TotalFreedom: A Private Freedom Server

[videogamesm12]

TotalFreedom as a Minecraft server is turning 16 years old this year. Throughout its lifecycle, it has faced many challenges, crisises, and disasters in pretty much every single way. One could even write a book about its whole history, and it still probably wouldn't capture the full picture. It has evolved considerably from its roots as an anarchy server into a freebuild server that tries to maximize player freedoms where possible.

Community toxicity and its corrosive nature towards active management has plagued TotalFreedom for many, many years. It very likely caused Mark to hand ownership over to Windows in 2017, Windows to initially disappear in late 2018/early 2019, Seth deleting the server in late 2020 during a mental breakdown, Ryan nearly killing the server in late 2021, Ryan then actually going forward with it in 2023, and the management of Rebooted killing it in mid-2024. It seems that no matter who I talk to (even regular players), the main issue with TotalFreedom is this community toxicity.

When Rebooted shut down 2 years ago, a major sentiment within management is that some members of the community tend to feel entitled, demanding, and downright abusive when things don't go their way. Whenever we banned prominent members of the community for things that were entirely on them, a dogpile was guaranteed to happen as people would bitch and moan endlessly, sometimes with people even coming out of the woodwork to defend them. This was further demonstrated during the brief anniversary event that happened in November 2024 - we had banned ayunami2000 from the community as we deemed him a liability after his gross mismanagement of a community in regards to child safety and his move to advertise Rebooted in such a community led to us almost getting hit by some of the most aggressive parts of the internet, which we only barely managed to avoid by sheer luck. However, people bitched and moaned anyways because we decided to be vague about why we removed him the community for security reasons.

It's been a few years since then, and now with clearer heads management wants to bring back the server, with a catch: the community needs to change. Management believes that to do this, we need to bend the community to our will and change how we approach a lot of things. While there are some nuanced positions I agree with, there are others that I do not agree with. In this thread, I'm going to outline the direction in which TotalFreedom should move forward should we decide to revive it.

When reading this thread and the solutions laid out for you, I don't want you to bitch and moan. I want you to help come up with realistic, feasible solutions. Complaints won't get us anywhere, but realistic solutions will.

My proposal​

TotalFreedom was built upon the idea of giving players as much freedom as possible. I believe this is a central pillar for any freedom server and we should never deviate from it. However, these freedoms have been abused by malicious actors and there has been a growing need for improved server security for quite some time. However, this sometimes comes at the cost of player freedoms. We have struggled to figure out a good balance for this for as long as the server has existed.

My vision for the next generation of TotalFreedom tries to maximize both freedom and security while reducing toxicity by making it a walled garden that you would have to apply to get in. It would still follow the foundation of the server of granting equal freedoms as every player has the same privileges, but not everyone will be able to be classified as a player. Only those who apply to be whitelisted will be allowed in, and even then this is granted as a privilege, not a guarantee. Ranks would still exist, but would mostly be to deal with more minute cases.

I realize that this is a radical proposes that involves a rather authoritative expansion of a server administration, but bear with me.

How would this be implemented?​

Players will not be able to join the server or engage with the wider community unless they file a special application to be whitelisted. Attempting to join the server anyways will show a message saying that you're not whitelisted and that you need to apply, along with a link to do so. Whether they will be approved or not will depend on decisions made by the Executives. They can approve or deny any application at any time for any reason, and they can also revoke membership at any time if necessary. As a member of the community, you are expected to act civil and to abide by the rules.

How would this benefit us, security-wise?​

As implied in the section above, this model gives management control over who is and isn't allowed on the server. This allows them to vet users and prevent them from entering the community before they cause any disruption or problems. In the event they manage to slip in anyways, they can simply be quietly removed from the whitelist. Anyone deemed suspicious or malicious will not be allowed in. This severely mitigates the problem of malicious assholes like Declan or other potentially troublesome players joining to cause problems. Joining to crash the server or grief becomes a lot more of a headache and time consuming compared to just going elsewhere to grief if you have to apply to get in at all.

We had implemented an idea like this on TotalFreedom on a smaller scale in the past. During the Akefu raids, we temporarily implemented a verification system that all new users had to go through before joining, and whether to allow them or not was entirely at the management's discretion. This was an extremely effective measure that forced the attackers to shift their attention to other less fortified platforms we had. Expanding upon this idea and making it a more permanent whitelist system would improve the server's security.

How would this benefit our freedoms?​

With better control over who is and isn't allowed in the community and the reduction/severe mitigation of malicious actors, the active administration is able to be much more lax and casual as well in their administrative style since they don't have as many people to be paranoid about. With this more relaxed and casual administration style comes looser restrictions on what players are allowed to do with plugins and their components since there's a lower chance of having someone waltz in and abuse these issues.

For example, we have had to block certain Essentials commands because they were being used to bypass tptoggle or could be used to untraceably grief the maps. Keyword: could. Same for some Movecraft features which would just immediately be used to grief shit. This is all thanks to an inherent trust between players and management to not fuck everything up.

