You don't know me and I don't know you

Let's share thoughts about Serverstuck

[srvr-confession]

Serverstuck confession channel (Not affiliated with Serverstuck)

Rules:

Anonymous Only, non-anon asks will be resend as anon

Asks have to be about anything you think about Serverstuck (the server AND the TTRPG module) that you cannot confess off-anon

Do not add names in the asks, keep information regarding people and yourself as minimum as possible

To make this very clear: this isn't a hate blog.

List of evidence compilation: Part 1 (OG) / Part 2

- Mod Anonymous

[srvr-confession]

Personal Confession

The fact that in the module, human on Green Moon is stuck in 2013-2014 trends and technologies despite having access to Alternian trend and technologies through the SBURB techs the human has baffles me.

-ModAnon

[srvr-confession]

I only really lurk in the server for updates, so I cannot speak on any mod behavior but as someone who played Subgrubs and Snazzards for a year long campaign the system just... Isn't very good. I don't think they play test anything and it really shows. It's not the end of the world because the developers are doing this for free, but it just sucks that it's the only Alternia based TTRPG as all the other ones focus on Sburb.

Turns take forever, especially if you play at higher levels. This even happens over VC because there's so many moves and passives that apply to so many different things. Most of the time that we'd play we'd shuffle through our character sheets trying to find things because someone remembered they have a resistance to some certain type of move. Most of the time it didn't even matter!

Then there's all the mechanics that are basically dead weight. None of my group ever used downtime or hivecrafting. Unless you picked a tree that revolved around items it was just best to throw a bunch of healing items on there and call things a day. We tried dealing with vehicles since one of our players had a mech but we ended up learning it's better to just not to since it only really mattered for the mech guy.

And finally the most cardinal sin of the system is just that it wasn't all that fun to play. According to my DM, balancing was a bit of a nightmare as there was very little guidance in the book about encounter building. What was there didn't seem to be play tested as encounters could be cheesed so easily. It would either be a terrible time for us the players or the DM as one side would just steam roll the other and everyone would just feel bad about it. My DM admitted to having completely homebrew a lot of things just so he wouldn't feel miserable during encounters. Eventually we've just abandoned ship and are now trying to reflavor other systems because the amount of effort wasn't worth it.

I've been keeping my eye on their development for the past 2 years now and do have a lot of hopes for 7e, they're removing a lot of the extra mechanics I've never seen anyone use. Even then I've noticed a bunch of new mechanics popping up as they try to rework the system from scratch. Just this 4/13 they announced another template that doesn't have any origins in Homestuck or the trees they're scrapping. I think 7e has been taking so long because it's trapped in the dev's ecosystem and hasn't been touched by any fresh perspectives. It's being bogged down by insane feature creep and if it ever does actually come out I don't think it'll be worth it as it'll be stunted by dev tunnel vision on the project.

They recently made a dev blog which I do think is a step in the right direction. However it hasn't gotten down to the nitty gritty of what mechanics they're making out in the open where their fanbase can comment on it. I want this project to be good so badly as it's the only TTRPG that focuses on trolls as a society, but I don't think things are going to shake out that way. The dev team's MO seems to be release their work and fix it after the player base breaks it. I would really like to see them interact with their community more and ask for feedback but seeing some of the other posts on here I doubt it's going to happen.

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[srvr-confession]

the mods are not your friends. they say they are if you're a nonproblematic member who is active, but they are not. they will drop you the second they find a "valid" reason to do so, and before that, they were most likely gossiping about you behind your back long before they ever found an excuse to get rid of you. if they hate you enough, you become the next hot gossip. otherwise your name is mud and they never want to acknowledge you were there at all.

if you do something to annoy them you will be talked about. they will do it. they will hate you behind closed doors. they will be elated when you cross their moral threshold because they wanted nothing more than to be rid of you. you could consider yourself close friends with someone who hates your fucking guts.

and they will pretend to be upset when they ban you. distraught that you forced their hand because you were a crucial, active member in their community, destroyed emotionally that you would dare to become a 'danger' to the minors that they claim to care so much about.

then they will tear you apart in your absence.

because they never actually liked you.

