Life at 1000 discord friends

Entry posted by HataVNI in Diary entries August 31, 2022

793 views

Dear Diary,

It is not surprising that after the 5 years I'm already in this scene (it is probably more, because just 5 years ago the whole VN.Info thing took off and I oddly played some VNs earlier too) I met many people in this scene who came and went. After living for 3-4 years as a total meme, but totally unobstructed by whatever stood in my way to essentially shape VN.Info into what it is now, I had a big public fight with some people that left some psychological damage and required some introspective. I decided to completely switch my personality to someone who is just striving for harmony, does not get triggered at the occasional idiot anymore and is just focused on his goal to be "Making VNs popular in the west" or by extension probably due to my illusions of grandeur "Making VNs popular in the world".

In order to achieve this goal, I have had the pleasure to meet a lot of special people from the scene and the VN community who carry somewhat an influence in companies, fan projects or generally the western VN world. I believe that Fuwanovel (the community we are currently in and that is trying to drag its body out of its coffin after it laid idle for effectively 6 years or more) can achieve everything that we desire from the VN community. I wish to create a society where ppl are not gatekept for external reasons, where fanTL and official TL can thrive in parallel and where a healthy blog scene is nurturing.

In order to do that I sacrifice my time and effort to connect people who have otherwise never met in the hope they can create something great when working in collaboration with others. Many fan translation projects have failed not necessarily because the staff was incompetent, but because they either lacked the social skills for HR/management or their ego stood in their way of achieving greatness. Fuwanovel houses about 10 years of history and back in the day so many things were posted here where the githubs are still alive and still offer opportunity for the new generation of VN fans to learn how to deal with VN engines and how to start their own translation projects. The FanTL still scene has so much potential. I can see and 95% when I decide to hop fresh into someone's DMs and they get surprised like "who the fuck are you?" it still ends up being a nice talk. Mainly, because we all share the same passions.

However, to get to the point of this post's title. Due to this "dancing on every party" that I perform day after day in my mission to lay bridges for people, I ran into an interesting roadblock that I was not aware existed.

Discord only allows you to have exactly 1000 friends, an arbitrary limit that obviously now tugs on my heartstrings because it forces me to delete some people from my friendlist. I'm convinced that these people will eventually prove useful in some particular project and then I have to wrack my brain to recall their usernames. I can already see it...

Someone from JAST once said that he knows what "type of person" I am. I'm a person that enjoys being the well connected one and would bask in being the go-to guy for the fandom I occupy. Indeed, I enjoy that very much. But as long as it contributes to great projects being realized, no one can say I'm doing this out of malice, can they?