How would this benefit the community?​

Making TotalFreedom a walled garden will certainly not be a popular decision, but in my eyes it is truly the only solution to cut down on community toxicity. By controlling who can't be a part of the community, identifying problematic/toxic users, and removing them, we can cut down on community toxicity and introduce a much needed form of quality control. If we deem that you aren't compatible or aren't capable of not being a shithead, you will be removed.

It is thus in everyone's best interest to remain civil, because the alternative is not being a member of the community anymore.

What implication would this have on the staff team?​

The reduction in troublemakers and increased privileges for the common player that this would cause would mean that there's less of an incentive to become an admin. This means that there will be less admins in the team, allowing for an implicit quality over quantity approach to staff. The purpose and strategy of having admins would shift towards a more passive, preventative approach that monitors for potential issues instead of an active approach that looks to enforce the rules.

Because no system is perfect, an admin team will still be necessary to deal with some of the more extraordinary cases or in cases of an emergency, but aside from that the staff team will become a lot more passive and will generally be seen as regular players.

What implication would this have on our public presence?​

Since TotalFreedom has been a public server for so long, shifting to a whitelisted strategy will shift our public presence and appearance from a chaotic, toxic server which can't keep itself to together to an exclusive, lucrative club that runs itself. Exclusivity generates interest, which would make for an interesting marketing campaign should we decide to market it.

Conclusion​

This is a proposal for how to approach a revival of the server, and it's for a quality control system for the community by means of a whitelist. I don't expect it to be very popular, but it's an idea I had while I was working on another blog post.

 

[Luke]

only comment i have is that this won't stop the problem, and if anything it'll increase it. if theyre added via a whitelist then not only will they be in the community they'll also have the added leverage of 'you allowed me in'. if the solution to that is to just remove them from the whitelist again we could just skip the extra step and not have a whitelist to begin with and use the ban system.

it also means older players would struggle to rejoin.

something i said yesterday in the big boye chat is that we need a balance. this method likely works well for servers for friend groups, whereas tf is meant to be ideally accessible. adding a hurdle would help prevent the idiots, but i don't think it's a net positive for the wider community

plus, you'd need a system of approval. if votes are needed then it adds a delay and isnt very welcoming for new players. if its up to an exec then... yeah that's a terrible idea overall lol. what i did on the discord was enable something similar during times where it was needed, i.e. when the granite gooners were mid-raid, i'd enable verification where my team would manually verify each player. i'd support that, but not a blanket whitelist

 

[shdwo]

counter proposal;

keep TF publicly accessible but adopt a genuine zero tolerance policy towards individuals with prior destructive behaviour. oh and perhaps keep staff to players that are above the age of 18 and have a functioning, working brain.

maybe a manual verification at a push if it's needed, as luke said.

 

[videogamesm12]

I think something that should be discussed internally (and maybe already is or has been) is managements stance and desire on wanting to actually grow the community.

Going private is a great idea, if everyone in management is in agreement that TFRR will not have even the slightest focus on trying to grow the community at any significant rate. Because while you might think that making the server whitelisted will generate a sense of exclusivity, I believe (and I suspect some others will as well) that most players, including good, kind, decent players who would fit in well, will simply be turned away by the thought of having to complete some application just to join.

The only solution I see to that would be allowing anyone to join the server, but only allow accepted members to build, chat, or otherwise interact with the server in any meaningful way. Think of it as allowing prospective members the chance to look around and check things out, while still keeping the advantages of not letting them really do anything.

 

[AdaLux]

i agree with shdwo

 

[fionn]

I think there are some practical implications of employing such a system, some of which have already been mentioned. I'll come up with alternative solutions where possible, but my response will focus more on stress-testing the existing suggestions. My primary concern, one that Luke has already mentioned, is consistency: there will need to be established criteria (a checklist?) to ensure fair application across the server. This does two things: removes the availability of an 'unfairness' argument/struggle, and reminds the executives - or whoever will be eventually deciding - of the purpose of the whitelist. If it is a sole executive actor, or a group of executives closer in likeness to friends, it raises another key concern regarding the impartiality of the process, but I'm assuming (hoping) that we have learned from our mistake, and this will be accounted for should this be introduced. Equally, I share a similar concern with the ability to remove players from the community. Important to ensure players aren't removed for just being annoying, but rather if they're identified and agreed upon as being a net harm/nuisance to the server and community on a wider level. Without that distinction, enforcement risks distorting into a form of subjective enforcement, a method which has historically worked very well for us!

Another concern I share is whether such a model is sustainable long-term. TotalFreedom survived on (and struggled with towards the end & with rebooted, iirc) a consistent player base. The empirical model for TotalFreedom consisted of maybe 1 in every 10 sticking around for longer than a year. TotalFreedom, neither by model nor practice, can sustain a player base consistent enough to endure a purely whitelisted model. I can imagine, in 3-4 months, when the hype of TotalFreedom being rebooted has subsided, we return to those pre-shutdown numbers. I'm not sure that TotalFreedom has the demand to justify such time, money, and resources being invested in a private server. A whitelist model only works sustainably if the community can consistently replenish itself, and historically, TotalFreedom has struggled to maintain that kind of long-term retention.

