will try their best to justify getting rid of you, and funnily someone on bluesky who runs several sites actually said the quiet part out loud to further prove my point. It's especially prevalent in quote "leftist safe spaces" like resetera where you literally can't say shit about anything unless you're trash-talking Elon Musk, not to imply the other side never does that, it's pretty much a given that any social spaces has hidden rules like for example you can't trash talk Elon musk the psychopath if you are a large influence on his site.

The first examples coming from furry spaces

It was very normalized to hate on freaky furs over a full decade ago for a very VERY long time1, furries left and right were denouncing us. that was before the community was established around the queer identity (starting in 2010 I'd say and fully coming into place around 2020) because while most of us already knew we were gay, trans and stuff we seemingly didn't understand that we were seen as weird too, so this came with a very naive will to reach out and share art with normies in public art spaces (oh and the musical.ly teens making silly vines calling furry a 'hobby'. they're normiefurs, so maybe that took them longer to let the reality sink in). Furries back then would often just make fun of folks and treat them differently as outcasts (i.e. burned furs mentality).

1 I should note, but I heard that apparently in the 90's outright cub porn and nsfw ferals were common, I wasn't even apart of the community yet back then and it's not like that information is gonna be promoted freely but anyway something must have happened around maybe 2010 that caused furries to value their image far more to a point where the burned furs group was created and fetishes like abdl were shunned. The funny thing is that around 2012 was when the world was starting to become unbearable to live in due to a paradigm shift with prudes and sjws becoming far more prevalent and wanting to censor everything which would lead to the rise of the counter culture movement we now know as anti-sjws or reactionaries, as well as gamergate as a side dish

As far as discord servers are concerned, I got kicked out of a popufur discord server for arguing in support of abdl and even after explaining exactly what abdl was about and why it was fine, educating people in other words (since it was at a time when everybody believed abdl was wrong and pedophilic and you know how it was quietly banned on furaffinity alongside cub) and I'm sure that my ban got me put on a shitlist somewhere because random folks I never interacted with would have had me blocked too.

Should be noted that I'd also get kicked from some servers before posting anything probably due to the above, emphasizing the fact that if a moderator doesn't like you they will want you gone even if you haven't broken any rules on their server.2 It seemed like I couldn't catch a break and would just get banned nilly-willy and that is a big reason why I don't like discord, it's got a shit culture.

2 I didn't think too deep of the context or subtext when I wrote that part, but there's a nonzero chance that given how at the time "abdl" just meant "pedophile" to idiots that they'd assumed I was one and I do know that pedophiles just like nazis get rightfully kicked out of spaces asap. I'm adding this to add possible context, but I will never know exactly why I'd get insta kicked from servers and the only clue is that it started happening after that aforementioned ban.

As for furaffinity, besides the ABDL stuff I casually cited earlier, Dragoneer's administration was generally pretty shitty, for starters they banned talpimado1988 for quote "pedophilic content" because he drew (just like many other artists) characters that are canonically minors, also I just read the deviantart comment section and lmao the first comment is literally just making shit up, instantly defeated in a single reply. That gloom and doom was also looming over FeetyMcFoot where he would get shit for using Tails in his 3D renders even though he explictly said that he designed the models to be aged-up I find the current administration under Squiggles to be a lot more fair (although I should note somebody cursed out Dragoneer right after he passed away and they got permabanned on the spot, I know that's not a very smart thing to do either way, but come on), they no longer target ABDL creators for a start and they understand that "small" doesn't mean "cub" and "weird" doesn't mean "sexual", problem that is widespread enough as is.

Dragoneer while he was alive would also tolerate actual uppercase ζ Zoophiles on his website which is something other furs have been talking about since as far back as 2010, all the while banning ABDL creators. I genuinely hope 2024 is the last year I hear about those seemingly arbitrary and unfair bans and I genuinely hope there will no longer be scandals due to abuse of powers or favoritism.

On Wikifur, there was a mini drama because an article without citations made the blatant claim that a furry named Tsebresos refused a commission because the commission included the gays™ and the main mod for the wiki was adamant to keep it that way, meanwhile when I do add a relevant piece of controversy to an article with a citation it gets reverted immediately by the same mod.

Whether Tsebresos did refuse for a stupid reason or not is not what matters here, it's the fact it's purely an opinion without any evidence to back up the claims and this fact's not gonna change even if it did happen as stated. It should have been properly cited from the get-go, but it wasn't.

Keep in mind that it's all the while they're reverting controversies that I add to articles and calling me a "drama llama", while they are doing the same and the citations are just "trust me bro". You are hypocritical Spirou.

PS: This one's probably the least offensive one on the list so far because it's just a disagreement, so don't worry about wikifur too much if you use it too, though I do hope an updated wiki (since wikifur uses an extremely old and insecure version of mediawiki) that has better sourcing practises and better staff pops up.

Now let's get into the real nasty stuff! What you've been waiting for!

Furry porn archive drama

E621 is probably THE example of all time, first it's owned by Bad Dragon which also owns F-List (equally a mess btw) and it's a capitalist monopoly on dildos, so the whole ordeal is operated like an enterprise (In fact, they do love AI, on their sister site at least lmao). Second I alluded to it when I mentioned F-List, but this website is full of abuse of all sorts. I remember back when Kothorix got randomly banned (yeah same guy who made that "in defense of pedophiles" video, not the brightest lightbulb in the shed, but that doesn't change the fact that the ban was excessive) and they refused to reinstate him no matter what, he was gone for good. He's not an isolated case either. E621 is certainly no better because it's run by the same people who run F-list.

For example, after they banned Carpetwurm over if I recall correctly a crashout at a few users who teased him about his then alleged transphobia in the comments, kind of bullying him over it with later somebody even tolling me he was transphobic to them apparently? It sucks if true, anyway that was also after he switched to another account (so he had 2 accounts on e621) because he abandoned his previous one, that's when he snapped back at them and got banned, not even 3 days later, someone decided (Probably NotMeNotYou) to delete his ENTIRE gallery off e621 and place him into the DNP (Do Not Post) list without warning. I had a problem with that because 1. I'm a firm believer of the saying "separate the art from the artist" and 2. E621 is a motherfucking archive of furry art, you can't just decide to randomly exclude someone's art just because they're a bad person, speaking of why is Jasonafex's art allowed if you're gonna enforce a hidden "minimum decency" rule? Jasonafex is way more problematic than Carpetwurm in every single way and somehow his art is fine to stay?!? #lift_the_ban_on_carpetwurm

The funniest part is that the admins have on record stated that ban evasion was fine and that they would ignore it if you don't get caught especially if they liked you, really saying that they don't care so long as you are aligned with them. I guess this is why they salted the tag, to denounce and personally label him "persona non-grata" so even if he were to ban evade to post his art to e6 he wouldn't be able to.

Garfield looking at a sign that's just a crossed out picture of him.

If that wasn't enough, they apply their rules arbitrarily depending on the artist. Now, just to be clear I have no strong opinions about any of the artists I'm gonna talk about, all I'm doing is to point out the irony and double standard.

For context, there's a rule that states that in a comic series only the first 4 pages are allowed and this is the rule they are enforcing arbitrarily. So, let me tell you about 2 political artists, one is openly left-wing antifa, the other is openly right-wing libertarian. The left wing comic artist is happyroadkill, the right wing comic artist is I believe yoloswagstudios. Funny thing is I call the other artist right wing because of the shit he says and since he's vaguely associated with nazitoss, but most of the time his comics ain't even political. There are probably other examples where this rule is being enforced arbitrarily, but this is the one that stuck with me, I don't even want them to delete happyroadkill's submissions, I just want them to take the rule as literally as possible and only focus on episodic/page based series, not what's essentially Garfield strips.

Oh yeah I'm not fucking kidding about the bias, they openly allow and tolerate terrorist art on their site calling for violence against anybody the leftists disagree with. There'll be a day where some motherfucker will be radicalized by this shit and carry out a shooting irl like what happened with Luigi Mangione (and apparently he was a furry last time I heard of him) or the Minneapolis shooting because the shooter hated religious folks. God forbid I post a harmless, apolotical garfield strip from a right-wing weirdo because I liked it, but oh no no "art" making vague threats against others is perfectly acceptable! I know they're ashamed as fuck of it too because they disable the comment section on all of them and then threaten to ban you if you add a "comments_disabled" tag to the posts, what fucking lunacy!

While we're on the topic, let's talk about tagging because it's been sort of a disaster since day 1, it's split into multiple categories and one of those categories is "lore". This category has been ripe full of controversy because not everything's on it for example there are missing LGBTQ+ identities on it as of this writing, it also doesn't label whether a character has autism or other identity labels because in essence that's all it is for labels, but also the tags weren't defined perfectly well with rules and all, so something like a male character presenting female can be interpreted as them coming out as trans when that is not the case, try "ralsei trans_(lore)" to see what I'm talking about. To my knowledge the lore category was added around 2018 to please their users because the policy before was to salt the trans tag (they [the admins] actually got shit for it), and now they treat this category more as an unserious vibe-based category where labels can be included or excluded at will.

That's not all, tags sometimes get merged together recklessly, or get invalidated as is often the case with color tags (worst offender is any color analogue to "Blue" I'll forever give them shit for aliasing Cyan to Blue, it's not the same fucking color!) and they will forever pull up the burlywood color as an excuse as to why they act like that, (it's literally just another name for tan) the only color I felt was justifiably not a fit for e6 and they decided to make a big deal out of any colors beside the generic red, yellow, orange, brown, green, blue, purple and pink, not even comparable to my example earlier. Due to that it makes searching harder all because the admins are too lazy to do their job and just want everything clumped together with no rhyme nor reason. Fun fact: their own logo ain't blue, it's indigo, but I'm not sure you can tag that anymore either because they likely aliased it too like everything else thus making it so the tagging system on this website is fundamentally broken and incompatible with quickly looking up things I wanna look at even with the help of the blacklist.

Don't get me wrong I HAVE SEEN WORSE and I've been around on the internet for a very long time and a good chunk of boorus don't even bother tagging properly at all, the fact tagging is enforced at all on E621 means that in many cases you can actually find what you want, it's the hubris of the head moderator and other janitors that piss me off like merging "slime", "goo" and "snail slime" together (which are different things and thus incompatible together), having separate "praise", "pet praise" and "good boy" tags that only serve to dilute search for the posts I wanna look at or tagging everything involving a character's maw "vore" when the site offers "in mouth" and "maw shot" which don't involve a character getting eaten at all. Not to mention how extremely arbitrary lore tags are, some things just don't get a lore tag and imo lore tags are unnecessary, why not tag "family" or "trans" as a general tag directly like male and female instead? That alone has caused so much drama from what I've heard. This booru is too rotten to be fixed, so why bother at this point. I think we'd be better off starting from scratch and that's why I wanted to open my own booru, however I lack the technical knowledge or even motivation to get it started. I have a 1TB stash of furry porn (both literal and exotic as in fetish stuff) ready to upload online, but oh well.

I'm pretty much done with them, but I'll leave some further readings if you want >:3

F95Zone

An adult forum. I haven't hade any problems with them, but I did read up something a bit troubling about the forum.

Sumbody on trustpilot has made a 1 star review on F95Zone decrying abusive arbitrary moderation and the only funny part is that they made the review on mf trustpilot, but anyway I saw this after signing up recently so I got a bit of a small anxiety attack from that which's certainly not good for my heart.

I went back on Trustpilot to find a similar rant with the person also claiming that it distributes malware (nothing new btw, all porn and piracy sites do that to some extent) and that it fingerprints you, but that's not relevant to the post, what I want to highlight is that there is more than one person complaining about the moderation.

Yesterweb community

As far as Nekoweb is concerned, I haven't had anything in partcular happen, but there's been some talk about the moderation of Nekoweb in other places.

Not really pertinent, but a nekoweb site I added to my list of links was removed for "This site may have contained malicious content like phishing, spam, malware, etc in the past.", that site was just a math site running in javascript. It doesn't really work the best on the wayback machine either because it's doing instancing and archive.org can't handle that so the page just refreshes repeatedly. Regardless I'm wondering if it's true that the site contained something fishy like malware or it was just a simple overreaction.

Really didn't want to add this one to the blog post, but there you go: Melonland run by melonking, melooon or melon, whichever spelling you prefer is a yesterweb forum for discussion about the old web as well as old tech. The forum felt welcoming at first, but the more I use it, the lesser it feels that way. For example, you cannot convey or express opinions a certain way on the forum or else you can get dinged by a moderator.

Basically, you cannot be stern and straight to the point or else it'll be seen as a personal attack or insulting which I personally don't understand. For example, I said something to the extent of "...this is designed poorly because...", and Melon didn't like that because I said "this is bad". I don't believe it's a matter of being intolerant to criticism, this might be a culture gap, heck even on furaffinity the users tend to be generally more harsh even if I exclude the trolls and edgelords, there's maybe a way to formulate criticism without causing animosity, but I have no idea how.

At least he clearly highlighted that when it happened, last time I heard of him before I said something like "...I'm surprised you haven't considered an alternative if Krita is difficult..." to a poster and adding "...is there a reason why you use Krita?", for which Melon contacted me via DMs and linked me this https://www.recurse.com/social-rules#no-feigning-surprise which i've already read for the purpose of adding a link to it on my website. This is the sort of shit some linux douchebag users and tech support forums in general do, so I'm familiar with it. This was harmless casual banter and the only thing in common with the article is my use of the word "surprise" and it's from a poster who commented that they had trouble using Krita, they weren't asking for advice and I was wondering why they didn't use anything else. Melon didn't even properly glean nor understand the context of the post as he suggested me something completely wrong, unrelated and that could potentially come off as condescending or belittling ironically in of itself, this being said he did admit fault when I pointed it out to him, so that's that. The first time I've ever been dinged over something I said was again due to how I wrote my comment and I don't know what I said was so bad, in short I told 2 people that they may have not read the post, simply going off the title when they replied to it which is against the first point of the forum rules, they didn't force me to edit the comment however so I left it as-is. Should've reported them instead I guess...

I've behaved much worse outside of melonland calling assholes I don't like twatwaffles and morons, so I really do not understand what I'm doing is wrong I don't know how to improve if I have no idea what's wrong with how I write, I write like how I talk irl and this has never gotten me weird comments like that, if something's not done correctly I just say it. No idea if the tone policing is even gonna achieve much when I don't understand the problem. While Melooon wants his forum to be welcoming, it feels hostile at times.

This was way longer than I ever intended that paragraph to be, just things piling up and that's how it got so long. I think the real takeaway is that a space should be safe as I am queer and furry, but if it is "too safe", the atmosphere can get kind of oppressive and I may not be the only one feeling that. I like melonland for what it is and what it wants to achieve, but all of this is just discouraging me from coming there (I don't even post as frequently as I used to when I started using it, cleared 100 posts and got up to Senior Mamber rating in the span of months).

I juat wanna be clear about something: me sharing my gripes about melonland is one thing that doesn't mean it's all bad nor that it's as bad as other places especially since I've been to a dozen of forums in my life and many were way worse (if we count furaffinity then yeh it was worse), and heck I dedicated an entire essay on Xkeeper because she is an abusive site owner who can't stop herself from getting into trouble despite little me never using any of her sites. Those are just 3 instances of getting yelled at for my tone, that doesn't compare to other sites discussed here. Anyway, moving on.

Honorable mention

Due to a troll hijacking furaffinity and redirecting to the green bird site (which I believed was involved at the time), I decided it would be funny to sign up and piss them off. Other furries had the same idea or were angrily commenting and replying in sheer confusion. That didn't really go anywhere at first so I mafe a few serious posts while being nonchalantly myself (I'm a furry, I'm fruity, cry about it!) and eventually I would get banned not because I broke any rules but because I pissed off the sole admin of this hellscape, so much for muh freeze peach am I right? He would ban other furries as well during that time, some who had a longlasting legacy on the site. One of them had a bottle of beer as his avatar and was a member since 2013, BRUH!

Conclusion

I just generally dislike how cliquey smaller sites are and I hope that when I decide to make my own hangout place it can be as neutral as possible and allow a range of interests as wide as possible. To a point where even if somebody is a bit douchey they can still stay and contribute to discussions if they aren't a huge constant problem and they aren't a nazi/tankie.

The ironic thing is that those social media oligarchs (think Elon Musk and shit) do not know you exist, you will never blip in their radar or they will be so desensitized to getting mobbed and dogpiled all day (because they suck) to ever care about you, meanwhile if you are on something smaller, immediately you will feel the site's owner breathing on your back the moment you say or do something they do not like whether that breaks any rules in the first place or not.

#informational #personal #rant