Storming Glory

Flowerbed MC, the “safe space” minecraft server, is anything but.

This server advertises itself as an LGBTQ+ Safe Space server for people of all ages. while in the background, the owner of this server, a cishet white man, feels that things like a topics blacklist, are “too much” to deal with.

This post will be broken up into sections, discussing their behavior towards the community, fellow staff, and blatant disregard for their build team

No names will be used, and for those from the server who may be reading this, this post is of my own fruition.

POOR COMMUNITY TREATMENT

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Where to begin, from their blatant disregard for transparency, their cold, and outright rude responses to questions as a reprocussion of that lack of transparency, and the belittlement / blatant disrespect of players within their staff channels.

• Player Disrespect

I myself am a victim of this, when I first joined the server, staff would call out any little thing I did for the simple fact that they didn’t like me. But the thing is, when they felt I was doing something wrong, nothing would actually be said to ME, but would just fester within their staff chat. It was brought to my attention by a now ex staff member, and good friend. I left the server several timed due to this, as it greatly effected my mental health in a negative way

• Poor Transparency

Wether with maintenance announcements, server resets, or lying about why 5 of their staff members suddenly “left” the server, their transparency towards their playerbase is all but nonexistent.

During the time the server was In 1.16, the world was corrupted, and was down from October 15th 2020, to November 7th 2020. And there were No updates to how developement was going. And players were met with cold, useless responses. While at this time, their staff team began to fray.

STAFF ISSUES / THOSE OF US WHO WERE BANNED

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Once again, where to begin. From the time the current owner took the position, their staff team was split, Admins Vs. Mods / helpers.

please note that I am speaking merely as a secondary source.

• Staff Relations

On several occasions, the owner both directly and indirectly called out their helpers for calling out decisions and actions by the admins / owner that made them uncomfortable, and dehumanized them to merely “a group of traitors”. The owner has gaslit and manipulated specifically the admin team, but in general the whole staff team, to listen to him.

One of the decisions in protest, was after a user with a rainbow confederate flag cape, and a transphobic username joined the server, to which they were simply met with a name change within the server. The user wasn’t banned until 3 staff members were reprimanded for their reactions, the owner specifically telling a Trans / POC staff member that he overreacted to the situation.

• Those Of Us Who Were Banned

6 Of us were banned, from both the discord and the server. 5 out of 6 being prior staff. For calling out the owners blatant tyranic attitude over the server, and when asked about their staff shortage, the owner made an announcement saying that they “left for the benefit of their mental health”, sweeping this whole situation under the rug, and silencing all of us.

• The Build Team

The build team made an absolutely beautiful spawn, and many other amazing builds, to which they were given absolutely 0 recognition or credit for. After their december monthly build, they were told that monthly builds took up too many recourses, and that they wouldn’t continue them.

BIGOTRY

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I won’t go into too much detail here, as im not aware of specifics, but I am aware that there were countless instances of deadnaming, and misgendering.

There were also several instances of the owner trying to disregard the server rules and blacklist topics, invalidating staff, and players triggers. Because they didn’t effect him.

IN CONCLUSION

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This server is anything BUT a safe space. And I highly recommend finding another server. And for the staff team reading this, I hope you take these words not as an attack, but as an eye opener.

Hi. My name is Nate (AKA pogspice) and I’m a former staff member of Flowerbed. I was fired. It was an incredibly impersonal firing, and one that gave me no real insight into why I was fired. Let’s take a look. (Names will be hidden for privacy purposes, but let’s be incredibly clear that I have no reason or desire to fake anything that happened. Flowerbed was a community I cared deeply about, and the fact that any of this happened hurts. A lot. I would not attempt to sabotage any individual admins, hence why I am not attaching names to screenshots said by anyone other than the owner.)

https://gyazo.com/b74311c65966e50fa2778d6273350cac

(Image ID: Hello Nate, Due to recent events and continuation of those events. We think you are no longer capable of being a part of the staff team. Reason for this is part of events during the last few months where you made people uncomfortable or/and angry more than a few times. We thank you for your time on the staff team and will be changing your rank to tulip.)

First off, aside from this message being incredibly unprofessional, it takes over a year of work I’ve put into the staff team and quite literally throws it in the trash. I cannot convey in a single textpost the amount of work we put in the server to try and fix the issues we were dealing with. We struggled heavily with communication issues, transparency, and cohesiveness. We held staff meetings with thoroughly-written note documents and pages of ideas. But as it got into the later stages of falling apart, every issue we (mods and helpers) saw or every time we made a correction, it was a “callout.” And this was unacceptable to the admin team.

Callouts

One of the biggest issues I saw during my time on the staff team was the inability to correct transphobic or ableist statements when made by higher-ups on the team. At one point, I even presented the idea of doing a “Call-In,” which some people may know as a tactic frequently used in GSAs to correct someone in a gentle way if they’ve made a transphobic/homophobic statement or misgendered someone. I was told that this should be taken to the staff vent channel or into DMs because “dragging things up” wouldn’t be helpful. 

