Tulpa.info Discord has shut down

[Pleeb]

Here is my full announcement that I posted in the server itself:

Quote

Dear community: This is my very first (and probably last) @everyone ping in this server.

After a great deal of thought and reflection, I've decided not to re-open the Tulpa.info Discord server.

I started .info in April 2012 -- over a decade ago -- with a companion forum and IRC channel. Over the years we've had ups and downs, and when the wind was blowing towards Discord, we ultimately moved in that direction. I could never really get into Discord though; maybe it's just because I'm getting older, maybe it's because I was also used to the pace of forums and IRC.

The past couple years things have been pretty stressful, even when Lumi wasn't an admin, and when Reg wasn't moderating "silly" stuff.

In October 2022, we actually came very close to shutting down. We had the ruleset that we've always had, but the community was exploding in drama and behind the scenes there was a lot of internal conflict too based on things that happened in between September and October. Ranger (our last active staff member aside from myself) was about to resign if we didn't make drastic changes. It was at this point Reg asked for permission to try doing things his way. I also asked Reisen's system to join as community manager. This is around the time the new ruleset was made and Reg started to become more active.

Things were starting to get a little better, but more conflict and chaos in late December early January (I think a member was muted for something which led to weeks of server-discussion exploding again). This resulted in the promotion of Reisen et al. to admin and I believe the resignation of Ranger.

I feel like things were relatively stable for a bit. The drama was subsiding, I felt like the community was happier, and for the first time in a while I was actually talking in the channels again and being motivated to work on things in .info. Ranger even came back as a moderator. But internal disagreements in the staff channel on action or inaction started to raise tensions again. When those disagreements reached a breaking point they bled out into the community channels, and you can read about them in the very channels of this server. I'm frustrated with how all of this came down, I can see both sides of those arguments and I admit I was often participating in them (even against other admins) at times too.

Eventually we lost all of our moderators except for admins and Rusty. Reg was busy with IRL stuff during most of this. Reisen et al. and I were dreading the discord (and had been for the last 3 months) and all of these timelines strangely correlate to my Apple Health app's resting heartrate being elevated.

Then some things were said by another staff member, there was more back and forth, and it seemed like every time I checked the server, it was Reisen et al. arguing with members. While KitKat was saying "that's more than 10 words", I was pleading the same in our moderation channel. Someone always had to get the last word in.

Multiple times in the last couple weeks I would be out driving to try and de-stress, and then my phone would blow up with DMs with people asking me to get into Discord and deal with whatever was going on, or the moderation channel would blow up and people were demanding my response ASAP because of something another staff member said in a public channel and they needed to use a quote that I said somewhere to refute what that staff member, I would have to keep pulling over into parking lots and try to deal with all this.

Then the night I shut things down, I was also driving when a raider came in and spammed horribly inappropriate images in the main channel. It took over 20 minutes before it was gone. That led to more arguments in the main channel, a lot was going on.

While everyone was arguing with Reisen et al. over recent actions in lounge, the administrators were arguing in the mod channel over how to handle the tone of the server and removing "sillyposting" and stuff. Reisen et al. has been arguing for months to change the name of `#general-chat` to `#serious-chat`, general-discussion to something else, and `#lounge` to `#general-chat` and just handle the general channel like every other discord channel does. Then just allow any sort of discussion in everything except for `#serious`. The argument against that was that this server would just be a clone of reddittulpas with just casual reaction images everywhere in every channel and a dead `#serious` channel.

I was considering giving that a try, though I knew that the moment I did it, Reg would resign, and then we would be left with just Reisen's system and I. Considering that recently silly-posting was only one specific point in the drama surrounding Reisen's system, I knew the result would be "still drama, now less admins".

With our staff openly throwing shit at each other, with over a year of on and off drama, and with the risk of ruining my friendship with some members of the community being a real possibility, I was already considering shutting everything down. When I received a DM from a member pointing out that porn on the server from that raid can cause problems for *me* if it's not dealt with in time (they were requesting I make an executive decision vetoing Reisen and Reg's gridlock to fix the staff situation), it pushed me over the edge and I locked every channel. Nobody noticed it because the only active channel at the time was lounge, with staff actively throwing said shit at each other. I locked lounge last, and posted my announcement.

I was told that the community was thriving in a private server in lieu of .info being closed, and that this was a great point that the issue isn't the community, it's the moderation. But I would like to point out that before October of 2022, the community was still at issue. Before we ever brought Reisen on; before we restructured the channels as per Reg's plan. That was a desperate situation and the community was close to closing then. Even if we reverted back to that point, we'll have more drama in the next 3 months. Someone said to me that it seems like this community is fantastic at making something out of nothing -- a true Tulpamancer skill.

These days as I approach my mid-30s, life is getting more and more hectic, and the experience is shared between our other admins too. There's a good chance that if we re-opened, we would do so with adding the `#serious` channel and lifting the "sillyposting" rules. Then Reg would be gone. Reisen has already expressed that they have already been extremely stressed over the last three months, and I would not ask them to remain as an admin. I would be the only administrator left, and that's just not attainable. Maybe we can promote some members as moderators or HOPs, but everything would be left on me for admin stuff when drama comes up as it absolutely would. Once a year or so I'm told "Just do XYZ and it'll fix everything" and it doesn't.

I've watched some members migrate over to Reddittulpas and they seemed to have embraced the community with open arms. I don't see anything that Tulpa.info provided that this server couldn't provide, at least in the way the current community wants us to be.

Unfortunately I can't quite get into it though; I've noticed a pattern in the channels where some discussion starts to kick off, but then someone posts an emoji or gif of a cat, and then the next several messages are just "Kitty" or cuteposting. Is that a bad thing? Reg will read this and say that it is. Many reading this will certainly not; after all, it works for them. It might even work It may just be a generational thing; I'm used to IRC or the forums. Discord, which is more of a social media platform and a totally different style of posting and conversations. Not as fun.

My main regret to keeping things shut down is that I've always had a grand vision[1] for Tulpa.info, even since the very beginning. It never quite panned out; some of it is just life getting in the way, some of it is the forums dying down, most of it is my own fault for not staying on top of it. I still wish to see .info achieve that vision, but it doesn't look like that's ever going to pan out. Even things like community (I stopped the movie nights when people just weren't interested in showing up anymore). I still have a little voice inside my head (not Chess's) that says it will never happen if I close this up. Sure, we'll still have the forums (and I guess IRC), but most of the internet has moved to this platform.

But at the same time, the last few days have been the least stressful (.info) days I've had in months. I can actually go for a drive without everything falling apart, I can work on my video games and other hobby projects and while my resting heartrate hasn't gone down, I've had more sleep.

While this a break from Discord, it is not the end of tulpa.info. We still have a thriving forum and our IRC channel has been neglected for way too long. We still have a minecraft server and I would still like to host events. And I'm still in some of the other discord servers, check out #server-hub to see what else is out there. And who knows, maybe someday the discord will open back up. Not any time soon though.

Also I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to both @staff and @ex-staff for everything you've done over the years. Words cannot express how grateful I am to have worked with you on this server. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, and if there's anything that you need that I could help with, please don't hesitate to DM me.

Farewell,
Pleeb.

 

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