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[darkserverstuck]

The Case of the Favorite Proshipper

Let's put it front and center, shall we? The images below show the owner of Serverstuck admitting he protected a known proshipper from being banned, because the proshipper was his friend.

The proship subject had a long and storied history within Serverstuck, including briefly being a moderator, and briefly being banned in the past. (Mentioned in the owner's last message in the first image.) Explaining the details of that drama is entirely outside of the scope of this post—not to mention it is old—so, that'll be a story for another time.

Here is the ban message of the proship user:

As stated in the ban message, the subject had a history of behaving inappropriately towards minor members of the community. At the time, Serverstuck allowed users as young as 13 to join. The following screenshot shows that the age minimum was not raised until 2023.

The subject would have been 29 or 30 at the time of their ban. This is their intro, showing their age and the date sent:

Though the following screenshot was taken after the ban, it serves as an example of the kind of behavior the subject was displaying. The user who received this message would have been 16 or 17, while the subject would have been 30 or 31. The user went by the nickname "Dima" at the time. This was in a private message. The fact that this screenshot was taken after the ban also reveals that the subject was resistant to change, even after the ban.

Besides knowingly protecting a proshipper, which should have been grounds for a ban based on Serverstuck's rules, the owner also willingly gave a predatory subject many chances to improve their behavior. Had the subject not been friends of the owner, they would not have been given so many chances.

[srvr-confession]

If anyone has evidence of the owner of Serverstuck and the team behind the server being hypocrites behind the scene or right in the server channels itself, please send screenshots (with context) to my inbox.

I won't post it directly in this blog but I will put it in the Imgur compilation instead to keep it 100% anonymous.

[srvr-confession]

wow, talk about a blast from the past! i haven't thought of this server in years, so to see this popping off again is shocking.

anyway, after a look through the recent confessions all i can say is holy shit?? adult mods are encouraging CHILDREN to cyberstalk NSFW blogs?? that *IS* grooming, that needs to be reported- and i don't mean evidence posted onto some nothing blog for online drama(no offense), i mean evidence sent to actual authority figures. these are serious child predators hiding under the anti label to pose as safe adults to these children.

also seeing the 16+ signage being removed from the current ads i saw with a brief poking around and old ads being wiped off the internet is ALARMING.

someone on the mod team must like to prey on genuinely young kids for that to be happening. actually sickening.

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[darkserverstuck]

In 2023, the Requiem Café in Anaheim hosted a Homestuck collaboration event. The Serverstuck mod team chose to take advantage of this opportunity to do some in person advertising at the event. They pasted physical posters nearby the Café.

The poster included no information about the fact that Serverstuck is unfriendly to proshippers. There was also no information in the server's rules at the time that prohibited proshippers from participating in the community, just a Blacklist channel that contained a list of topics that weren't allowed to be roleplayed or talked about in the server. The only way anyone could have known that Serverstuck wasn't friendly to proshippers was if they visited their Tumblr, where this banner was present under some posts:

Conveniently, the Tumblr isn't mentioned in the poster, or anywhere in the Serverstuck rules at the time of writing. You have to go out of your way to look for it.

Several members joined the server as a result of seeing this poster, including the subjects of this post. One of the subjects posted a commission ad that briefly mentioned they were willing to draw Dead Dove content. (This ad has since been deleted, so no receipts here.) This prompted the Serverstuck mod team to go through the social media of both subjects, and upon discovering "disturbing content" (that is, proship content), they banned both users.

Here is the ban message they posted:

Owner of Serverstuck confirming that the subject's ad is what caused them to look into their social media history:

The Serverstuck mod team then reported the subjects to the Homestuck Anniversary discord server, as well as a handful of local cosplay group discords. This resulted in the subjects being banned from all of the mentioned servers, labeled dangerous predators, and excluded from their real life friend groups.

