Quandary Lions

So after about four years in the community, we're stepping out. Unfortunate that it's come to this, but it is what it is.

About why: it's a lot of factors, honestly. As time goes on, we find ourselves disagreeing with more and more of the things presented in tulpamancy--not with the practice itself, but with various cultural elements of the community. How tulpamancy is presented, how tulpas themselves are presented and treated. As a system who does have tulpas but whose majority type/origin is DID, we've wondered a lot about whether our experiences are relevant--we don't feel confident speaking on things like creation and such from our own experiences anymore and have to crossreference frequently.

After a tremendous collapse about two years ago, we've been busy rebuilding our collective life. We've found communities, friends, and loved ones beyond tulpamancy, beyond plurality even. We've been rapidly relearning a bunch of technical skills we'd forgotten, and we've been learning how to relate to others, inside and out, in healthier ways. (Don't be old us, kids.) All of this has been eating most of our time and energy.

We currently have too much on our plate. Career, family, health. Overworked and overstressed. Something needs to go.

We haven't been able to keep up with the community as much as we feel we should. We miss things in modqueue. We can't read every comment like we used to, and that means stuff flying under the radar, which means inconsistent modding on our behalf. The Discord is linked closely to the sub and yet we're not even in it.

There's a lot of squabbles inside our head about the community. People disagreeing with how to moderate stuff, how to talk about stuff, how much to get involved, etc. While squabbles are just part of the territory when it comes to living with others, this was distinct in the way it genuinely, consistently strained several of us.

All of this meant that we've been lowkey thinking about resigning for a while.

A few days ago, it came to our notice that a prominent member of the tulpamancy community was engaging in predatory behavior, which we and some other staff investigated ourselves. If you want to know who and what was going on, ask us for access here on Dreamwidth--we'll likely be making an access-list locked post later. While we believe we handled it as well as we could have, the whole incident hit far too close to home for us in many ways. It brought up all of our misgivings about the community at once, along with a lot of past things we've experienced that were all too close to this, and overall made us profoundly sick at heart.

This was the tipping point. We've discussed this among ourselves, and none of us feel right staying, much less holding a position of leadership in the community after this.

Several of us have written up our individual goodbyes here. Take care, and thank you for the support over the years.

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Q. What will happen to Tulpa.io?
A. It's not our site, actually, but we do have a major hand in it. We're wondering whether we should retain any direct involvement in the community at all and are currently figuring that out with the other admods of the site.

Q. Will you continue to be involved with the rest of the plural community?
A. We're distancing ourselves from there as well--actually, already have. While we don't have the same fundamental disagreements there as we do with aspects of the tulpamancy community, we've also seen a lot of attitudes and behaviors that just don't sit well with us. We still feel very powerfully about plural advocacy, but it's something we've decided is best done solo or alongside individual systems, rather than from within the community.

Q. Will you be doing any future projects related to tulpamancy/plurality?
A. Planning on it, just solo/not-high-involvement stuff like blogging about our experiences and opinions. And writing guides focused more on improving system skills and communication, rather than tulpa creation. Maybe a webcomic?? the possibilities are endless

Q. Where can we keep up with you?
A. Right here, on this Dreamwidth. If we do any noteworthy plural community stuff, it'll be mentioned here. We are also discussing remaining on plural.cafe. (there's a slim chance that we might crosspost to tumblr, but most of us would rather not touch the site with a hundred-foot pole.)

- Architect wants to write a blog on social issues found within the tulpamancy (and to a lesser degree, wider plural) community
- Cassius is bemoaning the lack of good, solid, practical plural selves-help resources that actually treat system members as goshdang people (formal DID/OSDD self-help manuals sometimes have useful stuff in them but we can't crack any of them open without a hell of a lot of internal bracing, brilliant user design there lmao)
- several of us want to write an accessible-to-baby-plurals-and-singlets (read: without the hair-splitting terminology/origin wars and politicking) personal blog about our experience of being plural

it's just a matter of getting past perfectionism and planning and actually doing the thing.

Our system, up until very recently, helped run a forum for soulbonding located at Soulbonding.org. In recent days, we and the rest of the admods decided to close the forum.

We needed a few days off to process everything, but I think it's time our system came forward with our reasoning for closing the board. Though all three of the primary admins of the board okay'ed the motion to close it, the reasons we present here are our reasons alone, and are not necessarily the reasoning of the other admods.

First things first--our group had actually been planning to step down from the board for a while. We created the board years ago with a misunderstanding of soulbonding, thinking it wouldn't be that different from moderating a tulpamancy space. Over time, as we learned more, we realized that wasn't the case. We had no conflict with what was being discussed, but we were profoundly unfamiliar with it and did not feel qualified to moderate the space. And when our own soulbonds decided they would rather not talk about their personal experiences and withdrew, we lost yet more of our connection to the forum and the soulbonding community overall. So we posted a notice in late June explaining that we would step down in October, after ironing out technical issues that the board was facing and helping appoint new mods.

Several factors pushed this to deciding to close the board instead. What sparked the discussion that led to the decision was when certain topics began emerging on the forum. To protect the privacy of the members involved, we will not elaborate on what those topics are. But we will say that, for us, they pushed "things we are not familiar with at all" to "things that are actively, acutely distressing to be around". They are not things we are comfortable attaching a moral label to or cleanly judging as "right" or "wrong", but we did realize that we could not be around such discussions, or stay on the forum any longer.

We discussed this with other staff about the possibility of us leaving early, and about the possibility of appointing new mods right away to cover our departure. However, the following issues were present:

- Overall admod activity. All of the staff had either left or gone mostly inactive due to a lot of life happenings. None of us felt like we were able to oversee the board anymore.
- Difficulty communicating with the people who hosted the forum/managed the server. They also had gone mostly inactive due to life happenings, and we'd been unable to get ahold of them.
- Difficulty training new staff. We'd implemented a bunch of usergroup stuff to control privacy levels across the forum--only members with X amount of posts could see this subforum, and so on. Even after looking through the settings, we couldn't remember ANY of how we'd done it, much less teach someone else how to alter and manage them.
- Lots of technical issues. The site was missing some important security features, like https, and had various bugs regarding logging in, recovering passwords, even registering. We found that we were unable to budge them at all.
- Other, more personal factors that we aren't comfortable discussing.

Some of these we probably could have overcome, but it would have taken time, energy, and resources we didn't have. Others, we could see no good solution to. And no one felt up to managing it all.

So with all of that in mind, we decided that it would be better to simply close the board entirely. We arranged it so that if people had accounts there, they would still be able to view their old posts and save things, as well as message each other for contact info, but no new posts or registrations will be possible.

We've heard that the old members of the forum may be starting a new forum, which we will admit to having banked on--that people would be able to pick up where we stopped and begin anew. If any of you are reading this, you have our full permission to use and adapt the site rules and other resources we've written for your own forum. We're unable to give you the domain name since it doesn't belong to us, just the people who oversaw the server--that decision lies with them, and we're not sure of the best way you can contact them. For practical reasons, we would recommend starting with a different domain anyway, to avoid confusion from dead links to the old forum that might be scattered around the web. Likewise, our system has neither ownership nor jurisdiction over the Discord associated with the site--the decision for what to do with it will lie with whoever owns it.

Please take care. We're sorry it had to end this way, and we wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors.