It should be noted that I am prone to making mistakes and misjudgments, and everything I write should be treated with the appropriate amount of skepticism. My statements are safer to consider opinion rather than fact, unless specifically stated otherwise. Descriptions of people, events, and places are subject to change based on what I observe and what people feel is necessary to correct me on.
Further, while Makin provides commentary he has absolutely no true editorial purview concerning the contents of this document. Anything he suggests may be accepted or rejected by me as I see fit, and the document in its entirety is something that is completely under my direct control. I clarify this in an attempt to mollify any who may be concerned that I’m being influenced, which would be understandable given the history of controversy in this community. Rest assured that I am trying to be as impartial as I possibly can in writing this, or at least true to my own feelings. I reiterate that anyone who wants to suggest improvements or corrective edits to the document are free to do so: I may be contacted on Reddit as /u/DrewLinky or on Discord as Drew Linky#0361.
Finally, the first 50-100 pages (starting from July 9th, 2017) are written in a much different tone than the rest because at first the document was not going to be revealed to anyone. As a result the statements in that section are more blunt and less diplomatic than I would prefer in a public context. Please bear this in mind as you read the beginning of this journal.
Drew Linky
(Note as of 2/14/2019: this section is unchanged from when I wrote it back in July of 2017. For an up to date list of server attributes refer to the section called "Current Statistics"
This is a personal effort to document the general day to day life of the Homestuck + Hiveswap Discord Server (hereinafter referred to as HSD) as well as my own personal experiences there. My handle is Drew Linky and I moderate the place; I do so in conjunction with a few other moderators, an administrator, and pseudo-moderators, all of which I will name shortly.
The server itself is a place to congregate and discuss the webcomic Homestuck, written by Andrew Hussie from April 13th, 2009 ostensibly to the day of writing this, although no updates have occurred since October 25th, 2016. The comic's status is 100% complete, save for the possibility of an epilogue (edit as of 4/13/19: The Epilogues have begun, refer to the entry from date of edit for more information; further edit as of 10/25/2020: Homestuck 2 was started, refer to the date of edit for more information). Also discussed is the video game Hiveswap, conceived by the same person and currently in development by an affiliated studio called What Pumpkin.
The server itself is hosted by the program Discord, a web service dedicated to allowing people to gather and talk to each other, much like a modern day mIRC. It has a wide range of features that allow one to customize their server, including modifying who can speak where, roles associated with various people, etc. The HSD was created by its administrator, Makin, on the 27th of February, 2016 (edit as of 2/14/18: Makin will sometimes provide commentary, which are supplied in the form of footnotes which can be hovered over for floating text, or you can click them to be taken to the bottom of the page. Any footnotes written by myself will appear in italics, including occasional responses to Makin's commentary.).
The community as of the day of this writing, the 9th of July 2017, consists of 7,211 individuals from a wide variety of different locations around the globe. At any given time approximately 1,000 to 1,500 of these members are online, and about 100-200 are actively talking. This number fluctuates often depending on the relative activity of the server as a whole, community events, newly generated content, etc.
The moderators consist of myself and five others: sea hitler, wheals, Cerulean, Lucky Red Seven (LRS), and Ngame. The pseudo-moderators consist of nine people, all responsible for their own channel: Anervaria, tori (also known as cheeto), Difarem, Ifnar, Medixum, ost, Tensei, Toast, and WoC (short for Wizard of Chaos). As stated before, the owner and administrator of the server is Makin. Together, we make up the moderation team of the HSD1. These people will be referred to by their handles only (save for exceptional or otherwise specific circumstances).
This journal, I suppose I should call it, is not meant to be completely exhaustive, because I am not a proficient writer and I am certain I will forget things a lot of the time. I will do my best to record things as thoroughly as possible, but I have no doubt that I will fail in certain cases. For a while, as I'm trying to record the basic elements of this place, I will probably also seem pretty directionless and ramble about what I'm describing. (edit as of 1/15/18: this is still the case, unfortunately2). I will also try to introduce terminology to streamline my thoughts and observations of the place, but at a rate that is not overwhelming. Please bear with this and pardon any poor organizational conventions.