Here is one of the subject's thoughts on the matter: (Thanks @sals-geno for the screenshots)

"I posted my commission sheet (with permission from the mods) because I needed money, and on my commission sheet it briefly mentions I am OK doing Dead Dove and NSFW commissions. it was only mentioned, didn't show anything explicit. I only accept commissions from adults regardless of rating. They pulled me aside and said it was "unacceptable" that I am ok taking dead dove commissions and that they were banning me (and by extension my partner) from the server. They then went around and to all the cosplay groups we were also in since there was a lot of overlap due to an IRL event, and we got banned from all of those servers as well. I will note at this time I accepted a single commission from a minor, but it was due to an IRL circumstance. We were at an event and I was short on cash, and he was the only person around who had any. He offered to help me pay for something if I drew him something in return, and I agreed."

TL;DR: Serverstuck's false advertising and subsequent cyberstalking and defaming of a "dangerous" pair of users led to real life consequences for the users. All this, because the mod team did not like that they were posting Dead Dove content on social media accounts unassociated with their activity in Serverstuck.

Additional: Less than a month later, they formally added "proship content" to the blacklist. Yes, that's really what it says, and yes, this is really how they chose to announce it.

A bit odd that they would insult the reading comprehension of proshippers, given the fact that putting "proship content not allowed" on the Blacklist still isn't an actual statement explicitly barring proshippers from participating in the community.

[srvr-confession]

I saved the online version of the poster 3 years ago and now just noticed the one detail difference now that the physical photo of the poster is here

-ModAnon

[srvr-confession]

Honestly if people have evidence of the shitty things mods have done they should just make a burner and either post it here on Tumblr or in the server itself. It pisses me off so bad that there's a bunch of these gullible kids who put the losers in the mod team on a pedestal as they get taken advantage of. Even if the evidence doesn't implode the server I think it'd at least do some good in making people wake up and realize they don't need to be stroking a bunch of insecure people's egos but hunting down users who did nothing wrong.

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[srvr-confession]

Can I ask why this account no longer tags its posts as #serverstuck? I get avoiding drama but ngl serverstuck is such an incompetent that I don't think you should have to scroll very far to find that out when searching their tag. Their bad behavior ought to come back to bite them.

The tag is THAT dead now??? I'm updating some of the confessions now

-ModAnon

[srvr-confession]

Lowkey, I fucking hate how the mods don’t take bad individuals seriously at all. These disgusting creeps keep roaming around a Discord server meant for users 13+ (at minimum, since that’s how the server is labeled), and incident after incident keeps happening where minors get harassed, or worse, groomed by these individuals until it’s too late.

I know people there who’ve personally gone through that experience, and they basically got ghosted by the mods. The mods didn’t do shit.

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[This might refer to a different server based on another anon ask -ModAnon]

[srvr-confession]

They used to use an anon-note bot that was actually anonymous. They've switched to a custom bot since then, that isn't actually anonymous since it's maintained by some members of their team, who can and do check to see who sent an anon-note. This is very easy to test: Join on an alt, dm them even the slightest criticism, and watch as your account is magically banned without a word!

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[srvr-confession]

if the server still has the bot they use for anonymous reports, you can very easily make it post elsewhere on your behalf. if you wanna expose them you can do it

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[srvr-confession]

i see yall talkin bout serverstuck havin a monopoly on homestuck rp and allat but nothins stopping you from just making yo own damn place for it. like literally if theres this many people who have issues with it why not make ur own space. improve on it, pick up a pen

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[srvr-confession]

Sorry for having a full conversation in your ask box (anon from last-last ask) but yeah major agree with previous post. At the end of the day, Serverstuck is run by people who want to pretend it's still the pandemic and they're all 18 year olds playing in their friend server. I think it explains the disconnect the server has right now running an arc for humans when literally no one in there is roleplaying humans in the fantroll rp server. A human arc is happening because that's what the mod friend group wants to RP, what the userbase wants be damned. The mod team to me didn't read as people who set out to have a hard stance on anti vs proship but just ended up extremely anti because it served them well. As literally every anon here has said, so many mods have side blogs with proship content. They use anti morality policing culture just to cut out people they never liked in the first place.

