>>3331
>>3332
I can speak to this a bit.
This website used to be known as ponygoons. It was actually an offsite spawned off the Something Awful forums when some of the forum posters (who call themselves goons) started posting about the show and were mocked by the rest of the site for it. Pic related, it's the Something Awful internal wiki article about the whole thing. For reference, Something Awful was one of the big sources of internet culture in the 00s like 4chan was, it's a website about remorselessly mocking the rest of the internet. It was funny at the time, but in retrospect those faggots really were precursors to much of the cancer that was killing the internet in the 10s and continues to shit it up today. Kiwifarms types, ironic weebs, SJWs, journalists, and other crap like that. To be honest, I was one of them. Anyway in that kind of atmosphere, the sort of person who would genuinely love MLP and post about it on the forums would either have to have a thick skin or would be really sensitive and neurotic and self-conscious. The ponygoons forum was a mix of the two. It trended more towards the latter over time as the former slowly lost interest, plus there were people from tumblr migrating in a few years after ponygoons was founded. The Something Awful forums roots are why there was such a heavy anti-shipping focus (gay and straight ships alike, no social conservatism there), that attitude came out of the typical goon attitude of throwing the rest of the fandom under the bus to try to appease perma-highschool internet social climber types. (Goons act the same way about anime, which is why I say that they were precursors to ironic weebs, and about videogames and open source software, hence anti-gamergate and CoC bullshit etc. etc.)
>and the political conversations I've seen so far much more left leaning with no right leaning opinions at all . I'm not really going to judge them on that, unless I see the type of bulling and competitive fake virtue singling that such communities can often breed .
I don't think you would be surprised at what you saw if you had been around at the time. There were people with more right leaning opinions in the early days of the site, but they tended to get dogpiled when expressing them and they eventually left, changed their minds, or went quiet. I remember one guy who was pretty vocally conservative and thought the cops were correct in one of the big police shooting outrage news stories of the era. Either the Michael Brown one or the George Zimmerman one. He got hounded and attacked so much on this website (which I think was a big social outlet for the guy) that eventually he caved and decided hey, he may be a tranny after all. He posted a pic of some glittery silver paint on his toenails, a closeup pic that showed the toe knuckle hair and all, and I was really grossed out and disturbed. Everyone else was congratulating him. I said nothing.
>Also, it is fairly active in an era of discord and social media. Not the most happening place and some parts clearly are inactive but it is still getting daily posts and the booru has frequent uploads. Not a lot of smaller web fourms can claim that nowadays in this era.
Sometimes a forum just has a lot of momentum and staying power, it's weird.

As much as I complain, and as mentally ill as the userbase was... I had some good times on that forum.