Below I present a chronological note of major internet groups I have singlehandedly founded and led. Along with lessons I learned from them, screenshots and personal my way of managing them.
Most of my groups were related to, but not limited to, computers, finance, education.
While this article might be longer than my other articles, I assure you that it will be comparatively easier to read and I will be sharing both highs and lows. Reading this article will give you a wild ride of roller coaster of emotions that will pass through loop of every emotion.
Heading format: “<group name>, <platform>, <my age when I created>, <member count>”
After learning programming, cyber security for about 1.5 years, I at the age of 13, created this group. This was my first internet group. I got this idea by participating in a similar group. After creating it, I shared the links in the chatroom and left it, so I could focus on my own group. Just few hours later, I got lot of other members, not only from that chatroom but from others too. After few days I shared this group with some of my classmate and they joined too.
I know the name of this group might look “weird” to some, but to be honest, not a single member objected. Later I changed it by omitting my last name for privacy and to reduce my influence.
I left this group because I was kinda worried with my phone number being associated with such group. Also there were some people asking about black hat things.
I passed the ownership to one of my classmate and bid farewell. However, I still kept getting DMs from people even after weeks of my resignation.
At the age of 14, I started a YouTube channel where I uploaded unique tech tutorials. I did not share about this channel in my previous group.
I closed it after I got strike on a video where I taught how to make and execute prank bat "viruses" on Android using Exagear, Wine implementation for Android, and an another strike
for using copyrighted SFX in my botany video.
“Telegram Group” was the second group I created and it marked golden age of my
leadership this journey.
The reason I say it was the best one because Telegram offered me global audience, bots, freedom to manage my group as I wanted, all of things that WhatsApp lacked.
I made extensive use of bots to ease up management. I even created my own bot! Created an open source wiki and programmed bots to share relevant extracts on specific triggers. Set rate limit on messages, blocked certain file types and more.
I made plenty of good friends here, from all over the world, did collaborations with other groups. Including with a Russian gaming server, even though I dislike video games and don’t speak Russian.
I also made $13 profit, which was made possible by referring members of this groups. While I was not able to withdraw it, but that’s a different story that I have already explained in my financial autobiography.
As I learned more about internet privacy and security, notice the No Script extension in first screenshot, I decided to leave the group and pass admin role to one of the member.
However, he started changing group fundamentals including icon, description, name. So I had to cancel my plan of leaving, strip him of privileges and ban him.
Emotional messages from some of the group members, urging me to not leave also kinda made me to cancel my plan.
Though around two weeks later, I again made announcement, promoted two members as admin, left group and deleted Telegram after few days of announcement.
I initially did not want to include this group. But for sake of completeness and to cheer up readers somewhat, I have decided to include it.
Just like my matrix fanclub described below, this was also a group of people I knew. Though majority of members were female and not much tech savvy.
There was a huge platform problem. I refused to create an Instagram or Snapchat account. Instead, I “created” a private, web based chatroom. I managed to make around 7 people come there.
In the conversation between me and R below, I start by acting like I forgot her, and ask her identity. She then said that missed me, asks if I have Instagram, and if she is the only one who knows about this chatroom. I then tell her that some “Russian”, whom I did collaboration, know. I then also joked that Instagram banned me twice for trying to intercept network requests. And also Github is unsafe, only Proton mail is safe, advised her to refresh webpage after every message.
After that she created an Instagram account and gave it to me. Though still, I did kept joking to her about that I am going to block her on Instagram, and told her to continue to my website. She initially, as seen in the screenshot, used to take it seriously but then developed thick skin. She later even started learning Punjabi, my mother tongue, to better understand banter. Despite her native language being Tamil, a Dravidian language, which is polar opposite of Punjabi, which belongs to Indo Aryan branch. The genetic distance between Tamil and Punjabi is 78.
Though sometimes we did really move back to my website. As seen in below screenshot where I mention, “This place looks like home”. And the she starts her usual “romantic drama”.
