Howdy! In this entry in our series on the overlapping communities within Incremental Games, I want to discuss how ephemeral communities can be, and how that might be a Feature rather than a Bug. But first, a bit of news for anyone hear it already: r/incremental_gamedev has gotten a bit of a refresh with new moderators, new rules, and a good deal more activity to show for it!
Alright, now lets talk about ephemerality. For those who don’t know, communities don’t tend to last forever - including the ones for incremental games. The subreddit has been incredibly successful in that regard, but other communities - like Kongregate and the other flash game websites, the Dashnet forums hosted by the creators of Cookie Clicker, the Plaza, and innumerable Discord servers - have either shut down or been abandoned. They all have their own reasons, from financial costs (all the places mentioned were free to use) to moderator costs to the owners moving on to other things. Communities built around specific games or developers are naturally the most susceptible to that last reason. In any case, I don’t believe the exact list of communities that would outlive each other is very predictable.
There’s a field of study called Cybernetics, or the study of organizing (I’ve mentioned it before with respect to how I want to run this newsletter). Within it, you’ll come across things like Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, which posits that for a organization to continue existing, it must have as much variety as the environment it occupies. Put another way, it means a community must be flexible to survive a society with shifting needs and desires. I’m sure we’re all aware of the various shifts we’ve seen within the incremental games community: at the very least, we’re all acutely aware of the recent AI and nodebuster-like trends and how the various communities have had to change to account for them.
To compare this to ecology, communities changing their rules to react to these shifts is like adaptation. It’s great, but sometimes shifts can be too quick or severe for adaptation to suffice. In this case, what we need is biodiversity: a large number of species with different traits, and then as the shifting environment “selects” for different traits, those species can survive where others cannot. Within this framework, ephemerality is biodiversity working as intended.
For communities this means having such a large number of overlaps, each with their own unique moderation, definitions of the genre, and vibes of interactions, makes the combined community more resilient to our changing society. As an individual, it can be really sad to see a community you were apart of go away though, so I personally recommend participating in several of these communities that appeal to you - thus making you and your friend groups more resilient to the ephemerality of communities as well.
I actually am the owner of one such defunct community: Incremental Social. For some context: After Reddit banned 3rd party apps, I was part of the people who left Reddit for Lemmy. I wanted a good home for Incremental Games on the decentralized alternatives to Reddit, Discord, and Github which essentially all players and devs defaulted to. It never really took off, and the journey took me to really not using Reddit nor the Fediverse. Incremental Social’s Mbin instance (a open source alternative to Reddit and Twitter) never had more than single digit active users. The matrix chat (a open source alternative to Discord) was similarly inactive, and today there are no active users of either service. I also host Forgejo on the site (a open source alternative to Github) and it actually does see some use still, and of particular note is still the canonical home for Profectus.
In fact, I actually would like to take this moment to announce some changes to Incremental Social. Next month (Nov 1) I’ll be shutting down Mbin and Matrix, as they require a good amount of resources for the 0 active users they serve. I will continue hosting Forgejo, and plan to introduce other services in the future. Specifics to come later, but I’ve been really interested in AT Protocol lately (plusone is now a publication, and my digital garden has both a publication and semble collections!) and would love to explore hosting communities for Incremental Games on that protocol. In any case, there’ll always be communities coming and going and we can mourn the ones lost while making room for the next.