Berries.space

berries.space was a pan-fandom Mastodon instance, focused on diversity. It was one of the first mastodon instances to be started in response to the Tumblr NSFW Content Purge, and was initially created by estroqueen.
==Opening==
berries.space was announced by estroqueen on December 4th, and grew exponentially during the coming months as fans and other Tumblr users left Tumblr and joined the community. (alternate archive) estroqueen later left the instance and started up webfru.it.
Despite being popular with fans from Tumblr, the instance limited certain types of fannish content - RPF was explicitly banned, as were certain tropes such as incest (even in fictional situations where the characters in question were not related) and NSFW content featuring "aged up" characters. NSFW furry content was considered zoophilia and also banned. (alternate archive)
Despite being a Mastodon instance, the instance had strong cultural roots in Tumblr. The instance's logo was often anthropomorphized into Berrychan, who was considered a trans lesbian. Some users made her friends and girlfriends, such as Strawchan and Cranberry. There were also memes regarding #berriescon, an imaginary convention inspired by the failure of Dashcon, which included a berry ballpit.
==Closure==
On May 4th, 2019, the moderators of the instance announced that berries.space would be closing, and suggested that users move to other instances. (alternate archive) 
In the Google Docs notice, the main reason cited was stress regarding the running of berries.space, which the moderators admitted had caused mistakes within both moderating and the organization of the instance. Registrations to the instance was blocked, with a notice that the instance would shut down within a couple of weeks.
==Archiving==
Despite being a home for minority teens, berries.space was a public instance and did not explicitly ban archiving, nor did it edit its robots.txt or engage any privacy protocols to stop archive crawlers. Following its closure, a collective of archivists known as Archive Team archived every public post on berries.space via the Wayback Machine. This caused some drama in the community, with users protesting the invasion of privacy, and the fact that Archive Team did not ask the consent of users before archiving.
Several users defended the archiving of berries.space by Archive Team.
A former admin of berries.space, corrin, confirmed that consent had not been sought from the berries.space team, and they intended to take action. 
Despite claims made by corrin, the berries.space admin team did not post instructions on how to use the mastodon archive service on the official berries.space admin account, nor in the farewell GDoc. The official berries.space moderator account only posted instructions hours before the instance was due to close, and after most of the users had left. Most of the instance's moderators and admins did not post about archiving - although a boost was made by illuminatedbeehive of a user's instructions on how to request an archive.
The drama expanded into both discussions on archiving and into wank and personal insults. On May 28th 2019, the Wayback Machine removed the berries.space archive. Jason, an archivist from Archive Team, apologised for the way DashEquals behaved in response to concerns and criticism about berries.space being archived. DashEquals was removed from Archive Team, and also posted their own apology for misrepresenting Archive Team. 
==References==
Category:Websites