What happened to HypnoMUD?

The community had become too toxic and unsympathetic towards me. I had spent years hosting and maintaining the platform for free, but I wasn't playing the game or involved in building things for at least a year.

I felt excluded and disheartened by how some people treated me, and I tried to express my discomfort several times. Unfortunately, my cries for help fell on deaf ears. The community that had developed was not mine anymore.

Eventually, I shut the server down and explained my position to the community on Discord. The response I received only served to make me feel more worthless and unappreciated.

Isn't this all your fault?

I can broadly summarise my three biggest mistakes:

1. When I set out to build this, I was too focused on eroticism. I ended up inviting the core team through a female identity. I could sense some of those people felt uncomfortable with me when I later revealed my IRL gender.
   
   
2. While distracted by personal issues and reluctant to lead, I allowed the community to run itself, which promoted the idea of democracy.
   
   
3. I ended up placating the new administration rather than putting my foot down and taking back control of what arguably was still my project. Stepping back further cemented the idea that I was a doormat for the community to step on.

I've always struggled with these kinds of projects because I try too hard to please everyone, which leads to friction and frustration.

Leaders must trust that they know best for the cause they are leading. I failed to be selfish enough years ago while simultaneously allowing my frustrations to get the better of me.

The online hypnosis community can be a wild and toxic place. Many people are too frustrated to have sympathy for others. Some people feel vulnerable, and I recognise that my behaviour at the time was not helping people feel safe and comfortable.

Mental health

I wasn't healthy when I started HypnoMUD, and even now, I'm only partly through my recovery.

Many people in the online hypnosis space suffer from mental health issues ranging from loneliness to anxiety and depression.

I wanted to build an environment where people could escape from the real world and interact through a character, learning and growing from their experiences on the MUD.

Instead, I ended up in a community that felt uncomfortable to me. I did not make the friends that I had hoped to make. I did not build the kind of environment that I had wished to create. Presumably, others trying to start hypnosis communities may have encountered similar problems.

Are you open to continuing HypnoMUD?

I may be inclined to rebuild if there is a strong sentiment towards that and if I can gather a group of volunteers who respect me and my views rather than being antagonistic towards me.

My vision has always been to bring people from various fringes of the online hypnosis community together to cultivate an inclusive group of hypnosis and mind-control kinksters.

If I were to do it all again, I would probably focus on creating a world more focused on hypnosis and mind-control tropes rather than a purely erotic fantasy world.

And in this day and age, I'd try to write AI-controlled characters that the player could hypnotise. The characters could also mesmerise the player character to affect the story. (However, this may not be appropriate in a purely NSFW environment due to content policies and restrictions.)

If you are interested in this project, don't hesitate to contact me on Reddit. With full transparency from the beginning, this project might turn out differently.

That said, I'm not eagerly planning for HypnoMUD's return. Bringing HypnoMUD back would depend on the interest in this project and creating a solid core team of compatible people.

- G.P.