From Discord to Somewhere We Own

Well. Here we are: from Discord to the Blog.

That is a slightly strange sentence to write. Discord has been the front door, the living room, the noticeboard, and occasionally the room where everybody starts shouting at once for most of PVC's life. So why am I suddenly asking you to follow me out of there and read a wall of text on our website?

Because I have been building this place for the last few weeks, and thinking about it for months.

Seven years, two worlds, and one small empire

Over the last seven years, zDavidMeson, Marshall, and I have somehow built a tiny empire. Not an empire in the sinister sense. We do not have an army, unless you count moderators who have not slept enough. I mean a small world made out of people who share the same odd interest, an unreasonable amount of creativity, and one place that many of us now simply call home.

We even gave that world the most obvious possible name: Mondo. Then, because apparently one world was not enough, Terra2 came along too.

A ridiculous amount has happened inside them. An equally ridiculous amount has happened outside them.

An old, anonymous castle at sunset. I have used this screenshot for years because it has always felt like PVC.

PVC began with room for twenty players. Today, a normal day can mean forty or fifty people online, and our busiest peaks can touch one hundred. Terra2 has recently reached seven players at once outside its opening-day rush, which may sound tiny next to Mondo, but it makes me strangely happy. You are few, you are stubborn, and I respect every one of you who keeps that world alive.

The Marketplace in August 2019. I took this screenshot before it grew into the much denser place it is today.

Some of our history is measured in much smaller firsts. When we were experimenting with Geyser so Bedrock players could join the Java server, somebody built the first player house through the proxy. At the time, getting Minecraft: Pocket Edition into this world still felt new, fragile, and slightly magical.

The first house built by a Bedrock player through our experimental Geyser setup, recorded on 28 May 2020.

The player side of Minecraft still feels healthy to me. PVC is growing. People are still building impossible things, making friends, starting arguments about block palettes, disappearing for six months, and then returning as if they only logged out yesterday.

The part that worries me is everything being built around them.

Everything is getting enshittified

There is a useful and deeply inelegant word for what keeps happening to online platforms: enshittification. A service starts by being useful. Then it becomes unavoidable. Then, once everybody and their communities are trapped inside it, the service slowly becomes worse for the people who made it valuable in the first place.

Discord's direction has been bothering me for exactly that reason. Its current age-assurance plan is more limited than some of the loudest headlines suggest: Discord says most users will not need manual verification, and its wider rollout has been delayed. Fine. I still dislike the direction of travel. More gates, more automated judgement about who you are, and more occasions where access to ordinary online spaces depends on proving something about yourself to a company.

I understand the stated intention of protecting children. That intention does not automatically make every implementation good, proportionate, or harmless. I cannot prove some secret master plan, and I am not trying to. I am saying that both America and Europe appear to be taking different roads toward the same uncomfortable destination: more identification, more tracking, and more permission required to participate in ordinary digital life.

I do not want the history of our community, or my only way of speaking to all of you, permanently sitting under the claws of Discord, Peter Thiel, or whichever collection of enormous technology companies is deciding how much identity we should surrender this quarter.

Minecraft was always a small happy world to me. It came from the hands of a slightly mad creator and then, unfortunately, ended up in the hands of a corporation the size of Microsoft. Java Edition in particular still carries some of that old independent spirit: your own server, your own strange community, your own rules, and decades of player-made tools holding the whole thing together with string and optimism.

Now even Minecraft is brushing against the same problem. Microsoft's own support documentation says that unverified UK accounts may lose access to Java Edition chat. That does not mean the whole world is being asked for documents tomorrow. It does mean that identity and age checks are no longer an abstract debate happening somewhere far away from our game.

A little hope, followed immediately by paranoia

There is some genuinely promising news. Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft Gaming, has taken a more direct interest in Minecraft. Reporting from Game File says the new leadership considers Minecraft massively underinvested, despite the game helping to fund much of the wider Xbox organisation.

If Minecraft's money is finally used to improve Minecraft, including its performance, infrastructure, development, and future, that would be excellent. I will happily take the good news where I can find it.

Then I hear Minecraft discussed in the same strategic breath as Roblox, creator platforms, growth, and new business models, and every alarm in my head starts ringing.

To be clear: nobody has announced a Minecoin shop for Java Edition. This is fear, not a patch note. But Bedrock's Marketplace has always felt completely alien to what Minecraft means to me, and I cannot pretend I would calmly accept the same economy creeping into Java. If I open Java Edition one day and find an expensive corporate cash shop waiting for me, I may actually lose my mind.

I hope the future of Minecraft SMPs is brighter than it currently looks. Public survival servers feel as though they are in a strange decline. Players have not stopped caring, but the platform owner keeps putting more hands on the game, and those hands do not always look clean.

At the same time, PVC keeps growing. Both things can be true. The wider platform can move in a direction I dislike while this stubborn little community keeps making something better inside it.

So what is this Blog actually for?

This Blog is not a replacement for conversation. You cannot answer this paragraph with a meme, start a thread underneath it, or react with the most inappropriate possible emoji. I know. It is a monologue. It is me writing an offensively long wall of text and hoping you are still here.

But it is ours.

This website is hosted and managed directly by us. It gives PVC an independent channel where I can share what I am thinking, explain changes without reducing them to three rushed bullet points, announce events, celebrate Build Battle winners, publish patch notes, and tell the longer stories behind what we do.

There are more announcements coming, including some thoughts about what happens if Discord continues down this path. Do not worry. We will find a way. 😉

For now, the Blog is the beginning: a quieter place where a post can still exist next month, next year, or whenever somebody returns after one of those mysterious six-month Minecraft breaks.

The newsletter, and a small bribe for reading

You can subscribe to the PVC newsletter if you want to know when a new post appears. It will not be an automatic weekly content machine. I might write every week, every two weeks, or once in a month. We will figure it out. The rule is simpler: I will send something when there is actually something worth telling you.

Many of those emails, though not necessarily every single one, will include a small one-time in-game reward as a thank-you for being subscribed. The email brings you to the new story with your private reward code attached to the link. If you arrive from that email, the panel below reveals your code. Copy it, join PVC, and use /pvcreward CODE in the game. The first successful claim binds that reward to your Minecraft account, so it cannot be reused by somebody else.

At the exact moment I am writing this, the newsletter has one subscriber: me. I am testing the whole thing on myself with this first post. So yes, the first Vote Diamond is also going to me. Extremely fair and unbiased system.

If you came here from Discord instead, the panel above will show you where to subscribe so you can receive the next one.

This first post is partly a test, partly a rant, and partly a flag planted in a small piece of the internet that belongs to us. I hope it gave you something worth reading. I hope I did not bore you to death. Most of all, thank you. That applies whether you arrived in 2019, joined yesterday, spend your life in Mondo, or are one of the seven maniacs quietly keeping Terra2 busy.

Welcome to the PVC Blog.