In recent history, Admin and operator of Inkbunny GreenReaper has been criticized (I think fairly, having read some of the examples and their full context) of anti-transgender actions. This is in addition to IB's general problems in its history such as serving as a hotbed of Offender MAP networking for illegal file sharing, the foolish decision to allow Machine Generated Imagery to spill uncontested across the site, and to fail to enforce meaningfully coherent standards in regards to the presence of human loli/shota on the site (as well as external linking advertisement, etc).
During 2023, Inkbunny had every opportunity to clean its act up, engage meaningfully in adjusting its moderation culture to at least reflect fair treatment of the vulnerable populations of people who call this hellsite home. Furaffinity's moderation has since reversed course following Dragoneer's passing, unprecedented times in the US however make this perhaps too little and too late for those who give a shit about Queer Erasure. You could almost say that IB's endorsement of cub art and blanket rejection of MAP as a status of any kind reflects its Administration's general grasp on internal site policy.
That term, MAP (Minor Attracted Person, for whoever doesn't know this) is one which entered the public lexicon in a big way when research about that genre of person from the last 10 years became discussed online (on Twitter especially). IB being cub-friendly and happy to host redirects to sites of illustrated human minors (loli/shota/etc) had an opportunity to distinguish Offender and Non-Offender categories of MAP, set reasonable community standards, and enforce them with care. Instead of that, the same general attitude of 'lmao, lol' non-serious consideration of the larger baggage lead to the site having countless Offenders constantly engage in solicitation of illegal content, with no site culture or even basic broadcast of acceptable standards in conduct discussing this issue beyond "don't break the law :)".
Site administration is fucking hard. Don't get me wrong, I won't mince words here and claim it's always a clear-cut issue, but the decision to sit ontop of a network of Queer people of various types and not to support healthy discussion, healthy behavior, and set healthy boundaries for acceptable conduct really has caused IB's reputation to be tanked. It's at best one livestreamed mass shooting short of having 8chan's reputation, and even then a 'centrist' approach to moderation would defend that shit as 'speech', and we're oh-so beholden to the US Constitution as a privately owned and privately operated website hosted on servers in (Norway?). That last bit is sarcasm.
To the administration: You do not get a pass because you claim neutrality. Especially when you openly have an admin endorsing anti-transgender talking points such as proposing additional "responsibilities" to transgender people. This is basic shit, you really should know better, when bias is worn so openly it really does not help your population that came to your platform for right of expression. FA's endorsement of BLM specifically comes to mind, contemporary politics really are not the appropriate thing to broadcast. In FA's case, this was in addition to a blanket ban on 'hate symbols', and it's made artistic critique of Nazi's a whole lot harder. This example is to provide you context, I am in fact capable of nuance, and any website's policy has to be flexible but consistent for when things evolve in meaning.
Centrism deserves to be dragged through the mud, because it is not a position of neutrality or non-polarity. Centrism as a political ideology is to be undecided upon basic direction of policy, political, and government agenda and to instead take an 'estimated average' of those disparate views. When one party says "deport all non-citizens without trial" and the other says "do not deport all non-citizens without trial", there is no middle ground, the logical fallacies compound when ideological distinctions in action have absolutely no coherent ethos or connection to prior established policy direction. As a stance to take on your website, you are not capable of neutrality, you are a bag holder. Your position is one of affirmative self-defense and it is rationalized by provision of the space and by restraint of your power to follow a series of escalations to correct clearly defined wrongdoing.
That is not neutral. That is not centrist. That is in fact, very close to how owning a private building works. You are nested in a community, and if you say "whites only" on your door, a lot of people who do not identify as white are going to see that and say "fuck that guy in particular". When you make exclusionary criteria for enforcing conduct, you want as light as a touch as possible, but one which does not compromise between provision of the space and the space's regulars who make your space possible.
Because you're nested in a larger community, decisions to endorse Machine Generated Imagery and allow your space to become overflowing with slop only worsens a cultural stance on Free Expression which emphasizes the absence of restriction. Without curation, the most impulsive and aggressive of people fill the space, and that means more than a breakdown of 'civil conduct' when internationally, our historical moment is one of democratic decline and increasingly fragmented societies.
