I've been trying to piece this together since a lot of the posts in question got deleted.
Some chunk of it was quoted in this comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePeoplesPress/comments/1k6er17/comment/mopihqh/
Best I can tell, the guy who started 50501 went off the rails and there was some sort of sexual harassment allegation involved.
Ultimately what I don't like here is how much people have been discouraged from discussing it. The discord and subreddit want people to just leave it be and wait for the official statement from the mods. But...in a decentralized movement, "the mods" should not be the only ones privvy to what happened and the only ones discussing it. I mean I sort of get it, you've got a discord with however many tens of thousands of users, you don't want to deal with keeping an eye on all that. But at the same time, if the creator of the movement has done something, it's a really, really bad look to try to stop people from discussing it or sharing what was posted. This should be as transparent as possible. If only the discord or reddit mods get to talk about it and see what happened, or if everyone else can only find out what happened as filtered through discord and reddit mods, that's not really decentralization anymore, that's having a class of members that are privy to secrets the rest of the movement is not. And I think it's pretty important for everyone to be able to see and discuss what the guy behind a movement is doing and saying. I mean, it doesn't sound like his positions are very defensible from the fragments I found, but I also want to see the firsthand accounts of what happened, because in another scenario if some reddit and discord mods decided they wanted someone out of the movement for bad reasons, and all you were allowed to see or discuss was their retelling of it...you can see how that could be abused.
The reality is decentralized movements are never truly leaderless, but sometimes they end up in a worse situation where there clearly ARE leaders but their power is dismissed as if it's non existent. At the end of the day, someone owns admin ownership of the discord, some number of people moderate it, some number of people moderate the subreddit, someone owns and registered the website, some number of people have edit access to it, all of this does matter. Some number of people were able to oust the creator of the movement out of the movement. From what info I've gathered so far I can't say it was the wrong move, but it is a very good moment to start asking how that was done, how just a handful of people were able to do that for a movement of this many people overall, and who has what powers where. It's something you should ALWAYS be thinking about in any decentralized environment. I don't think they made the wrong choice (as of now), but I don't like mods on any of these platforms going "no, don't talk about this, this is just some drama you don't need to worry about, we're handling it behind the scenes". I'm not sure who decided who gets to be privy to it and who gets to be "behind the scenes" and who doesn't.
Yeah ultimately my impression of all of this is that Fungi is probably a mess, but the other side is probably ALSO a mess, and I have no problem believing that in a decentralized grassroots movement someone will see a power vacuum and start trying to corporatize and centralize and sanitize it, and possibly make some money too.
But to your point, I think 50501 as a brand outlived its usefulness anyway. The best thing it did was get people connected to their smaller local organizers, it doesn't really mean much otherwise. Most of the protests are being organized by entities other than 50501 or volunteers that have no need to stay latched onto 50501 as a name. I think it served its purpose and there's no good reason to be donating to some sort of overhead 50501 organization versus your own local organizations doing the actual work, and 50501 as a name is absolutely is rife to be exploited.