It also then begs the question of what the original purpose of TotalFreedom was? The appeal of the server, what sold it for me and many others, I'm sure, was the sheer freedom provided to you. Whereas if you join 99% of other servers, there is a hardcoded restriction installed within the server, stopping you from doing a particular thing (going into restricted areas, spamming in chat, breaking blocks). What grabbed me was the lack of these hardcoded restrictions with TF. Of course, griefing was prohibited, as was spamming in the chat, but there was a retroactive accountability to it, rather than that same old proactive prevention (most of the time). You were held to direct account, rather than being prevented from ever having done it in the first place. If you are to spend time on a true freedom server (not an anarchy server, the nuance is important, and one I recognise), you are to expect occasional griefing/nuisance. That is the purpose of having an administrative presence on the server, with plugins like WorldGuard making restoration quite simple.

Joining to crash the server or grief becomes a lot more of a headache and time consuming compared to just going elsewhere to grief if you have to apply to get in at all.

Throughout the course of this post, I assumed that the purpose of this whitelisting was more to counteract the inherent toxicity that comes with a community like this, rather than to mitigate low-level disruptive griefers who may arise occasionally. Toxicity is a corrosive problem to any community; griefing (in this context) is a Minecraft-specific problem that can be solved with the administrative presence of the server. While I appreciate that it hasn't been explicitly stated that, it is important that we do not use whitelisting as a prevention for low-level disruption. As I have said above, this is an example of why codifying the particular use case of whitelisting would be vital.

This means that there will be less admins in the team, allowing for an implicit quality over quantity approach to staff.

Should quality not be determined in the application process? I think this is very flawed reasoning, as an increase in applications should not inherently result in a decrease in staff quality. If it does, that indicates a failure in the selection process rather than an issue with the size of the applicant pool.

1. Where you say "... players will not be able to join the server or engage with the wider community unless they file a special application to be whitelisted", will this be enforced on the server, the forum, and Discord? If the answer is as I expect, can somebody be removed from the greater community (i.e., forum & Discord) for a server-side offense? If a whitelisted player commits a low-level disruption offense (the majority of these whitelisted players will still consist of children; it is likely inevitable), will removal from the whitelist act as a replacement for a ban?

2. Following on from that, would temporary whitelist removal be a recognised punitive avenue, or would it be more like a perm-ban system, where 24h bans and such would be an intermediary method of punishment? This distinction matters because it determines whether the whitelist is a moderation tool to be readily used, or similar to the previous permaban system we had.

The pros of imposing these measures: discretionary pre-approval for participation, allowing discretionary expulsion, and broader community control mean a much more pleasant community experience for those involved. The cons risk repurposing TotalFreedom's fundamental freedom model. I understand your argument that it will allow more immediate freedom to those whitelisted, but to prospect players, returning players, and the demographic to which TotalFreedom was previously advertised, the immediate appeal seems to be much weaker.

Of course, repurposing is not inherently bad. I do believe that we need to be clear about what this reboot will entail, and then it needs to be stuck to.

For once, I agree with @shdwo

 

[videogamesm12]

I think there are some practical implications of employing such a system, some of which have already been mentioned. I'll come up with alternative solutions where possible, but my response will focus more on stress-testing the existing suggestions. My primary concern, one that Luke has already mentioned, is consistency: there will need to be established criteria (a checklist?) to ensure fair application across the server. This does two things: removes the availability of an 'unfairness' argument/struggle, and reminds the executives - or whoever will be eventually deciding - of the purpose of the whitelist.

I agree that fair application would need to be imposed for such a system to be successful. I suppose that raises a natural question of what this criteria/checklist would entail. Would it be based on geolocation, intent, or perhaps willingness to integrate into the existing community? I've got no idea. What would be the ideal checklist?

If it is a sole executive actor, or a group of executives closer in likeness to friends, it raises another key concern regarding the impartiality of the process, but I'm assuming (hoping) that we have learned from our mistake, and this will be accounted for should this be introduced. Equally, I share a similar concern with the ability to remove players from the community. Important to ensure players aren't removed for just being annoying, but rather if they're identified and agreed upon as being a net harm/nuisance to the server and community on a wider level. Without that distinction, enforcement risks distorting into a form of subjective enforcement, a method which has historically worked very well for us!

That's also a very good point and I appreciate that you bring up the history of such cases in our context. While you one could make the argument that everyone involved is now an adult and not a teenager (which can't be said for the administrations of the past like the Seth administration, all of whom were idiot teenagers), I'm not going to be the one to make that argument given that maturity is not a solid indicator. The problem is that for some people, such a distinction may not exist or if it is, it's incredibly muddied.

Throughout the course of this post, I assumed that the purpose of this whitelisting was more to counteract the inherent toxicity that comes with a community like this, rather than to mitigate low-level disruptive griefers who may arise occasionally. Toxicity is a corrosive problem to any community; griefing (in this context) is a Minecraft-specific problem that can be solved with the administrative presence of the server. While I appreciate that it hasn't been explicitly stated that, it is important that we do not use whitelisting as a prevention for low-level disruption. As I have said above, this is an example of why codifying the particular use case of whitelisting would be vital.

The point is primarily to counteract toxicity, however I've pointed it out because if such a system is effectively implemented it would inevitably carry the side effect of being used to counteract low level disruption like this because the option is already there in the first place.

It also then begs the question of what the original purpose of TotalFreedom was? The appeal of the server, what sold it for me and many others, I'm sure, was the sheer freedom provided to you. Whereas if you join 99% of other servers, there is a hardcoded restriction installed within the server, stopping you from doing a particular thing (going into restricted areas, spamming in chat, breaking blocks). What grabbed me was the lack of these hardcoded restrictions with TF. Of course, griefing was prohibited, as was spamming in the chat, but there was a retroactive accountability to it, rather than that same old proactive prevention (most of the time). You were held to direct account, rather than being prevented from ever having done it in the first place. If you are to spend time on a true freedom server (not an anarchy server, the nuance is important, and one I recognise), you are to expect occasional griefing/nuisance. That is the purpose of having an administrative presence on the server, with plugins like WorldGuard making restoration quite simple.

The problem with this is that with time, TotalFreedom has gradually shifted its approach of dealing with wrongdoing from retroactively sanctioning users but allowing them to do it to more preventative measures like preventing you from being able to nickname others in the first place via permissions. The reason you were able to do these in the first place was, in my opinion, an unintentional side-effect of granting everyone operator privileges and the extremely hacky way we had to block things back then. When we had to disable, say, a command, we had to manually specify a string in the TotalFreedomMod configuration which would instruct it to block any commands which start with the manually specified string. This system was extremely primitive and it's a miracle it even worked in the first place, however there was no other way to disable it due to the model of the server at the time basically granting everyone permissions to do anything they wanted. We resolved this issue by moving everything to a permissions-based system with TotalFreedom: Rebooted, which massively stabilized everything, but it raised some additional concerns.

Since permissions drastically changed how we could approach allowing users to do certain things, we could now properly restrict much more specific parts of commands and plugins without having to resort to either command blocking or forking the plugin for our own use cases. However, that posed an interesting question: we now have the ability to prevent users from fucking around using /give, /nick, or /warp on other, non-consenting players, but should we? While you may make the argument that yes, we should, because that's the name of the game for a server like this, I would turn that question around: why should we allow players to do things that we will sanction them for? It seems counter productive to technically allow players to do things we don't allow them to do according to the rules. The only reason we did it before was because we simply had no choice given the resources we had. While you may argue that this went against the spirit of the server, the alternative doesn't make logical sense. If I were to nick you "bigloser69" and I got smitten for it despite being implicitly allowed to do it by permissions, the first question that would come to mind is "why can I do it in the first place?"

 

[Panther]

I think there is some context to why this thread was created in the first place and for transparency's sake I want to to discuss some recent events.

Provoking Event: Grant (irix) creates a rebooted TotalFreedom server, tfreedom.org
I was made aware about a month and a half...ish? ago that Grant was working on a new clone of TotalFreedom. I have no stance for or against this, but from what I know about this community I imagine people generally don't want him to run it. I want to remind everyone that we've already seen him do this before. During the window after Ryan shut down the server and before TF-Rebooted was launched, he gathered a community on Discord and essentially started the movement that created TF-Rebooted on his own. Whether it was because of his effort, in spite of his place (then) as the manager of the community, or something else related, the people of this community decided it was a good idea to reboot the server. And then we all know how the rest went. The main thing I'd like to point out is that Grant inflicted a great deal of destruction onto that same reboot he once commandeered. I wasn't active for the whole thing but I remember him constantly raiding the server and wearing people down, the kind of toxic behavior you guys are saying you want to avoid.

When I look at the situation going on right now with Grant's server and the calls from Video and others to re-re-reboot TotalFreedom, I'm getting some serious déjà vu. I find it pretty hard to believe that anything other than his efforts are the primary force behind people going from "just let it die" to having a full blown discussion about rebooting the server again. I'm not saying it's going to play out exactly the same way as it did the last time TF rebooted if the community tries again, but I'm here to make you aware of the force he will have if you do. For those who don't know, he's actually done some technically impressive work on improving the efficiency of the server and he has some smart ideas about how players should be managed. He has good ideas on how to build a community with a cracked-premium hybrid EaglerCraft model. Even if he doesn't act as he did towards this community before, the community will probably have to compete with his reboot if they don't want him to manage it. Everyone can think what they want about that but my two cents is this: it ain't gonna play out in the way you guys want. It's going to be toxic, whether you like it or not.