But this rule didn’t apply to admins. There was more than one occasion where something would be said in an announcement or meeting that was very clearly directed at a specific person or a group of people. Here’s an example of where he blatantly infers that a group of staff members (which was clarified to be different sets of people on different days).

https://gyazo.com/621548141c7b0cddaea5c1c264433d76

(Image ID: Discord message said by user xmaniaxz on November 17th, 2020. Hello Staff. As I’m sure you’re all aware, tensions have been rising quite rapidly among staff members. This is extremely prevalent when mistakes are made concerning moderation such as what happened yesterday. To my knowledge, there seems to be a specific group of staff that have been in the midst of nearly every drama that occurs and yesterday it was brought to my attention that they do not like/accept how things are run here and seek to change that. That will be touched upon later, but for now, i have some other things I would like to say).

Now, in the first (or second?) staff meeting, he clarified that this message was only directed at 2 staff members… who had already left. And that it was intended to be upsetting. He only said this because I said that I had a lot of anxiety around being a traitor for wanting change when we really needed it. If we’re making mistakes concerning moderation, there’s a problem and it needed to be fixed. Now, Jay already mentioned the person that warranted this conversation (read- transphobic username, confederate flag cape). I can’t say anything more about this, because I was not part of that conversation directly. I will leave that to the people who actually had a part in it.

Lack of Transparency

As Jay mentioned, the server went down for a reset for 23 days. During this time, we (mods/helpers) were given no instructions other than “hey, tell people asking to just… not ask anymore.” Obviously, this. Isn’t helpful. To anyone. If we pressed for information, we were either given a very vague update or just nothing at all.

My Firing

When we were fired, the announcement given was… vague. It stated that we left for mental health reasons or because we disagreed with how the server was run. 2 people left for this reason. The rest of us were fired because we were blamed for a situation that we realistically had no involvement in outside of snail asking a genuine question and me correcting a moderator for misgendering a former staff member. I apologized for not getting involved more. I was blamed for the situation anyways, as was snail. I said I was muting the server for 24 hours to try and regroup, and to gather my words. I muted the server. I stepped away.

Less than 30 minutes later, I receive the message that I’ve been fired. I am still very shaken and upset by what’s happened, and I am not given any real information on what I’ve actually done to get me fired, and I don’t even get it when I ask. Let’s be real for a second. What had I done in any situation that made people uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to tell me? They were clearly fine making a vague callout post, why not contact me in a private message (their preferred communication method, according to them) to tell me what I did wrong?

You both know very well that only one staff member runs the tumblr account, and using her post as a platform to try and tear down someone else is completely unacceptable. What you’re doing is harmful and triggering and you need to stop it immediately, get a life. Move on. The server isn’t for you if you think it’s ok to traumatize people and throw them into a panic just because they’re a way to get to someone you want to hurt and want to get rid of. Go away. It’s nearly been a whole month and you decide to stir up shit again? People are trying to recover from everything, from everyone, you should try to recover and heal too. It seems like you need it if you’re still trying to drag the server into the dirt because the owner “isn’t LGBT enough”, as many of you have stated in my DMs while you were still part of the server/discord.

Stay gone, you made everything feel so unsafe and uneasy and we don’t want you, from having your group single staff out to force them to leave, tear them down and make horrible threats as well as sharing private information against anyone’s consent. If anyone is really truly persuaded by your words and hold your side of the story to be the only side or “the right side” then I’m sorry. Sorry for them, because you’re dead wrong if you think that any of what you’re doing is right or justified.

We never forced anyone to leave. we never singled anyone out.

We never singled anyone out and forced them to leave. we presented them the information stated above and they left of their own fruition, some of them fully believed wes’s blatant lie that we all LEFT of our own fruition for the betterment of our mental health / we didnt like how it was run, can you believe that? A server owner LIED to his whole playerbase and people believed it?

I am calling out nearly a YEAR of wrong doing.

It took me MONTHS to get to a point with you in particular where you weren’t shit talking any little thing I did. purely for the fact that you didn’t like me. You invalidated me when I tried to come to you as civily as possible to explain to you that due to mental health / years of really fucked up personal shit that I wont go into here. I needed someone to be a little bit more clear when I was doing something wrong. As beforehand, nobody would say a thing and it would all just fester in your staff channels. I explained that Nik has always done his best to be that person for me. And you called me a fucking child. And completely invalidated me to the point I had a panic attack. so im sorry that im making a few people a little bit uncomfy for calling it out.

I hope you enjoyed the new Mandalorian episode though, I truely miss talking to you about it

Leaving that server was a long time coming, and I remember this time last year checking staff-chat for the latest “tea”- meaning who was calling who out this time. 

It came to such a point that I wrote a resignation in staff-chat after an hour long argument about racial slurs used in the public statuses of *staff members* that I finally quit. The argument had more to it than that, and I didn't even start it, but I ended up taking over for the person who penned the original message. I scrapped the original resignation I had already been working on for a week or two before that and wrote a new one in the style of a will, giving my in game possessions to people, partly as a joke. Then I said the following.

“I’m not going to go down with this server... This is going to become a problem, as will the lack of actual conversation between staff. It’s all passive aggressive messages and phrases used to stop further conversation. If you're not going to listen to fellow staff members, then the house of cards will collapse. seriously I have no idea what happened to this server. I love Flowerbed. I don't know what happened, but this isn't flowerbed. This is me being nice. If you want to know specifics about what’s driven me to this, dm me. 

“There’s a reason so many good people have left recently. maybe you should figure out why.” 

Only one person dm’ed me. I wiped my tears, felt the weight that had been flowerbed slide off my shoulders, and I went back to work.

Everyday, Black women and girls are missing and either never found or found dead.

Say HER name.

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes. 

Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history. 

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