SimplyPlural alternative: Twine
Since the announcement of the discontinuation of SimplyPlural, I've started using Twine to create my own database of the members of my system. However, I haven't seen anyone talk about Twine as an alternative to SimplyPlural or similar services, so under the cut, I'm going to talk about that.
TLDR - Twine is a text-based game engine that requires no real technical knowledge to use and that, among other things, can be used to create private databases of information. This includes information about your system, which, if desired, can be copypasted from your SimplyPlural descriptions and/or filled in using templates formerly meant for SimplyPlural. Twine is not an app and is yours to use as long as it's on your computer, so once you make your database, it's not going anywhere.
---
Firstly, an introduction to what Twine is. It's a free computer program used to create interactive fiction. It's usually thought of as a game engine because text-based games are one of the most common uses for Twine. One well-known developer of Twine games is Porpentine, whose Twine games can vary in how much they feel like a story versus how much they feel like a game. Some of them are more mechanics driven, and some of them are like reading a story where you click on the words to turn the page.
Ever since an event in our life last year that caused us to require more extensive documentation of our system, my system has been using Twine to create private databases of information for our system. Some of it is the same basic information about our system (e.g. its origins and functions) that we have available on our Neocities site. However, some of the information we've put in our databases is more personal, e.g. descriptions of our trauma history written out for headmates who did not know about these events from personal memory.
When SimplyPlural announced its discontinuation, I immediately understood that relying on an externally-created and hosted app to store all my information about my system was not the way to go. While I don't fault anybody for relying on apps like SimplyPlural to document all their important information, I also now understand that those apps just aren't reliable, and they can go away at a moment's notice.
Twine, on the other hand, is not an app. It is a free computer program that, once you download it, it's on your computer unless you delete it. There is no risk that I'm aware of that Twine will be taken off the internet anytime soon, but even if it were, you would still be able to create things with it if you had Twine on your computer.
This is why I see Twine as the most viable alternative for creating a headmate database, because I simply do not trust available or promised apps. I believe they are too ephemeral and are too easily taken away. At this point, I only trust the resources I create for myself. However, as long as I have Twine installed, that includes private resources created with Twine.
It's true you can't code Twine on your phone (as far as I know, anyway), but it is possible to run Twine programs on your phone, e.g. on a web browser hosting the javascript. You can also get a Twine game's file on your phone by emailing it to yourself and downloading it. This means you'd have to update the file every time you updated the version on your computer, but if your system doesn't change very often, this could still be useful.
Furthermore, cell phones are just not that important to my system, and we prefer to type lengthy and detailed information on the computer, so the lack of a mobile equivalent isn't really a big deal to us.
---
If you've read this far, I'm going to assume you are interested enough to develop a basic understanding of Twine on your own. Therefore, I will not explain in this post how to do every single thing in Twine, especially since a lot of what you can do in Twine just isn't needed for these purposes.
I will assume, for the purposes of this guide, that you can learn how to create pages, link pages, and use as much HTML as would be necessary to achieve your desired results in Twine. You can also use CSS to customize how the pages look, but this is not as important to setting up or recording the actual information you will be using your system database for.
Here are some screenshots of my Twine workspace to show you how the database is set up. (Voidelia is the planet/country my headspace is set on/in, hence some of the pages' names and phrasing.)
As you can see, what I've done is I've created a page for the different amnesia groups (West/East/Central Voidelia) and structures (sidesystems and subsystems, more to be added) within the system, then pages for all the individual headmates, which I've arranged into alphabetical groups in the workspace.
The headmate pages are listed and linked on the alphabetical list, on the regional list (depending on what structure they're in), and eventually on a qualitative list. Some of them also link to each other (e.g. for in-system relationships).
I am going to work on making a qualitative database (the first page of which can be seen in the first screenshot) where I list things like who has what gender, who has which of our disorders, who follows what religion, etc.
This is what the alphabetical list looks like when I run the database (i.e. click "play" in the "build" toolbar; I'm going to include custom CSS later but that's not as important as getting all the pages in).
I've put stars next to all the names because that way, I can go "CTRL+F" for that character while looking on the page and easily find the number of headmates who are on that page.
When the database is more complete (it's still a work in progress because my system is very large), I will include a part on this page saying "population: [however many headmates are on the page]", same with the sidesystem pages and qualitative pages, and put in the number of entries there are on that page. That way, I won't have to run CTRL+F every time, but being able to do that is how I'm able to be sure of the numbers in the first place.