The thing about trying to play the 'politically neutral' card is that in Western Democracies, the Overton Window has shifted substantially towards more unregulated market economies and singular ethno-national identities. Neutrality is not a lack of polarity in this context, as the historical perspective demonstrates clearly that democratic decline is being ushered forward by a complex dance of free market absolutist worship and xenophobic isolationist rhetoric. You might call them the Alt-Right, I will simply refer to them as Ethno-nationalists.
Ethno-nationalism at its core is all about mythological rationale which has loose basis in actual history. By comparison, Progressives at this moment have a substantial challenge of creating a simple rhetorical package out of a very complicated, nuanced world view in which comfortable human lives and equal human opportunity are valued more than the relative positions of individual economic actors. The lack of intellectual cohesion and appropriately ethical actions by the current Socially Liberal parties of the West have given way to identitarian politics which of course, operate as a Greatest Common Denominator that filters out people who are preferential to socially conservative values.
Ethno-nationalism prescribes a simple narrative, and at current moment, the entire Democratic West is embroiled in this precise conflict of internal economic and social distress being misidentified as not directly related to labor exploitation. A literal worst-case scenario for our societies right now, the US and Europe especially, is this divide-and-conquer identity strategy which seeks to mobilize what is propagandized as a 'silent majority' into Authoritarian, Ethno-national Popularism. It's why Brexit ultimately worked, why Trump got his second term, and it's why Canada is barely able to transform the Conservative party's lead into more than a reasonably sound defeat. The Liberal party here having free brownie points with Trump's insane tradewar against Canada has not meaningfully prompted inter-party cooperation for National Cohesive Identity.
Nation-States face unclear futures in the context of clashing cultures and populations of humans who come into contact with completely alien levels of privilege and economic opportunity. Centrism is always relative, and as the Overton Window shifts closer and closer to cultural iconoclausts preaching ethno-national identity politics and authoritarian and fascistic governmental policies; so too are centrists preferentially permitting their positions to shift 'right-ward' towards the authoritarian and fascistic political ideas. These ideas are formed almost entirely because of political and industrial elites finding that sharing their 'civilized' world with the very labor populations they have exploited guilt-free for generations is in fact a little uncomfortable. By extension, Free speech absolutism prioritizes the mythological 'silent majority' as culturally valid, and minority statuses foreign and domestic are de-prioritized in policy and enforcement to 'preserve' the status quo.
IB's administration has rarely elected to respond to criticism with much internal reflection, instead externalizing the cultural problems of the site to 'bad actors', 'radicals', and things they could not possibly hope to control without substantial intellectual rationale for their policy. Further more, by choosing to allow labor devaluation to escalate so robustly by opening the floodgates to Machine Generated Imagery, it has made the creative and social capital of the principle population of talent that makes the website possible so much less valuable to the administration's operation of said website. It may be that the administration wishes to return to the fringe, so it may become a haven of illegal content sharing, and I wouldn't fucking say that if not for how clearly not-giving-a-fuck the administration is on defending the ethics of fictionalization in a uniform and coherent public message.
TLDR:
If you run a website like shit, people leave, and you get to go back to being obscure. That might be the fucking point, they don't want human labor and creative capital to be present for their fucking spankbank. Being a queer space online comes with compromises that make the administration have to fucking put effort into policy and behavior which requires people to be a lot more informed and measured in their decision making processes.
We saw this issue with Furaffinity, and they have reversed course since with baby-steps towards a more reasonable compromise of the site's content security needs and its population's key talent who bring the site any fucking population that could be anywhere else if they wanted to be. We saw this issue with Cohost's failure, due to their inability to be coherent on site agenda, direction, policy, and how that talent and viewer population would make hosting materially possible.
IB faces an uncertain future, like most queer spaces online, despite Norway(?) having pretty fucking lax legal permission for its content to exist within. The decisions of the Administration and their hostility towards transgender people pairs with the increasingly troubling problems of AI Image hosting being completely mixed in with normal human created artwork, and it comes in the context of a grander administrative culture of annoyance that people bother with them.
As such, IB is now a place I will not be posting to. Sorry to disappoint people, but I am choosing to walk away knowing full well that any opportunities IB would have offered in light of US legal attacks on Queer Spaces Online are truly antithetical to the operation of the website as a personal fiefdom.
