>>42439414
This went on for another couple months beyond common public perception, and to make a long story short Moonfag finally had one meltdown too many and disappeared on us. By the time that happened, if we turned back around and looked at the main board on the site, it was getting something like two posts per month, and probably at least half of those were me. There was absolutely zero engagement or discussion. It was starkly apparent that it had truly become "this-thread.org". Even after Moonfag's disappearance, Erisfag and I were still in touch, and life had changed enough to leave us without any kind of enthusiasm for moderating a dead board, so we decided to mercy kill the site.

4chan might be shit, but it's also not the only place people can go even right this very second. If people were sufficiently motivated, there are at least two other sites with better moderation that would probably provide an overall more enjoyable experience. Apparently, even two weeks of downtime earlier this year wasn't enough to get people off this site, so from an altchan admin's perspective, it's pretty hard to justify running a place that'll always be seen as a backup site, rather than a place with an actual community that's passionate about being there. Between that and users like this >>42411550 making up the entirety of the Mare Cult userbase at the time of its demise, I really don't have any continued interest in running an anonymous imageboard. While I am big on friendship and would theoretically like to give people places to speak, I also need to get something out of it to make it something other than a burnout-inducing spam cleanup machine and work generator. You have no idea how fucking buggy LynxChan is, and LynxChan is one of the """better""" choices for imageboard software. Three users was already enough to cause all kinds of fucking weird site bugs. If I were to do something else today, I'd want to set up a community that's more gated but not a Discord server; I don't need that kind of drama and it's a garbage chat program anyway, making it safe from the barbarians roaming and pillaging the modern internet. In my opinion, that's why imageboard culture everywhere is dying, actually: imageboards just don't fit the current state of the world very much more, and it's all too easy for a well-meaning community to be broken up either accidentally by the barbarians or as part of a personal vendetta or targeted attack due to the lack of any kind of real gatekeeping inherent in imageboard design. Turns out that in the longer haul, you need to make actual friends for a community to survive. The ponies were right all along.

2/5