And when it comes to my recommendation on how to deal with toxcitity within the community, you all already know what it is. Oh boy, here he goes again...yammering about that route. I'll save you the discussion for now, but I still stand by that path because in my opinion just embracing or ignoring the toxicity is far better than fighting against it. If you really care, I talked about it here.

This brings me to my responses to the ideas proposed in the thread. My intent is to be constructive; I hope my discussion helps this community make the right decision and avoid toxicity. I hope as Video said that my responses help come up with a realistic solution, even if that solution is to do nothing. Since absolutely nobody wants to hear my plan for the server for the zillionth time, that leaves me to discuss what's here. I hope this does not come off as "complaining."

Responses

It's been a few years since then, and now with clearer heads management wants to bring back the server, with a catch: the community needs to change.

I ask this: why does management specifically want to bring back the server at this moment? Suddenly feeling nostalgic? Summer break beginning? As I said above, I doubt it. Grant's server seems to have sparked some interest here, and if it has, involving him (even if that means competing against him) isn't a battle I recommend you fight.

My vision for the next generation of TotalFreedom tries to maximize both freedom and security while reducing toxicity by making it a walled garden that you would have to apply to get in. It would still follow the foundation of the server of granting equal freedoms as every player has the same privileges, but not everyone will be able to be classified as a player. Only those who apply to be whitelisted will be allowed in, and even then this is granted as a privilege, not a guarantee. Ranks would still exist, but would mostly be to deal with more minute cases.

If you put a wall around a dumpster fire, it doesn't suddenly become a garden. First of all, the process of deciding who to let in and who to exclude is going to inevitably cause endless squabbling and annoyances. I am 100% certain some person in some group is going to bitch and moan when their buddies aren't whitelisted on the server, or complain it was unfair they got banned or didn't get let in. That will be something that spoils people who otherwise would have been fine to join, making them toxic anyway. Second, I see this as basically removing the gap on the old server between "admins" and "permbanned." That's not necessarily a good thing that reduces toxicity. We already did go through a selection process to select staff members for TotalFreedom. Probably a more rigorous one than what will determine who can and can't simply join the server. I don't think a single person here is willing to say that none of the TF staff were toxic, even in the reboot. Also, admins often went from "admin" to "permbanned" pretty damn quick anyway. Third, what happens if someone with selection authority is toxic? Higher management members have definitely been toxic before on TotalFreedom. What does making the server a whitelist really solve?

Making TotalFreedom a walled garden will certainly not be a popular decision, but in my eyes it is truly the only solution to cut down on community toxicity. By controlling who can't be a part of the community, identifying problematic/toxic users, and removing them, we can cut down on community toxicity and introduce a much needed form of quality control. If we deem that you aren't compatible or aren't capable of not being a shithead, you will be removed.

It is thus in everyone's best interest to remain civil, because the alternative is not being a member of the community anymore.

I've said it before: people will savor fucking around with this community as long as they feel there is something organized they can knock down. The motivation will not go away until there is nothing they can knock down, as is the case on a well-maintained anarchy server. People will toe the line as they always have. They will do everything they can to be an annoyance until they are just barely hovering above being removed, but be in a situation where removing them will cause more issues and controversy. That can and will be the case even with a defined and consistently enforced set of behavioral guidelines, which is honestly something myself and others don't really trust management here to handle properly anyway. Making the response to toxicity more concrete and more final might seem like it would reduce the the toxicity, but I doubt that would happen. Not with a sixteen year history of this same nonsense happening over and over.

Joining to crash the server or grief becomes a lot more of a headache and time consuming compared to just going elsewhere to grief if you have to apply to get in at all.

I completely disagree with you here. People wanting to mess with the community will find ways to do it. It might not take the form of people immediately joining and griefing or crashing, but rather a more sinister form of damage from within that you and I have both already seen happen. Since I've already been talking about him, I'll use Grant as an example again: this is a guy who made dozens of fake accounts on his forum to create the illusion of discussion and/or peer pressure to motivate others to take certain actions. You'd think you could just get rid of him with a whitelist, but people like him will just start again with a new name (or one of an unverifiable ex-community member) and wriggle their way back in. People in this community will go to ridiculous lengths to be a pain in the ass.

The problem with this is that with time, TotalFreedom has gradually shifted its approach of dealing with wrongdoing from retroactively sanctioning users but allowing them to do it to more preventative measures like preventing you from being able to nickname others in the first place via permissions. The reason you were able to do these in the first place was, in my opinion, an unintentional side-effect of granting everyone operator privileges and the extremely hacky way we had to block things back then.

You're so close to the root of the reason why people could do things like nick each other. I encourage you to take one step further back and look at the root of this reasoning. Why is TotalFreedom opping everyone in the first place? The answer is because it was meant to be an anarchy server. Originally, everyone could ban each other. I'm not saying that specifically would be a great approach to anarchy, but it's a fairly obvious hint surrounding what the best fit would be for this community moving forward.

keep TF publicly accessible but adopt a genuine zero tolerance policy towards individuals with prior destructive behaviour. oh and perhaps keep staff to players that are above the age of 18 and have a functioning, working brain.

