The game itself is really fun and griefers are much rarer than you might imagine from reading the forums. But yeah.... It's absolutely nuts there sometimes. The developer is a massive free speech advocate and doesn't mind hosting this horrible crap. But what's insane is that he gives moderator ability to some of the worst offenders. So I just don't know what's going on in his head sometimes.
There used to be a list of alternative servers, but seems to be gone now :-( Possibly nobody is hosting one any more. I'm tempted to do it myself, but I'm in Japan so the lag would be unacceptable anyway (I'd be playing by myself, which I do anyway...) But it's an option. If you can find a group of people to play with, it can be quite fun just to run on your own server. It takes very little CPU from my experience.
It's the issue with discussion platforms where the speech is not regulated, they tend to bring people that have been kicked out of other platforms, even if they are not really interested in the main focus of the forum.
> The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Which in practice just means that everyone labels anything they don't like "intolerance", bans it and toddles off congratulating themselves on how tolerant they are.
I have no idea what the solution is. I suspect anyone coming up with one would win all the Nobel Peace Prizes from now until the end of time. I do think it's a useful rule of thumb that if you're not finding tolerance excruciating and infuriating at times, you're not really doing it.
This has helped me to view the GNU GPL in a new light. That is, to ensure freedom, we curtail the freedom to limit the freedom of others with respect to software.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Then take a AWS free Virtual Machine and host it :).
Just check the traffic regularly (because only 15GB outgoing traffic is free, incoming does not cost anything. You can set a alarm for 1 USD).
Or get the smallest instance from scaleway, which is so far the smallest one with a dedicated hardware core (not thread) on reasonably modern chips at 2 EUR ~ 2.5$/month, unmetered 100Mbit, 1GB ram and some 25GB fast ssd. If you know any cheaper ones, let me know. They even have 3$/month bare-metal ones with slightly higher specs, but using a Marvell ARM chip and only supporting exotic NBD storage.
Heck, if you'd be fine with an EU server, contact me, I'd sponsor it, including a short subdomain.
interestingly, the game itself has anti-griefing features built in. Communication is limited until your character has survived quite a while and until you're grown up you're completely dependent on the help of other players who are already at the adult stage. If you die due to a negligent mother, you're back very quickly. If you get a griefer child, it's your call whether to feed them.
the game overall has some very interesting features around community and cooperation, and rogue griefers are disincentivised against because the way the game scales seems to inherently require cooperation between strangers.
Neat, that makes me want to check it out. I'm pretty tired of communities that are so busy virtue signaling what is "toxic" that actual discussion is hindered. Those types of communities tend to be overly ban-happy to anyone who speaks against the views of the mods/admins too.
Some players are really toxic. Twitter is a peaceful, loving place compared to that. No way I will spend my free time in this game.