The physical layout of the server is fairly organized; as of this writing there are 28 channels, 14 of which are used for public discussion of various topics. These channels in descending order as of this writing are: #general, #social, #homestuck, #hiveswap, #art-music, #gaming, #cartoon-tv, #anime, #mspa-literature, #coding-tech, #serious, #voicechat, #altgen, and #botspam-radio.
The purpose of most of these channels is self evident enough: #general is meant for (mostly) unfettered discussion about anything, and also doubles as the welcoming channel for new members; #social is meant for socializing and talking about more personal matters of a non-serious variety; #homestuck and #hiveswap are for discussion about the comic/video game themselves; and so on.
The channels whose purposes are not immediately clear or are otherwise misleading are: #mspa-literature, whose name changes at random into many different things (the name as of this writing is #read-worm) and whose purpose is the source of many controversies. This channel will be discussed more in depth later; #altgen, short for “alternate-general”, which is basically a containment channel for people who habitually post things unrelated to discussion or otherwise “low-quality content”, a practice known as “shitposting”; #botspam-radio, which is where one goes to utilize the channel's automated “bot” functions, such as giving yourself a color role, looking up information on a particular user or the server itself, and commanding the bot to play a piece of music in the appropriate voice channel.
The other channels consist of an #announcements channel, which true to its name is used for informing the userbase when a community-relevant or otherwise significant event occurs, or for administering server-wide polls, etc. There are also a few channels dedicated to mod and pseudo-mod use, only visible by them: #mod_moderation_log, where the aforementioned are expected to log all instances of user bans and unbans; #bot_moderation_log, where the same is done by an automated bot named Spectra tracking the server (this redundancy makes for more effective bookkeeping), and also logs name changes, user avatar picture changes, etc.; #illuminati-not-hangout, a joke name for the channel dedicated to mods discussing internal issues away from prying eyes; #spoopy_ghost_channel, which is functionally the same as #bot_moderation_log but run by a different bot named Aradiabot and maintained by the moderator Cerulean; #mod-chat, which is for communicating on an official basis with staff from related businesses or otherwise important figures.
The other seven3 channels are completely unused: hidden away from the general populace, they have completed their purpose or otherwise been decommissioned without being deleted, usually for archival purposes. These channels are: #serious-old, #nsfw-old, #nsfw-older, #survey-talk-old, #radio-old, #aprilfools-old, and #r-place-old. Very occasionally one of these channels may be lifted back into service, usually on a temporary basis; in particular, #survey-talk is used whenever Makin initiates a server wide poll and wants to talk to people about the results and their thoughts on the matter. Otherwise, these channels will probably not be discussed further except in extenuating circumstances.
Of note, the #nsfw channels in particular were decommissioned in favor of establishing a separate sister server named “Homesmut”. The reasons for this will be discussed at another time, and if prudent the layout of that server will be detailed elsewhere also. In short, its purpose is as containment for adult content, both related to Homestuck, Hiveswap, and in general.
There are two things to explain: my history on the internet and my involvement with the Homestuck community.
The first is relatively straightforward, or perhaps I just remember it as being so because enough time has passed. I was born in 1994, only a couple years after public internet had begun. My parents were accepting of the rapidly developing, new technology but still a little old fashioned, so it took awhile for me to gain full and unrestricted access to the internet. By the age of 10 or so, however, I was using the internet for several hours a day, usually aimlessly wandering about in the old internet of 2004 trying to find primitive flash games and news relating to console video games.
The Gamecube had just come out 3 years prior and I was still stuck on the Nintendo 64, often replaying The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and a handful of other titles. The Zelda series probably is the most responsible for me becoming as invested in video games as I have been--I often say that I learned to read by playing Ocarina of Time when I was 4 or so. Naturally, since I was such a fan of this series I decided to search for any sort of community that was actively discussing the topic. It was thus that I stumbled upon Zelda Blog, an old and true to its name web blog where newsposts about the series were shared.