I don't think serverstuck is going to die from scandal but more a depressing long running MMO death. Still running after existing for 10+ years with a dwindling loyalist player base and management completely out of touch with what said players want. In some ways it's even more sad than that because at least for an MMO the reason people still run those is to collect a paycheck. Serverstuck mods are still running this for the clout of the 16 year old yes men they've surrounded themselves with.

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[srvr-confession]

@ last ask yeah you said it better than i could

i wish the owners would just focus on shit they're actually good at like dwr instead of trying to maintain a community, because atp you could entrust the server with a 16 year old and it'd go over more smoothly than it is going currently

s2 was started as a small server for a group of friends, and since then its spiraled into a huge community of nearly 1000 people. obviously only a tiny fraction of those people are actually participating in the rp but idk. i feel like the mod team has spent the past 7 years refusing to acknowledge the fact that they now lead a large community that has cornered the market of a subsection of a very large fandom. they have presence and power, and instead of choosing to use that responsibly, they continue treating s2 like its the same friend group rp it was in 2018.

i get wanting to have your own little server for just your friends that is tailored specifically to your tastes. and i get the fact that growth to this scale can't be predicted reliably, but like... - they never had to open their server to the public, or keep it open indefinitely - they could just make their own space for playing their touys instead of doing whatever tf this is - i and many of the mods, on several occasions, did the exact thing in the previous point, and they never went anywhere. so idfk

i feel like s2 has long since outlived its usefulness to its own community anyway. i stopped being active because i had life stuff going on, but every time i tried to get involved again, i had the hardest time because the server had just shifted in a direction that i didn't find fun. the storylines weren't intriguing, the activity wasn't there, everyone seemed less excited, and the community itself had really started to suck by that point seeing as they were several generations deep in this moralistic echo chamber opinion inbreeding where the primary personality trait of 3 out of every 4 guys is being an anti. there were many other factors contributing to my experience not being fun anymore, but the decline in the quality of the rp and the community is an aspect that i'd be a fool to leave out

i felt like i was watching it die then, and i still feel the same way now. it's just going out slowly. maybe there will be some huge scandal when all of their dirt gets released. maybe the activity will just peter out. the mod team are close friends whose real lives are bound up in each other so i don't know if my top bet would go to the server dying from an internal drama or the team collapsing in on itself... but it's not like their team members hesitate to pull the trigger on one another, and at least a few of them are resting on complex webs of lies that could come undone at any moment

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[srvr-confession]

I think the issue with serverstuck is less that it's user base blindly follows the mod team (although that is a factor) and more that users have faith that people who are 30 years old won't be wildly incompetent. I think the owners of the server would be tolerable people in literally any other scenario but they are the worst two possible people to be running a server. One has skin as thick as paper, getting really upset when they're criticized or if someone is doing something they see as icky. The other has a reddit gamer type personality being kinda a dick to the userbase while also never being active.

The cycle things seem to fall into is people criticize the mod team or owner 1 and they put on a whole I'm just an uwu softie be nice to me act. Then owner 2 comes out of the woodwork after being MIA for months to be passive aggressive and call people idiots. If it's not owner 2, then it's their little gaggle of mod mean girls who jump a user or start talking behind a "problem user" behind their back.

These people are 30 year olds who are engaged and have homes together but they run some niche Homestuck server like it's the highschool cafeteria. I steered clear of this blog for the longest time but I genuinely feel that mod team will never take on feedback in a meaningful way. If you have critiques, it's just inviting the mod team to speak behind your back because you dared raise your voice to pookie little server owner. The cyber stalking and anti ship moral panic isn't about being right, it's a convenient way to get rid of "problem users" so the owners don't have to reflect on their shitty childish behavior.

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