In order which generation feels most like my little pony to you?

[Carrehz]

SunbeamV that spoiler is a hoot

G2 ran for longer outside the US... up until G3 started in some countries, I believe.

we also dont have a lot of old internet backed up,

The Wayback Machine begs to differ Though I suppose most forums and such are long gone.

[LadyMoondancer]

G1 feels the most MLP to me, then G3.

G2, G4, and G5 are all tied.  None of them give me the full MLP vibe, but none of them are totally off the mark.

After that: G3.5 and G4.5.

Then Dream Beauties.  They are very beautiful! I like them a lot more than some of the gens I previously mentioned! But they aren't My Little Ponies.  They're just horses.  They aren't even smiling.  Because they're just horses who live in a barn and poop in their stalls.

Then Newborn Cuties. They aren't ponies either.  They're freaky human babies.

Dead last: Equestria Girls, which aren't even pretending to be ponies.

Edit:  Oh yeah, the late 90s / early 2000s were wild times.  I didn't like the "new ponies" (as G2s were called at the time) and I remember some girl called me a Nazi because of that; she said that not liking the new ponies was "the same as belonging to a hate group."  Like, girl, get a grip.  They're just toys.  I remember just ROASTING her in response.

Looking back, and looking around at the current fandoms on the internet, it's pretty obvious that teenagers just like to fight over dumb things.  (Most of the MLP collecting community was teens or young twenty-somethings at the time.)  But at least the 90s MLP community mostly just insulted each other via emails.  On today's internet I've seen teens actually dox people over such important issues as . . . "I don't like that that person ships such-and-such anime characters, they are Problematic *frowny face*".  More problematic than doxxing people??

I can't wait for Twitter to finish dying.

The thing is, as I said before, the labels G1 and G2 didn't even exist till G3. LM will confirm it was borrowed from the Transformer community, since old ponies and new ponies couldn't wash when even newer ponies came out in 2003. There was such a consciousness about G1 and G2 being different, that those labels were always collective. The .5 was first in G3, towards the end.

Yep!  Man, I wish the old MLPTP board was still up.  If anyone knows how to use The Wayback Machine on a message board then lmk.  But yeah, a few years ago when it was still up I was like "I vaguely remember the Generation 1 etc thing coming from Transformers, I wonder who suggested it" and when I looked up the conversation on the old MLPTP, it was meeee, lol. I should have known.

I made a post about it on Tumblr, I should post it here too!

When (what is now called) G3.5 came out there was actually a lot of debate, and you probably CAN find that on the newer MLPTP and on these boards.  Some people wanted to call it G4, since the molds were different.  Others said it should still be G3, because the characters and setting were the same. And some people had this argument that I always found baffling:  they believed there had to be a "break" where Hasbro wasn't producing ponies in order to kick off a new generation.  Because there'd been breaks between G1/G2 and G2/G3 (even though there actually wasn't a gap between G2 and G3 in, like, France.)

Nobody really makes the gap argument anymore, ha ha.

Anyway, we ended up splitting the difference and calling the new molds G3.5;  at the end of the day we were toy collectors and it was important to understand whether an eBay auction was for a G3 Pinkie Pie versus a G3.5 Pinkie Pie.

[Taffeta]

I actually think SunbeamV is right about things having gone into the ether. The wayback machine requires quite specific knowledge to dig up individual sites and such, it also would require incredible luck (and possibly a means of bypassing logins) for forum discussions. But the most of the discussions around G2 - by which I mean the arguing side - weren't even on forums. The TP was the first space to do that, I forget exactly when, but the G2 controversy blew up mainly on individual people's websites (things that were on the ring of rainbows, probably, some of which disappeared a really long time ago) and on newsgroups and mailing lists. Most of these do not exist any longer.

I still have some saved data files which I have from old PC backups but whether I could open any of them now is questionable. To put it in context, most of these are backed up on floppy disk. Yep. So there we are.

There was also the DC chat and the DV chat. Of course there aren't any records of those.

There were also AIM, ICQ chats which probably nobody still has anything relating to by now.

I think back then the internet was a place where people could go and rediscover things that had disappeared from everyday life. So nostalgia was a part of it. But yeah, we were all pretty young (with a few exceptions of course). I think we also none of us really knew how to behave online, because there hadn't been any internet before we were there playing around with it.

I think there's a lot that I know now that would change my engagement with the internet in 1997-8ish if I could go back and do it again.

[LadyMoondancer]

Oh, same.  I look back and I'm like . . . maybe toy ponies didn't really require my dramatics, maybe I could have not worried about what other people thought and been a little kinder, a little less hot-blooded.  I do feel very privileged to have been on the internet at that time, though.  It was so much less commercial.  Even with the arguments, being part of the MLP community was a blast.  A really special time.

A lot of community discussions were also on the Ponypeople Mailing List!  I remember when people would go on there and be like "Please no one bid on this eBay auction because I want to win it" (until they made a rule against that, lol.)

There's a Tumblr called Old Web MLP that digs up old MLP sites!  I love it.

https://oldwebmlp.tumblr.com/

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Man, I miss the days when everyone had individual websites.

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Who remembers FLAT BED SCANNERS?

[Taffeta]

Oh, the pony-in-the-scanner was the height of modern tech at the time! 90% of pony auctions on ebay, and also trades, were done on word descriptions only, but throwing a pony in the scanner did become more popular as time went on. When I started making my website, I had two ways of adding photos. One was taking a physical photo, getting it developed and posting it up online and the other was to toss the pony in the scanner xD.

Some terrifying images resulted.

I remember the ponypeople ML, it's one reason I still call pony collectors ponypeople - but I know there was also another one. We also had a UK list which Tic Tac Toe set up, although not all the members were from the UK.

There were some not so pleasant things in that pony community but I also remember it as a fairly close-knit space where people mostly knew each other. I mean, we had the name registry and so on, and we'd get together to monitor known scammers on the mailing lists so that we knew what they were doing and could prevent them from creating more trouble.

And despite the fact most everything was in cash until paypal happened, I think that there's far more risk of being scammed these days than there was back then...since hardly anyone outside of the community knew ponies were worth anything, and most folk didn't care at all.

[FernMariposa919]

Honestly, G1 is the only one that feels truly like MLP to me. That's the generation I grew up with and know the best. I haven't really "studied" the other generations to know them that well, though I know what the toys looks like and even then I still think G1 is the best, but I may be a bit biased!