---
As for what the headmate pages and database entries themselves look like or contain, well, that depends on what information you find helpful. However, any template you can use on PluralKit, you can copypaste into a Twine page and use as-is. Some SimplyPlural templates might be more complex, but only if they have images, and it's not hard to add an image in Twine.
To give an example, this is what my template looks like in the editor versus when I run the database. "Roleics" is something we coined, that field is for listing things that have to do with the headmate's role. "Jobs" are related to but separate from "roles" for us. As you can see, you can include basically anything, including things that would be too personal to put on a public database like a Neocities site.
These are intended to divide sections for lengthier notes about the headmates. For example, notes about their roles, ways in which our systemwide dysfunctions are expressed in them, what their gender/etc. identities are or are like, and what they remember of their lives from their timelines or the innerworld.
While you need HTML for things like bolding words or centering headers, you don't need it to make unicode or emojis display properly, so it's easy to decorate the template or pages you use for a Twine page.
---
In addition to using Twine to keep a database of individual headmates, you can also use it to keep a database of information about sidesystems, amnesia groups, layers, or really anything in or about your system.
We have another private database called The Citizen's Guide to Voidelia that was created for newly-recovered amnesiac headmates to get them up to speed with our life as we've lived it (as some of them were from our childhood). I will not include screenshots because of how personal the information is, but if you make a private database of your individual headmates, you can also include pages of useful information for amnesiac members of the system, or create a separate database with that information.
While this is a little more complex than everything I've described so far, you can make interactive flowcharts in Twine (e.g. "You feel like shit"). This could be useful for systems in helping them determine who is fronting, remembering to take care of themselves, making decisions, or anything else that a flowchart would be useful for.
This project is on the back burner for now, but I eventually want to create a "headmate generator" in Twine - similar to the "build-a-headmate" templates you find on Tumblr, but it'll randomly generate items for the fields based on a database I write down myself in the game engine. It's doable in Twine, it's just more tedious and time consuming than I've had the energy for. I would recommend looking into how to generate random variables in whatever language of Twine you're using if that's something you want to pursue.
While logging front isn't very important for my system, you could use a Twine database to do that the same way you would in your notes app or a pen and paper logbook. You could make a new page for every day and link these pages on a chronological list, like a digital journal.
---
Everything I've talked about has to do with a Twine database as a private resource, but it's possible to make your database public if you want, since you can post any file made in Twine online.
If you made a database like this and wanted to make it public, I would recommend having a Neocities for your system and making a page where the Javascript for the game runs on a certain page. You can also make it available to download from your personal site.
I have used files exported from Twine to share some of my databases with my therapist and my close friends. However, I personally prefer my public and private databases to be separate, so my Neocities has no connection to any of the Twine databases I've made.
---
While apps like SimplyPlural are nice to have, the fact of the matter is that systems have existed before them, and systems have been using their own private methods for logging information about themselves long before there were dedicated apps for such things.
My system prefers to rely on third-party apps as little as possible, due to the temporary nature of all technology. However, a game engine like Twine is yours to use however you want once you download it. No one else is going to do anything with the data you enter in it unless you make it public.
If Twine disappeared from the internet tomorrow, I would still be able to use the copy of it on my computer to maintain and make databases for my system, and since its existence doesn't depend on external servers, someone could theoretically continue to distribute Twine unofficially as abandonware if that happened.
However, there's no reason to think Twine is going anywhere soon, these are just concerns I have with most SimplyPlural alternatives that just don't apply to Twine.
---
I know this was a very long post, but since I haven't seen anybody talk about using Twine to make a database of their system, I don't know if this use of the engine for these purposes is very intuitive, so I wanted to explain everything you would need to know to make such a thing short of basic info on how to use Twine!
For more info on how to use Twine, check their website, which has documentation on how to use the different languages that Twine has. My system prefers to use Sugarcube 2 due to preferring the presence of the sidebar it has, but I don't think any language would be better or worse for a project like this.
TLDR - Twine can be used as a replacement for the information-storing functions of SimplyPlural, as well as other functions that would be useful for systems. If you download it onto your computer, it's not going anywhere, so a self-coded Twine database is probably the safest and most private bet for storing information about your system.