That’s pretty much it for this section. There were many other members like “U”, who supported my decision of blocking R. E who insisted on that I should greet her like she does to me, due to which she clashed with R too, and use Discord. P, R’s younger sister, who randomly jumped into conversation on my website and more. A, who was first female member of chatroom. But to keep this section short, I will end it here.
Unlike my other groups, this one was different. It was not composed just of random Internet strangers, but somewhat familiar internet people.
Members were very diverse from areas including Americas, Central Asia, China, Southern Europe. Though there were only 3 members from Indian subcontinent and only one, I, was active participant.
Diversity was not just limited to nations, there were all kind of genders, languages here. For example, one of a main member and future moderator, B, was a trans woman and also a refugee from another room. Additionally, there was no main purpose of this group, which can explain the high message count.
I created this group after I built up enough audience by talking in other groups, including D, It was intended to be a satire, not serious, hence it was initially named “<my username> fanclub” and was private. I did not even share a link. I just said “You should join my fanclub for fun.”
However to my surprise, it grew rapidly. On just first day it got around 400 messages. This made me serious and I temporarily made this group public, invited lot of other people.
Two months passed by but the group didn’t stop growing and
encryption started lagging. So I had to send an
m.room.tombstone event to this one and create another
unencrypted group on another home server.
Shortly after creating a public group, I discovered an abandoned anime roleplay chatroom with no active moderators. I managed to revive it by criticizing anime, and later by “acting” as a moderator of the group, encouraging members to move to my group. Soon they all shifted to my group. That also improved the gender ratio of my group, because the majority of members there were females, or at least they claimed to be.
However even after settling in my group, they did continue their roleplay thing though to a less extent, and even involved me, though I did not get. Here is an example. X is a placeholder for my username, S, R both are from roleplay room.
- S: X is angry at me
- R: is he?
- S: R, tell X that S left the room
- S: He can't see me // She thought that I have blocked her
- R: okay i gotchu
- S: Just do it please
- R: i will do it for you
- R: <@X "Why are you crying lol"> hey S left btw
- X: I can see her though
- R: uh im js saying what i was told
- X: Haha This S can't stop this lol. Tell her that I am bored of this at this point.
- X: I really did a mistake by letting refugees from rp room here.Below is an example of an average day in that group. We were discussing a C++ algorithm but one of the regular member posted the benchmark done on Microsoft Windows. Seeing it was done on Windows, we started bantering with him. Saying that opinion of a Windows user is invalid.
K: unfortunately using windows disqualifies your opinion from being considered.
M: yea sure ok
B: one day you will switch to free because
not even you could bear the windows of
future
Me: Windows user opinion don't count. I won as always
I even conducted a public, empirical study to measure the influence of selected members(n = 5) of Fanclub. My hypothesis were: I will have the most influence. The more the influence, the more the words will be repeated, through both replies and adoption.
I exported chat logs(n = 8,000) as plain text. With consensus of all participants created sets of signature, unique, words, phrases. Below is an excerpt from the set:
{"my_words": ["nice bait", "meds", "group_nick_unity", "group_nick_freedom", "not debating that", "for fun"],
"k_words": ["gulag", "group_nick_by_him"],
"b_words": ["omg", "seethe", "purr"]}
K designed a simple shell script using Jq, grep. I implemented bash arrays instead of looping JSON with Jq. I also wished to write it in C++ with M, as I was in my C++ phase then and it would be fun, but I didn't citing that it would take lot of time. I then counted how many times these words were used.
The results fulfilled both hypothesis. After me, K had most influence. B results were not as impressive because she didn't talk much with other members than me, and was not there for long when the data was collected. Other 2 members didn't seem to show much influence. Notably, M use of common words and using Windows might have contributed to it.
Other than showing objective metrics of influence, this study paved the way for other members to conduct more study. Which even made me create a sperate room which served as a "journal" for studies. The requirements to get published there was just to use the Markdown template provided, and add some metadata.
As group started growing even more, it started getting harder to moderate it. It regularly got raided by spammers who spammed NSFW media, malware and more. Since Matrix did not have much public bots, unlike Telegram, this became even more challenging. While there was an API, but to get most of it you had to host a home server yourself. I did create some scripts using client API, some of them are available on my Github too.