It was unlike anything I had ever seen before; I didn't use MySpace because I barely knew it existed and didn't have anyone to talk to on it anyway, but people had already gathered here and were talking about something I liked so much. It was almost too much for my 10 year old brain to handle. I immediately made an account, my first and incredibly embarrassing internet persona "uberzeldamaster" (yes, I know), and began participating right away. Being so young and inexperienced with the ways of internet culture I made blunder after awkward blunder, and yet the users of this place were willing to help me learn what I was doing wrong and improve. I owe a lot to their patience and understanding.
As things go, Zelda Blog shut down shortly after Twilight Princess came out. I was heartbroken; the first place I had ever been able to call my internet home was now defunct, and in a show of camaraderie myself and a smattering of other users all made our own individual blogs to try and stick together. None of us had any experience in producing quality content or even basic web design, and despite our earnest attempts to educate ourselves and make it work we too all fell away eventually.
I didn't know what to do with myself for a couple of years. I went back to what I was doing before, but old flash games and reading random news on various websites with no community participation was now blasé, paling in comparison to the interactive experience I had on Zelda Blog. However, things changed once I got into high school or so.
At some point in 2009 I had given up on finding a solidly based community by chance and was trying my best to make friends with people in real life. I had moved recently from another school but, given to my habitual use of the internet, it wasn't hard to keep up with the people I had met in middle school. In the process one of them told me about emulators; I was ecstatic to learn about them, because I had lost my Nintendo 64 and all of my old games in the move. After gorging myself on all of my old favorites for a while, I looked deeper and quickly figured out I could emulate any old titles I wanted. I had never owned an original NES and my SNES had been lost way too quickly for me to develop any meaningful memories of it. I had no idea where to begin, so I looked up a list of games for these systems that it was recommended to try. This is how I stumbled across Sydlexia.
Edit as of 10/31/18: I have written a brief retrospective about the Sydlexia website and community, with a lot more detail than I provide in SPAT. It may be found at the following link:
Sydlexia didn't immediately seem like it would be anything great to me; the only thing I was interested in was finding a list of games to try and emulate, which I did. The website's "The 100 Best NES Games Ever" list was one of the first results on Google at the time (a quick Google search reveals to me that it's still on the first page of results for "top 100 NES games"). I looked into it and ran through the list of titles, occasionally reading the descriptions of why certain games were ranked the way they are. Some of them made me laugh, and I decided to explore the site further. The main feature was blog-like, with the owner of the site Syd Lexia writing articles about various pop culture icons or items. Some memorable articles I can still recall involve McDonald's toys descriptions, reviews of certain kinds of cereal (especially ones that are no longer produced), and an incredible array of video game articles. I ran through the archive, reading as much of it as I could. Syd had an incredible, almost decidedly Sean Baby-esque style to his writing, and it was addicting to my highschool freshman palate.
After reading these articles for a while, I decided to see what other features on the site existed, and I found the dedicated forums. These forums are still around if you wish to look at them yourself, I won't describe them in excessive detail. To me, seeing them for the first time, it reinvigorated my love for online interaction. These people, a small community by all accounts with less than 1000 people, were actively participating with each other and talking about all manner of things, from video games to movies to music even to politics and other things I had never even considered at that point. It was a cultural enrichment the likes of which I had never seen before. As with Zelda Blog, I immediately made an account and started participating.
My handle at this point had to change: I was smart enough to know that "uberzeldamaster" is probably not a title you want to be stuck with. I thought for a long time about what I wanted to be called, and remembered something from Zelda Blog. The webmaster for ZB ran a sister website called Nintendo Land, which had a feature parodying Drew Carey. The webmaster wrote in a host show format and interviewed various characters from an assortment of Nintendo games, and on ZB we all looked forward to this and would discuss the "episodes" at great length. The altered name of the host of the show was Drew Linky. As a memento and a way to permanently remember this place I liked so much, I adopted the name as my own.