The community has already tried stuff like this time and time again. Every "zero tolerance policy" I have seen on TotalFreedom has failed spectacularly. Remember when there was supposed to be a zero-tolerance policy for stuff like the n-word? The execs at the time made this their big "bottom line" and posted about it all over the forum, making broad announcements. It definitely didn't go very well, lol. It ended with individuals with enough power, like some of those same executives, just throwing the ideas out. Also, keeping staff above 18 is an arbitrary limitation that wouldn't have filtered out a lot of toxicity in the previous iterations of TF. It seems like a good idea but in this context and given the history I doubt it would do anything useful.

The cons risk repurposing TotalFreedom's fundamental freedom model. I understand your argument that it will allow more immediate freedom to those whitelisted, but to prospect players, returning players, and the demographic to which TotalFreedom was previously advertised, the immediate appeal seems to be much weaker.

Couldn't have said it better. This philosophy brings me to the next part of my post.

My Proposed Solution

It's making TotalFreedom an anarchy server and forgoing rules entirely. I know I have been over this already. It still needs to be said. I'm going to explain why below. There are new points I want to make that are relevant to this discussion.

Spoiler

The most freeing thing this community will ever realize is that it is far easier to establish anarchy and ignore the existing toxicity than to try and remove said toxicity. This server started as an anarchy server. On day one, back in 2010, markbyron, TotalFreeom's founder, signed up to allow people to do whatever they wished on his server, "without the usual red tape rules and restricitons." That's what made it unique. That's what made TotalFreedom what it is and attracted its community. Many have argued with me stating the server had rules for the vast majority of its lifespan, but the truth is that these rules were always secondary to the core ideas of freedom that were the glue of the server. We are dealing with a server that has attracted its community on the basis of these ideas of freedom for an amount of time we now measure in decades. It's ridiculous to think that there is any way to "remove" the toxicity from the community when we have promoted freedom for so long. Freedom meant for many that they saw TotalFreedom as place they could be toxic. And they most certainly have. The fuss over whether it was "allowed" or not is what creates all this controversy that puts strain on the management of this server.

If we do choose to return to our original and core mission as an anarchy server, the benefits this community will reap are immediate and obvious. The first of such benefits is that we can go back to doing what we do best: being as free as possible. Instead of constantly rewriting rule policies and squabbling over who should be allowed to do what, we can instead focus on making a good "freedom" experience that makes it possible to satisfy the needs of this boisterous community while still allowing those who don't wish to engage in the toxicity to simply ignore it and participate in the server in their own ways. 2B2T, while not perfect, is (or was) a good example of this concept: it has an awful chat when left unfiltered and is full of grief, trolling, chaos, and destruction, but some of the most beautiful builds, ideas, and sub-communities in all of Minecraft have emerged from the ashes over the years. This brings me to my next point:

If we choose to return to anarchy, we can fully embrace our roots and our history. TotalFreedom has struggled to market itself for ages, despite being in a great position to do so. It has a rich history that few Minecraft servers can match. Marketing TotalFreedom as Minecraft's original anarchy server is what the community should have been doing for years. And we're in an even better position to do it right now: 2B2T, the server many believe is the original anarchy server, has had their hand forced by Microsoft and has been neutered, reducing the anarchic nature of their server. And people still wait in a line to join it today! Imagine the attention we could attract by offering TotalFreedom's true, original vision of anarchy, untainted by Microsoft's ridiculous influences and free to join at any moment.

My last point is that anarchy actually discourages a lot of the toxicity that people complain about. Anarchy means that there isn't an official ruleset or structure to the server that mischief-makers can target in the first place. Many of those with genuine malice toward others in the community will likely get bored and move on more quickly than they otherwise would have.

I go into more details in https://totalfreedom.tf/threads/totalfreedom-rebooted-server-closure.362/#post-2099.

If this community wants to reboot the server, move forward with anarchy. If the community doesn't want to do that, fine. Then it's probably best to just leave it as is and do nothing.

For the reasons I have outlined above, if the server is rebooted without embracing the chaos, the community will almost cetainly be doomed to the same frustrating fate that was reached two years ago.

 

[Luke]

Provoking Event: Grant (irix) creates a rebooted TotalFreedom server, tfreedom.org

i have no opinion on the rest of what you've said (nor have i read it, to be frank) but i'll just chime in here.

grant has been mentioned exactly twice in the exec groupchat. if i could provide screenshots, i would. those times are to discuss an exploit, and to stress he won't be allowed back in the community in the event of a ban purge.

i'm neither packs nor taah so i can't speak on their behalf to say if he was a factor or not, but i can say from my end he's not. i barely remember his server, i thought it was a lot older than a month to be honest

 

[erin]

I believe something like this could nuke player retention. I'm not going to be sticking around a server long if it's asking me to fill out a form and wait until its reviewed before I can join. Even if a single staff member is all that has to review it, that could take a good while. More than a minute or so and you've lost the few people who actually bothered to fill it out. I also don't think you can really gauge much about a person from their answers to any questions we could feasibly ask.

