@Background Pony
Nobody knows, and I cba with contacting him about it. The staff here got about a notice from him that he was thinking of shutting down about a week before he did. For some reason we thought he meant “in like a month”, can’t remember if the wording was vague or what. Either way, yeah, other than a few days’ heads up we’re as in the dark as everyone else. Our best guess is he simply stopped caring about ponies enough to merit the time and cost, or he burned out hard and didn’t trust anyone to take over the stuff he’d set up.

As for ponibooru, I joined back when there were, I dunno, less than 5k images, and was active as an anon ever since. S1-S2 hiatus and early S2 were good. Tagging was always abysmal, and spam and dupes started getting really bad in S2. By HWE the site was already horrifically slow, which is why Clover made this place, and then cloudflare and outages and rampant spam…

Also, for those that didn’t know, we didn’t make derpi to replace ponibooru, we made it as a proof of concept for Eco to use our tech and still be PB, just updated on something that wasn’t dying all the time. For reasons, he didn’t want to go with it.

• From Post 33 of The decline off Ponibooru. One year after.