i keep seeing people in the tags of the "symptoms of a creative player" post who are clearly confused or asking for someone to elaborate (and also seeing people act like dsmp "came first" is making me insane) so here's a brief timeline on early-ish mineblr
after being widely regarded as cringe for a few years, minecraft starts getting traction again in small corners of the internet, namely on tumblr and reddit. around late 2018 (nov/dec), it starts catching my eye.
early 2019 (jan/march-ish?), mineblr suddenly explodes in popularity. herobrine was universally gay and trans, [identity]-[block] urls were everywhere, gay-herobrine and gay-slime were sorta the "faces" of the community so to speak, everyone used mizunos 16 and sildurs vibrant shaders, cute cluttered cottages were all the rage, and thicc herobrine ran rampant. notch was widely hated, and the phrase "miku made minecraft" was common.
in february 2019 i made a post pointing out an amusing word choice on herobrine's wiki page, which serves as a good representation of mineblr at the time. "gay icon herobrine", gay-slime adding on, etc etc
(also at one point everyone was showing off their human!enderdragon design and my dash was 80% hot milfs 🤤 but i don't remember when exactly this was)
shortly after the mineblr boom, the hermitcraft community, which had been quietly trucking along for years, suddenly exploded as well. i feel like hermitblr was actually noticeably bigger than mineblr at some point, but i'm not entirely sure. the communities overlapped a lot and co-existed mostly peacefully.
(there was also a lot of weird drama within hermitblr but we're not getting into that right now)
then it was summer 2019, and the support for minecraft that had been quietly building finally reached the public eye once more. while tumblr, reddit, and ole reliable hermitcraft had been laying the foundation for a minecraft renaissance, minecraft monday and smplive were the catalyst for it.
just to set the record straight, pewdiepie had nothing to do with it and i will maul you with my teeth if you even insinuate otherwise. he started playing minecraft WELL after it had become popular again, BECAUSE it was popular again and he knew it'd get him views. the most he did was provide a springboard for dream to blow up around this time using his name.
one of the posts i made during this time (june 2019) did well enough for a screenshot to be reposted to reddit and do well there too. if you've ever seen a "minecraft gothic" post floating around, that's me! hi!!
hermitblr had shrunk by now, partially due to the drama mentioned earlier, and smpblr (smplive tumblr) bloomed out of the husk that remained. iirc there was a weird sorta "hierarchy" where smpblr acted like they were better than hermitblr and smptwt acted like they were better than smpblr? i don't really remember and don't really care. mineblr exploded once more as more and more people were drawn back to minecraft, and as ex-hermitblrs returned to their roots.
by fall 2019 things were winding down. popular users were less active, minecraft monday and smpl were coming to a close, hermitblr's weird drama had infected smpblr which drove some people out, etc etc. minecraft was firmly popular across the internet once more, and mineblr was still alive and kicking (and probably always will be) but the near-frenetic energy and community of its early days was about spent.
and then dsmp caught the internet's attention in mid 2020. mineblr's "golden age" and everything that happened in it was almost a year before that. respect your elders or whatever
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