The Sun Sets On Super Mario Web Development
Since 2018 I ran a small web development space on Discord and collected people I ran into across the internet in there.
I've been building websites since I was a child and wanted to connect with the people around me who were interested in them and how to navigate building our skills in the ever changing technology world. I had also been having trouble landing my next job so I figured it'd be productive to start something like this up for myself too- and we could build each other up together.
It was great, multiple people leveled up their careers, I eventually landed a job that I've been with since. We had tons of productive discussions from the tech to advice for financial health. Lots of sharing cool and interesting things we found online as well.
Discord gets a lot of things right about having a little corner online. I recently tried out Signal's voice chat and it didn't have any activity indicators for voice chat- there's all these little things Discord nails and makes anything else feel inadequate. It's been great for us.
However, with Discord moving towards an IPO it felt like our time was limited. I started throwing out ideas of what to do next- there isn't really an all-in-one solution for Discord, but maybe we can do something more fun. With the global age verification announcement the timeline became more urgent. Discord eventually delayed the rollout but at that point I've already been invested in the next stage.
The first step I think was building a landing page- just a little spot on the web that we can direct people to and funnel people into whatever's next, which launched as UpGraded. I wanted to move away from the Mario branding since it's hardly a fan site and should be its own thing, and the word "UpGraded" is one that's stuck with me since someone spelled it like that on an old forum back in the day. Click was just a cheap new TLD that seemed fitting enough.
Since then I launched a wiki (though the only useful article on there so far is for deleting your Discord account) and I plan on sharing guides for doing all kinds of things with technology there. I got back into IRC and launched a channel linked on the site as well- though I've gotten some other channels active it's only been me in there so far. Originally I was going to launch a forum but I decided to funnel people to a forum that someone in the space had gotten back up instead- activity there has been great and I don't have to run the space anymore so it's a win/win.
Finally, the day to shut it all down came yesterday. An unceremonious delete server and it's gone! I've moved off of Discord too and started the process I outlined in that wiki page for deleting my account. While this isn't the only space I've had on Discord, this was an interesting one that I don't think would have existed without it. Despite the shutdown, I'm excited to work on building spaces outside of Discord and on the wider web again.
I've been busy with this stuff for a while so I haven't had much to Post about here- hoping as I have successes and failures I can report on them here.