Drew Linky
7th of January 2026
My decision to explain the Slur Accords late last year proved somewhat prescient: at least once every day there’s someone who asks whether a given term is still permissible per the Slur Accords, even though they were never really intended to be taken as definitive restrictions or permissions. Nonetheless, after seeing this occur for months on end, the current mod team initiated a small discussion on it, especially Lyra and Soc. They pointed out the other issue I mentioned as well, being the use of slurs in people’s nicknames. They seemed to have the same viewpoint I do, which is that while not really a moral wrong, it’s still unsavory and gives the place a bad image.
After a few comments that were going nowhere fast, I made a suggestion that–whatever it was they wanted to see in #general–they needed to come up with a cohesive statement and pin it, for clarity and visibility. I feel like the advice was fine, although the end result was maybe a bit hasty:
It has come to our attention that there has been some confusion over the past few months regarding slur usage, so just to clear things up:
- The slur accords are officially no longer in effect.
No more slurs in nicknames, we are still a Discord partner and as such we need to project a decent image.
I call this hasty because longtime users instantly pointed out that the latter point sounds remarkably close to an ancient reference to Max Mikester, which I have somehow neglected to describe in this document at any point. The phrase “CONDUCT UNBECOMING” was exceedingly popular for years, used for mocking people who made any earnest appeal which had no higher basis than “we need to keep up our appearance as a server so that people can’t accuse us of unbecoming conduct.”
It’s still the predilection of most older users to simply not care about how we appear to others, although this attitude has been diluted over the years. I believe Soc is newer and may be forgiven for not recognizing it when they put up the pin, but people such as Enn immediately latched onto it and made fun of them. WoC eventually appeared and also mocked it, eventually replacing it with his own message: “dont put slurs in ur username or i kill you thank.” He has always been more fond of the direct approach, which in my opinion only works as well as it does for him because he has a king’s own arrogance. Still, I have to recognize his results.
Nothing more for today.
11th of January 2026
I feel like talking about the server’s numbers today, it’s been a while since I’ve described them in this journal and the situation has changed rather dramatically in the last couple years. I used to endure some ribbing from people about being overly worried over server activity, and though the sense of worry isn’t quite as sharp it’s still a bit concerning.
The HSD’s activity has been on a slow but general decline ever since the COVID pandemic caused it to resurge, we were seeing daily message counts in the 10,000-20,000 range back then but in 2025 it fell to a bit below 10,000 per day on average, often enough poking over that figure. However, the HSOD’s creation marked a significant change: their total activity is insane, and at least some of that is directly from draining #altgen and #homosuck because they have a more shitposting friendly atmosphere (I believe so, anyway. I don’t routinely check to see what it’s like). The #mspa-forums were also siphoned rather drastically, and so after the initial bump from the news in August our activity has fallen much closer to 5,000 messages a day, often below that figure.
Like I said, this doesn’t inspire the same feelings of dread or anxiety that used to plague me whenever I described this overall trend. I’m much older now and often have real life responsibilities that keep me from talking in #mspa-lit even when I have something I’d like to be discussing, or I’m simply too focused on a video game. However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel some trepidation looking at the numbers for my resident channel specifically: we are now in the low-to-mid hundreds of messages per day (today’s recorded number was 174, below even the slothful #coding-tech) which is a rather precipitous fall from how it used to be even just in the first half of 2025.
I suspect that, being on average older, a lot of the rest of the channel’s denizens have fallen prey to the same increase in responsibility that I have. I wouldn’t be surprised if the state of the world politically is also kind of a damper, it certainly occupies a lot of my thoughts and puts me in a mood unfit for conversation. It may just be general drift though, at the end of the day I’m still unsure what forces compel people to talk in any given online chat. I know people are at least looking consistently–the odd funny message still gets plenty of reaction, it just doesn’t seem to promote discussion.
Something akin to this phenomenon was described in #general recently: Faeby described that it feels like people don’t treat it as a real time chat: “someone else… put it really well in that its been being treated like a twitter feed,” saying that no one is actually trying to actively talk to each other and opting to drop messages and leave it at that. The term “hug boxing” was brought up as well, though I’m not sure how true that is or what impact it’s having.
Without knowing the exact reasons why this is happening I have no effective solutions to propose. However, I do have suggestions I’m going to bring up with Makin about restructuring the server. The current layout is geared far more towards a place that’s still got tens of thousands of messages to worry about, segmenting discussion so no one place is overwhelmed, and even a couple of forums for people to generate their own threads whenever they want instead of centralizing discussion.
Rather, to an extent we now resemble the Sydlexia Discord: one or two people there have continuously requested more channels of increasingly granular purpose, even going so far as to divide discussion about media into several channels such as #book-club, #tabletop-games, #music, #tv-and-movies. Mind you that this isn’t a bad strategy in and of itself, but the Sydlexia server only has 78 members on it as of the time of writing. It’s a spread of roughly 4 people per channel, diluting an already extremely low amount of activity. The end result is executive dysfunction: I don’t know that I want to talk anywhere because it’s overwhelming to look at the server list, and I don’t feel as if my words are really being seen anyway.
With all this in mind, my suggestion is pretty simply going to be that we should reduce the number of channels we have in the server. The #gaming and #media forums are convenient for compartmentalizing discussion but what’s the point if hardly anyone is using other channels like #mspa-lit in the first place? It’s nice to have the topics of a given channel neatly defined, but in my opinion the numbers just do not justify it. The only channel with activity similar to pre-HSOD levels is #general, and for the last so many weeks it’s responsible for anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of all activity for the day.
The other thing I’m mulling over is that the current mod team is lacking something. I can’t say what it is for sure, but there’s a certain je ne se quoi that is causing things to feel off, although I may be influenced by a recent discussion in #general complaining about the team being unpleasant. We’ve had plenty of people who are a bit too aggressive, people who lack experience1, people without drive. I’m definitely unsure how to fix this though, it’s an extension of the same problem we’ve had for years: finding new people to be mods is a terribly difficult task.
I don’t want to harp on this too much though. Instead, to cap off the day on a more pleasant note I’ll briefly describe someone who’s been around since 2022 named Dabu. An Arab inhabitant of #general who often flits to other channels, he and I don’t share a lot of the same taste in media as far as I can tell, but he has a generally delightful demeanor no matter what he’s talking about. I believe English isn’t his first language; shamefully, for a while this led me to assume that he’s somewhat simple-minded, but that impression was belied by his natural curiosity. I see him talking and asking about movies or TV shows often enough, and if he can interface with media in a language other than his own that makes him more capable than most as far as I’m concerned. Additionally, he has a tendency to keep the #world-politics thread updated on various goings-on in the Arab world, especially with major events such as the recent unrest in Iran. These things together lead me to believe that he’s actually shrewd, and simply selective about what he decides to say.
I have literally never seen anyone complain about Dabu, and if they did I think I would feel defensive of him on principle just because he’s so nice. The other night we talked about Star Trek a little bit and he was asking about our opinions on the show’s quality between Berman or Kurtzman as series producers. After speaking in the HSD for almost a decade now I kind of take certain opinions for granted, but his transparent curiosity was a good reminder not to assume everyone knows about these things or share the same opinions. I appreciate him and I look forward to seeing what else he discovers while talking here.
Finally, something I consider rather important: I have finally cleaned up and reorganized the statistical spreadsheets for the HSD and the subreddit so that I felt more comfortable publishing them for general use. They can be found here in Appendix D, and will be updated on a biyearly basis.
Nothing more for today.
CURRENT END OF ENTRIES
If you're reading this, you have reached the current end of updates for SPAT. The Homestuck Discord is still going, and I still write stuff, don't worry. The changelog will have information whenever it feels prudent for me to write, which will almost certainly be more sporadic in nature due to not wanting to cover the same topics or describe the same events repeatedly.
Support
For any of you reading this, I hope that this document has been entertaining, informative, or even both. I maintain this document for my own satisfaction and that of others, and to keep the memory of this community alive as the years go by. If you so desire to support me in this endeavor, then the link for my Ko-Fi page can be found here*. I would be immensely appreciative of any support, but this resource is first and foremost meant to be enjoyed openly and without any sort of charge so no worries either way. If I receive donations then they will first and foremost be used to cover monthly/annual operating costs for the website. Thank you for reading regardless!
Makin
1 I'm at least comforted by the fact the HSOD is adding mods that still have the "new user" badge, meaning they're desperate enough to "hire" people who have been on the server for under a week. We'll have to see how sustainable their approach is.
* Drew finally sells out. Sad!