With this, I went into the Sydlexia Forums and was subsequently thrown into a much bigger pond than I was used to. I had been taught some etiquette by members of ZB but it wasn't nearly enough; these people had rules. I had to relearn a lot of things, but I made less mistakes and was trying my best to earnestly participate and contribute to this community as much as everyone else. At one point in 2010 I discovered that there was an associated IRC group, which is how I took my first step into the world of real-time chatting.
It's a strange but really big step to make that leap from timed, singular posts to chatting in real time with a big group of people. I hadn't used AOL live chat and I don't think I used Skype yet, so aside from Facebook Messenger this was an entirely new experience for me. I joined and some people recognized me from the forums, and thus began a multi-year stint of getting on IRC every single day, talking to these guys about who knows what for hours. It was through these discussions that I discovered more content than I ever possibly would have by myself.
Highschool flew by of course, and I talked with these guys even in my first couple of years in college. They were actually the first people I was able to talk to about Homestuck, which they were all stunned that I hadn't heard of by the time I did in 2012. In mid 2013 though, things seemed kind of bad. Syd Lexia hadn't posted a new article in months and people were running out of things to talk about. Zelda Blog had ended swiftly and without warning, so I wasn't familiar with the signs of impending internet-community-death. People were frustrated that Syd hadn't posted anything, and a few members even decided to make their own website, where anyone could post articles if they wanted to. This seemed like a great idea at first, and for a time we actually managed to make the site seem busy enough that we were satisfied with our efforts.
Unfortunately, as the weeks and months trickled by, it quickly became apparent that our replacement website would not last either. No one was as talented or engaging a writer as Syd, and people were joining the IRC room less and less frequently. Finally I gave up the chase and consigned myself to drifting once again.
I had started using Reddit around the time I started college at the suggestion of one of my friends from Sydlexia, and this was more than enough to satisfy my desire for new information. It was far more efficient than trying to learn from the guys at Sydlexia, and for a little while I was okay with it as a replacement for my now gone community. Unfortunately it lacked the essential element of individuals coming together to talk on a personal level; Reddit is far too big for that sort of effort. As a result I felt vaguely unsatisfied with my time on Reddit, as useful as it was. This changed once again in February of 2014 with the miracle that was Twitch Plays Pokemon, or TPP.
TPP was one of those things that you had to witness to understand completely. It seemed to pop out of nowhere; one day absolutely nothing, and then by chance you learned about it from a news post or word of mouth. For those who aren't familiar, Twitch Plays Pokemon was an event held on the streaming services website Twitch, where the owner of the stream set up a game of Pokemon Red version on an emulator. Rather than playing it themselves, they made it so that Twitch viewers watching the channel would be able to input commands for the game and play it themselves. With a few people this is a relatively straightforward process, but the stream rocketed up to several thousand people very quickly. The game became a manic, anarchic and frenzied process—thousands of people vied for control to go where they wanted or accomplish certain objectives. What would be simplistic and straightforward for someone playing normally became nightmarishly difficult to accomplish. Yet, despite this incredible confusion and overall frustrating format it became an object of fascination and a widely celebrated internet phenomenon.
I was very lucky and managed to join in on TPP Red on the second day. For my first time watching I was content to participate with everyone else, inputting commands and trying to generally progress the game as normal. However, I was still missing that community feel and decided to check out the dedicated subreddit during the more boring hours. In doing so I discovered that the moderators of the subreddit were looking for people willing to report on the progression of the game through a Reddit Live Thread, where anyone looking at the live thread would immediately be notified of updates. I happened to be available at times they needed and was greatly enjoying the process so I applied to help and was quickly accepted as a live updater.
TPP Red continued for a total of almost 17 days, and the level of energy involved only ever seemed to increase dramatically. Every success made more people join, which made the next goal even harder to achieve. Many people thought we would never complete the game, and some pretty incredible events we would never have expected to pull off only served to stir an already frenzied crowd. Eventually we did complete the game, and the question of what would happen next immediately came up: if the streamer decided to do more, we would stick around right?
