Arcesia History

In November 2021, Lele and I had been discussing a problem he saw no way out of: Lainland, a server originally for porting the PSX Lain game to web browsers, was now busy at all hours of the day and night with low-quality inanity. I told him to imagine one of the fancy chocolates where the chocolate coats a nut, but then imagine that the chocolate was shit. To mix my metaphors, I then said that his job should be to squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, then throw out the rind.

Even though that wasn't exactly what I meant, Lele founded a Discord called Arcadia with members vetted by him, called Arcadia, on November 23, 2021. A week later he called a vote on whether it should move to Matrix. It tied 7-7, so Lele decided to have two communities bridged to each other.

Arcadia was renamed Arcesia so the Matrix server could have arcesia.net. The Matrix server was opened to everyone in the Discord as a Christmas gift, and the Toxspace IRC was also bridged to it.

On March 8, 2022, Arcesia was bridged to a Discord server called Second Space, a successor to Miniwatrix, administered by Plastic, Yori, Sates, and me. There was only one tech channel to start with, but as discussion inevitably spilled over to politics we decided to bridge a second channel for politics the day after. Eventually the collection of bridged channels were known as the "cross channels" and there were four of them. Lele boasted that he would connect the cross channels to Lainchan IRC. But that was not to be.

After two previous versions, the final revision of the agreement under which they were governed is appended. It is important to note that although Second Space had planned to make its own Matrix server, Yori decided to encourage users to join the Arcesia Matrix as an interim solution, for that made the community of Second Space dangerously dependent on Arcesia and set up the stage for the tragedy that was to follow.

In February 2023, Lele was enraged at Vnark, a user of Second Space, turning the politics channel into a "cancer unfunny 8kun braindead place". After desultorily arguing with him, Lele deleted the channel entirely, and threatened that if Vnark discussed political matters in any of the three remaining cross channels, he would ban Vnark and close all of the cross channels.

Plastic, who had succeeded Yori, and I hurriedly proposed to Lele that we make more explicit rules for how the cross channels were run, and if Vnark broke them, then he could be banned. His only response was to repeat his threat in public. Sates replied that he would never ban Vnark because he considered Vnark a friend. The situation deteriorated and Lele deleted Arcesia immediately without warning.

However, about two weeks after, he issued a long statement on arcesia.net. In particular, he stated that this was not "fueled by the cross-politics sperg", and that he had in fact been seeking to do so since November 2022, and "just took the oportunity [sic] that presented itself to do that somewhat naturally."
APPENDIX - CROSS CHANNELS AGREEMENT
1. The cross channels remain open to users of Arcesia and Second Space.
2. Each party shall appoint an administrator of the channels.
3. (a) The global rules of Arcesia and Second Space apply to the channels.
(b) The administrators may make local rules for the channels.
4. (a) Each administrator may choose such persons as moderators with such powers over such channels as he wants.
(b) No moderator may ban a user of the party other than the one whose administrator chose them.
5. (a) The parties must not impede each other's efforts to bridge and federate the channels.
(b) A party can complain to the other if it thinks the other has violated its obligations under this agreement.
6. A party will share with the other any intelligence it finds that might be bad for the channels.
7. A party is free to dissolve this agreement after one full week's prior notice. If 7 days have passed since a party complained under clause 5(b), and it does not think the violation has been fixed, it may do so effective immediately.
8. This agreement comes into effect, and the Super Channels Agreement is dissolved, 7 days from its making.
Made the Seventeenth Day of April Two Thousand and Twenty-Two Between the Arcesia Network of one part and Second Space of the other part.