The main problem as you've even pointed out was prominent users getting a stranglehold and having a lot of people who would be happy to kick up stink for them. You're not going to really be able to gauge whether or not that can happen straight away. Shit just happens naturally with community tensions building by themselves. The key word is prominent - they became prominent and then the consequences afterwards.

Could anybody have forsaw me going completely deranged a year or two ago because I convinced myself the whole server was out to get me? And if so, would I have been denied access when initially joining tf those many years before?

...and another question I ask, as a more general thing. Why did you, reader, join tf? Why did anyone join tf? Which of us can actually say we had pure intentions when we first joined?

 

[Telesphoreo]

I think there is some context to why this thread was created in the first place and for transparency's sake I want to to discuss some recent events.

Provoking Event: Grant (irix) creates a rebooted TotalFreedom server, tfreedom.org
I was made aware about a month and a half...ish? ago that Grant was working on a new clone of TotalFreedom. I have no stance for or against this, but from what I know about this community I imagine people generally don't want him to run it. I want to remind everyone that we've already seen him do this before. During the window after Ryan shut down the server and before TF-Rebooted was launched, he gathered a community on Discord and essentially started the movement that created TF-Rebooted on his own. Whether it was because of his effort, in spite of his place (then) as the manager of the community, or something else related, the people of this community decided it was a good idea to reboot the server. And then we all know how the rest went. The main thing I'd like to point out is that Grant inflicted a great deal of destruction onto that same reboot he once commandeered. I wasn't active for the whole thing but I remember him constantly raiding the server and wearing people down, the kind of toxic behavior you guys are saying you want to avoid.

When I look at the situation going on right now with Grant's server and the calls from Video and others to re-re-reboot TotalFreedom, I'm getting some serious déjà vu. I find it pretty hard to believe that anything other than his efforts are the primary force behind people going from "just let it die" to having a full blown discussion about rebooting the server again. I'm not saying it's going to play out exactly the same way as it did the last time TF rebooted if the community tries again, but I'm here to make you aware of the force he will have if you do. For those who don't know, he's actually done some technically impressive work on improving the efficiency of the server and he has some smart ideas about how players should be managed. He has good ideas on how to build a community with a cracked-premium hybrid EaglerCraft model. Even if he doesn't act as he did towards this community before, the community will probably have to compete with his reboot if they don't want him to manage it. Everyone can think what they want about that but my two cents is this: it ain't gonna play out in the way you guys want. It's going to be toxic, whether you like it or not.

And when it comes to my recommendation on how to deal with toxcitity within the community, you all already know what it is. Oh boy, here he goes again...yammering about that route. I'll save you the discussion for now, but I still stand by that path because in my opinion just embracing or ignoring the toxicity is far better than fighting against it. If you really care, I talked about it here.

This brings me to my responses to the ideas proposed in the thread. My intent is to be constructive; I hope my discussion helps this community make the right decision and avoid toxicity. I hope as Video said that my responses help come up with a realistic solution, even if that solution is to do nothing. Since absolutely nobody wants to hear my plan for the server for the zillionth time, that leaves me to discuss what's here. I hope this does not come off as "complaining."

Responses

I ask this: why does management specifically want to bring back the server at this moment? Suddenly feeling nostalgic? Summer break beginning? As I said above, I doubt it. Grant's server seems to have sparked some interest here, and if it has, involving him (even if that means competing against him) isn't a battle I recommend you fight.


If you put a wall around a dumpster fire, it doesn't suddenly become a garden. First of all, the process of deciding who to let in and who to exclude is going to inevitably cause endless squabbling and annoyances. I am 100% certain some person in some group is going to bitch and moan when their buddies aren't whitelisted on the server, or complain it was unfair they got banned or didn't get let in. That will be something that spoils people who otherwise would have been fine to join, making them toxic anyway. Second, I see this as basically removing the gap on the old server between "admins" and "permbanned." That's not necessarily a good thing that reduces toxicity. We already did go through a selection process to select staff members for TotalFreedom. Probably a more rigorous one than what will determine who can and can't simply join the server. I don't think a single person here is willing to say that none of the TF staff were toxic, even in the reboot. Also, admins often went from "admin" to "permbanned" pretty damn quick anyway. Third, what happens if someone with selection authority is toxic? Higher management members have definitely been toxic before on TotalFreedom. What does making the server a whitelist really solve?

I've said it before: people will savor fucking around with this community as long as they feel there is something organized they can knock down. The motivation will not go away until there is nothing they can knock down, as is the case on a well-maintained anarchy server. People will toe the line as they always have. They will do everything they can to be an annoyance until they are just barely hovering above being removed, but be in a situation where removing them will cause more issues and controversy. That can and will be the case even with a defined and consistently enforced set of behavioral guidelines, which is honestly something myself and others don't really trust management here to handle properly anyway. Making the response to toxicity more concrete and more final might seem like it would reduce the the toxicity, but I doubt that would happen. Not with a sixteen year history of this same nonsense happening over and over.