Of course, we decided to do so. I became a moderator for the subreddit, at its peak boasting a membership count of over 100,000. I live updated regularly for the next 3 games, greatly enjoying my time with the community and involving myself in the affairs of the people playing the game. However, by the end of the Platinum run the symptoms of community death were appearing once again; I could see people talking less and less or debating the same points ad nauseum. The reasons this happened so quickly are difficult to describe exactly, and I won't go to great lengths to try. Suffice to say the community was dying, and I could see it coming from a mile away. Eventually I renounced my modship, only occasionally coming back when asked to live update on special occasions.
Once again, I was homeless, so to speak, and I was rather upset about it. It felt like every community I was a part of would eventually fade away, and I would be stuck forever trying to find another one until it too failed. With this I went back to reading Homestuck, whose community I had avoided getting into up to this point for various unimportant reasons. My involvement in that regard remained largely unchanged for several years, from 2012 up to the tail end of 2016. I will now describe my involvement with the Homestuck community at length, and to a lesser degree Homestuck itself.
Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic started in 2009 by Andrew Hussie, multimedia meaning it's not just an ordinary webcomic with pictures and text bubbles and the like. It often incorporates other types of media--music and animation, sometimes even small games--in an attempt to further the narrative of the story. It updated in a serial format stylized like a text adventure game, and is about four kids who play a game together on the internet. At the risk of writing a synopsis, instead I urge you to go read it for yourself. It's confusing and perhaps hard to like at first, but even so I feel like it's worth the read.
I started reading Homestuck at the tail end of 2012 in October or so, I had just begun college and was pointed towards the comic by a friend. I was immediately taken with the style and subject matter of the story; with my history of engaging in online discussions with people from around the world, I felt like it was something I could immediately relate to. I had always wanted to meet up with people I had met on the internet and have a good time together, so why wouldn't I enjoy such a story?
Ironically, despite my preferences in online community and the very nature of the story, I was not interested in trying to interact with people who were also interested in Homestuck, at least not at first. There were some occasions I tried to do so, but they were either half-hearted or outright not what I was looking for, such as a brief stint on Tumblr looking at dedicated blogs (a decision I still lament to some degree). Occasionally I would go to a con in the area and I even became friends with a group of people in my geographical area who were really into the comic.
It was nice to have such people to talk to, and I still remember my time spent with them fondly. Unfortunately, I'm an awkward person in real life and socializing in a context like that exhausts me very quickly--I didn't meet up with them terribly often. There also wasn't much room to speak with them online because they were typically busy, so it wasn't as satisfying as the Sydlexia community had been. I was more or less content in this, because I had other things to focus on anyway such as surviving college.
I went through four years for the most part like this, casually engaging in the Homestuck community if at all, mostly just focusing on doing my school work or actually working. Homestuck itself was experiencing some extremely big gaps in the serial format; it went an entire year without any updates at all from October 16th of 2013 to October 17th of 2014, and then experienced numerous halts and stutters from there to the end. By the beginning of 2016, it was clear that the comic was drawing to a close. There were faint rumblings that even I in my isolated state was not immune to—this giant of a story was approaching its end.
All too soon its anniversary approached again, and the long awaited time struck: the comic ended on April 13th of 2016, not with a bang but a whimper. The supposedly final page was a 9 minute long animation rendered beautifully, but with a subpar treatment of the story. The most succinct way I can describe this was a hesitant disappointment; the feeling I can distinctly recall the most was a simple “Wait, was that it?” I almost felt guilty for even letting those words cross my mind, because the quality of the animation was far superior to anything else seen in the comic. However, my feelings were very swiftly and completely echoed across the few affiliated places I did bother to keep up with at that point. The dedicated subreddit in particular was in absolute disbelief; the animation, again, was superb, but the story had been completely washed out and effectively destroyed. Shocked disbelief pervaded, and eventually outrage. People were not happy.
