On August 2nd 2023 Habitica announced they will remove all guilds and all public chats on August 8th 2023.

For guild leaders, like me, something got destroyed within a short time, what we built up within years. The utopify guild always had slightly less than 5,000 members and the few days haven’t been enough to react properly (there wasn’t even time to mourn) and build up something new and most people (I even think 100%) fled to Discord. The guild existed for around 6 years on Habitica and got wiped out, because of reasons I really don’t get. Imagine those guild leaders who were on holidays at this time and came back to find nothing, not even a notification of what happened. Horrible thoughts!

But Discord is nothing utopify stands for, it is distracting and I don’t want to support the company behind it. And the most important part is, that I will never trust a company or other people if it’s about keeping the community safe. I trusted Habitica, which was obviously a mistake. A mistake I will not do again.

So I tried to figure out another way, which would be better than the old chat, where people can discuss specific topics and where important information don’t get flushed away within minutes, but will be saved.

I immediately asked the community for help, because this was a huge task, which will take a long time and I occupied myself with different software like XMPP and IRC, which are older software, but really robust. But they didn’t fit to modern approaches of communication.

And at this point I have to say thank you to the one patron who did a private donation. It really motivated me to keep working every day for hours on a good solution, which took more than 2 weeks, but hopefully will work to keep the people on track with challenges, inspiration and motivation 🤗

After a while I played around with Fediverse software, like Mastodon, Kbin, Firefish and tried to figure out, which one fits best. The problem most have is, that they distract you from the main topics, because they have implemented stuff big corps invented to nudge you in and to keep you on the platform, like a timeline containing stuff you’re not currently interested in, but could like and get distracted by it.

So all of it wasn’t good until I found Lemmy. With Lemmy it is possible to put the focus on specific topics, because it is content based and not person based. But it still has the “All Feed”, which contains federated material, which was seen by other utopify users and could be distracting, so if you want to keep on track and focus on specific topics, I recommend to stay in the “Local Feed”.

The fediverse software (Lemmy) is connected to a lot of other instances, which opens the door for bots, spammers and trolls and illegal/copyrighted media could be uploaded on my server, which could be bad. The plan is to let it run for a while and observe how it will develop. If everything works fine and some people are willing to moderate this forum, we will keep moving on (Send me a pm if you’re interested in moderation). Otherwise, if it can’t be handled, this instance must be closed.

You can use Lemmy over different apps. Check your favorite app store for Lemmy clients. I recommend using Jerboa for Android.

In the next weeks there will be a lot more communities here (communities are like rooms or specific topics), because I want to cover all important topics we had in the utopify.org guild on Habitica and the next one might be “Self-Development” or “Management Methods” (still don’t know which name I should use?) to share methods like the Pomodoro Technique and finally have a discussion about it, which will not be pushed away after a few hours in chat, but stays in this forum and the side-threads feature is very important for deep discussions. If you miss a community or have recommendations, just post it here.

In the same announcement Habitica said they want to encourage us to continue create high quality challenges, but they didn’t provide anything what could help to even keep old challenges with the new “update”. The opposite is the case, because many challengers kept their challenges in a private guild and only copied it to a public guild to start the challenge. Without the guilds and no new system to manage your challenges on Habitica, it isn’t possible to keep the quality high. The only exception is, you are able to code scripts and manage all challenges outside of Habitica, what I do. But I could create a huge blog post or video about what went wrong on Habitica and what they should improve.

But thanks to Habitica most challenges of utopify will be publicly available and everybody can participate in them, whenever they want and with any task manager they want. To be honest, challenges were really bad implemented on Habitica.

I will still continue to create challenges on Habitica as long as I own 💎 there (or get banned), but people have to provide their Habitica-ID to make a connection to their check in / shared experience of a challenge to provide high quality challenges. I will not purchase any more subscriptions on Habitica, because without the community and the possibility to chat, all social aspects are gone, no one who motivates you, no one you can give you tips and no experience to get inspirations from. Habitica is now only a todo list with very few and unnecessary features and a piece of paper and a pen would be even better or just a simple app.

Technical stuff: I tried to set up the UI and the back-end of Lemmy separately by myself to be able to make some fine tuning and change stuff I don’t like. But in the end I used the docker containers, which provide the newest source code, but nothing can be changed, because I ran out of time and it was much easier and faster to use a out-of-the-box system. If there is someone, who knows Lemmy, please give me a sign.