I completely disagree with you here. People wanting to mess with the community will find ways to do it. It might not take the form of people immediately joining and griefing or crashing, but rather a more sinister form of damage from within that you and I have both already seen happen. Since I've already been talking about him, I'll use Grant as an example again: this is a guy who made dozens of fake accounts on his forum to create the illusion of discussion and/or peer pressure to motivate others to take certain actions. You'd think you could just get rid of him with a whitelist, but people like him will just start again with a new name (or one of an unverifiable ex-community member) and wriggle their way back in. People in this community will go to ridiculous lengths to be a pain in the ass.


You're so close to the root of the reason why people could do things like nick each other. I encourage you to take one step further back and look at the root of this reasoning. Why is TotalFreedom opping everyone in the first place? The answer is because it was meant to be an anarchy server. Originally, everyone could ban each other. I'm not saying that specifically would be a great approach to anarchy, but it's a fairly obvious hint surrounding what the best fit would be for this community moving forward.


The community has already tried stuff like this time and time again. Every "zero tolerance policy" I have seen on TotalFreedom has failed spectacularly. Remember when there was supposed to be a zero-tolerance policy for stuff like the n-word? The execs at the time made this their big "bottom line" and posted about it all over the forum, making broad announcements. It definitely didn't go very well, lol. It ended with individuals with enough power, like some of those same executives, just throwing the ideas out. Also, keeping staff above 18 is an arbitrary limitation that wouldn't have filtered out a lot of toxicity in the previous iterations of TF. It seems like a good idea but in this context and given the history I doubt it would do anything useful.

Couldn't have said it better. This philosophy brings me to the next part of my post.

My Proposed Solution

It's making TotalFreedom an anarchy server and forgoing rules entirely. I know I have been over this already. It still needs to be said. I'm going to explain why below. There are new points I want to make that are relevant to this discussion.

Spoiler

The most freeing thing this community will ever realize is that it is far easier to establish anarchy and ignore the existing toxicity than to try and remove said toxicity. This server started as an anarchy server. On day one, back in 2010, markbyron, TotalFreeom's founder, signed up to allow people to do whatever they wished on his server, "without the usual red tape rules and restricitons." That's what made it unique. That's what made TotalFreedom what it is and attracted its community. Many have argued with me stating the server had rules for the vast majority of its lifespan, but the truth is that these rules were always secondary to the core ideas of freedom that were the glue of the server. We are dealing with a server that has attracted its community on the basis of these ideas of freedom for an amount of time we now measure in decades. It's ridiculous to think that there is any way to "remove" the toxicity from the community when we have promoted freedom for so long. Freedom meant for many that they saw TotalFreedom as place they could be toxic. And they most certainly have. The fuss over whether it was "allowed" or not is what creates all this controversy that puts strain on the management of this server.

If we do choose to return to our original and core mission as an anarchy server, the benefits this community will reap are immediate and obvious. The first of such benefits is that we can go back to doing what we do best: being as free as possible. Instead of constantly rewriting rule policies and squabbling over who should be allowed to do what, we can instead focus on making a good "freedom" experience that makes it possible to satisfy the needs of this boisterous community while still allowing those who don't wish to engage in the toxicity to simply ignore it and participate in the server in their own ways. 2B2T, while not perfect, is (or was) a good example of this concept: it has an awful chat when left unfiltered and is full of grief, trolling, chaos, and destruction, but some of the most beautiful builds, ideas, and sub-communities in all of Minecraft have emerged from the ashes over the years. This brings me to my next point:

If we choose to return to anarchy, we can fully embrace our roots and our history. TotalFreedom has struggled to market itself for ages, despite being in a great position to do so. It has a rich history that few Minecraft servers can match. Marketing TotalFreedom as Minecraft's original anarchy server is what the community should have been doing for years. And we're in an even better position to do it right now: 2B2T, the server many believe is the original anarchy server, has had their hand forced by Microsoft and has been neutered, reducing the anarchic nature of their server. And people still wait in a line to join it today! Imagine the attention we could attract by offering TotalFreedom's true, original vision of anarchy, untainted by Microsoft's ridiculous influences and free to join at any moment.

My last point is that anarchy actually discourages a lot of the toxicity that people complain about. Anarchy means that there isn't an official ruleset or structure to the server that mischief-makers can target in the first place. Many of those with genuine malice toward others in the community will likely get bored and move on more quickly than they otherwise would have.

I go into more details in https://totalfreedom.tf/threads/totalfreedom-rebooted-server-closure.362/#post-2099.

If this community wants to reboot the server, move forward with anarchy. If the community doesn't want to do that, fine. Then it's probably best to just leave it as is and do nothing.

For the reasons I have outlined above, if the server is rebooted without embracing the chaos, the community will almost cetainly be doomed to the same frustrating fate that was reached two years ago.

This has nothing to do with Grant's clone, nor was I even aware he had these plans in the first place. As @Luke said, contrary to what Grant and others would like to believe, we really don't discuss him in our group chats.