Intrigued and pleased at seeing my sentiments in so many others, I decided to look into it further. I started participating on the subreddit a little more, but even so I still remained distant. It wasn't until the very end of October 2016 that I decided to take a leap and clicked on the invite link to the Discord server that this journal is about.
My first impression of the place immediately reminded me of the Sydlexia IRC. It was a decidedly public place where people talked to each other casually in real time, surely a sight for my sore eyes. I was quiet at the beginning, not sure how to participate appropriately. My doubts were assuaged by various people, and especially by the then regular user Toast.
Toast was an older member of the server, which had been established in February of 2016. There was a lot of history in the place despite its relative youth; I was directly exposed to the massive amount of history in a sudden flurry one night, when other regulars who had since stopped using the server came back and reminisced about various events that had occurred earlier in the year. This was the sort of thing I enjoyed so greatly about the Sydlexia IRC, the incredible wealth of in jokes and camaraderie. Naturally I began trying to participate more, and Toast was kind enough to direct me to #mspa-literature, where I started talking far more often. I quickly became recognized by people in the server, including its owner and other mods.
As one of the older people on the server (being 22 at the time of writing where most people are teenagers), I developed a reputation for having comparatively good opinions and being a fairly stable individual. I would like to think that my input on all manner of topics was valued, and I tried my best to refrain from speaking unless I had something meaningful to say. This process continued undisturbed for a few months; the new year came and by that time I felt I had familiarized myself enough with the community that I could consider myself an actual part of it.
Additionally, the server itself was experiencing some growing pains. When I joined the server was around 6000 people in size, and it had grown considerably by the time 2017 rolled around, reaching 6500 and then some. In light of this and in preparation for the highly anticipated release of the Homestuck-associated game Hiveswap, which was slated for a January release, the owner of both the Discord server and the affiliated subreddit Makin revealed upcoming moderator applications.
Given my history with TPP and my position as an older person on the server with more or less respectable opinions, I decided to give it a shot and apply. I figured the worst that could happen was that I wouldn't be accepted, and if not then nothing would change. No big deal. As things go I was not accepted as a moderator because of my lack of activity on the subreddit, which was fine. I continued as normal, disappointed but otherwise unaffected. However, the increase in numbers had drawn the attention of an assortment of people who wanted to get a rise out of the members of the community, and we started experiencing very frequent raids from outsiders.
There was the space of a few weeks where it seemed every single day had its raiders. All manner of porn, gore, and other disturbing imagery would be spammed by people joining en masse to try and drive users away from the server. Eventually it was clear this was taking its toll on the moderator team; even despite the new addition from the recent modship applications, frustration was mounting over the constant attacks the server was experiencing. As a result, Makin reached out to me on the 28th of January 2017 and said, “would you still like to be a moderator?”
As one can see, I said yes. Since then I've spent months trying my best to contribute positively and keep things running as smoothly as possible. A lot of things have changed in the server, and I came to the startling realization that I don't actually remember many of the things that have amused or frustrated me so greatly. As such, here I am writing this journal.
There's a high likelihood that I'll forget or otherwise stop bothering to write this at some point in the future. As it is, I suppose I would like to chronicle the happenings of this place to my best effort; I enjoy being a member of this community and participating in it, and I think the people involved in it are a colorful and interesting sort. The occurrences in this server have managed to make me feel a wide variety of emotions, ranging from incredible laughter to sincere anger to deep comfort. As such it has managed to affect me on a personal level and leave a significant impression; it deserves to be recorded and remembered, by myself if nothing else.
Based on my previous experiences with internet communities I'm sure it is fated not to last, but unlike my previous online homes I will not let this opportunity go to waste. I feel personally compelled to preserve as much of this culture and feeling as I can, while I am still able.
I hope the day this place ceases to exist is a long, long time coming yet, if ever. Help it be so, whoever may be looking at this.
Makin
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbW5sxyu9bU&feature=youtu.be&t=20
2 Sad!
3 lol this casual can only see SEVEN hidden channels