So I appointed a moderator. But unfortunately, he did not do any good job. Literally every thing had to be deleted by me. So I came up with idea of marking group private before going offline and making it public back when I came. I also reported these incidents to home server admins, who helped me by deleting their accounts, messages.
My another reason for leaving was that an ex classmate, to whom I introduced matrix platform, somehow discovered D group, but not mine. He recognized me there and started behaving like he was familiar with me. Members there immediately started being suspicious of us. I was worried that he might dox me, which he has history of, or if his OPSEC gets comprised, it will compromise mine too. So just around hour later, I secretly got him banned from D group from the hands of my moderator friend.
Around a month later, he met another moderator of D group in an anime chatroom who not only unbanned him but also spilled the beans. Hearing that, he also doxed my personal information to him. I’m not sure till what extent he did in DMs, but as I saw chat logs of anime group, he surely did enough. I had created an alt afterwards but still some users, including the members of my group, were aware of it, but not the reason of such.
So after 3 months of that dox event, I started sharing my thoughts of leaving the group and appointed two more moderators. They were really sad and some of them left immediately after I left, one of my close friend deleted his account too.
A day later, I came back from an alt account. I replied to one of the mod, B, and she was shocked that I have not blocked her. I replied with one of a my signature phrase “nice bait”. I then told mods that to prepare a list. B replied that all members left after my announcement, but I encouraged them that I will stay here for just for them and they got bit happy, see screenshot below.
Later when I did not return after 7 days, the group died, some more members left and told mods to invite them when I come back.
That’s it for this group. Though there are plenty of more things that I can cover, because it was the longest running group after all, but it’s already going very long.
I was the first one to realize the importance of having an unofficial chat group and to create such. I created this group on very first day of my college.
Following me, many other created groups, but the reason they did not succeed much because they were not as tech savvy as me, all of them created specialization specific groups, and lack of freedom.
I promoted the fact that we all will be following same syllabus till first year and managed to unite several other unofficial groups under my community.
Just the next day I realized that there were few members among us who were connected to authorities of the college.
I deduced it by seeing their profile picture, where they looked older than average first year students, their behavior, attempts to help students, maintain discipline. The next day, they were promoted to admins which confirmed by suspicion even more. Also one such spy admitted being 23.
I added a note in description of my groups that whoever who is connected to college authorities will be banned on the spot. A week later, I banned two of them from my group, after failed questioning with them and an announcement, see screenshot below.
As you can see in screenshot below, I questioned him politely, after fulfilling his request of a code review. I also trapped him an accusation “If you are not connected with authorities then why are you admin? And why is your surname same as of the ex-admin”.
Later I also discovered few other ways including asking for screenshot of their Learning Management System(LMS) and tallying it with students list which was hidden in LMS. Below is the screenshot of a female spy who messaged me first but next day, I managed to make her send me her LMS screenshot which proved to me that she was in last year, so I had to ban and block her…
Translation of chat: “Her: Proud of you. Let me free you of one chore, so you can do rest. I will clear your doubt, is it right? <shares LMS screenshot>. Now breathe if I’m your favorite. Thank you. Me: Hmm Thanks lol”
Around 1.5 month later from the above event, I was kicked out from the official group for pointing out errors in study material along with screenshots and code example to support my claim. Seeing this, three members from my group raised their voice against it and they were kicked out too.
Just few days later I observed that the group members who were kicked out seemed very nonchalant and they refused to email higher authorities regarding this. They were nonchalant on other issues and the ones that will happen in future too.
Around two weeks later, I discovered that the group was somehow unofficial. There was only an official community with teachers who we were familiar with. The university also repeatedly warned against unofficial groups saying they only had this community group, nothing else.
Though I refuse to believe that it was unofficial all the way as we got link of it through email. Maybe they took it’s authority later on.
I left this group because it felt like an unnecessary responsibility and talking to a wall. I could not express myself freely. I had to “dumb down” ideas because I was the only tech savvy person or active person here, others were not even willing to learn. I was the only one raising voice against the university, finding errors in study material. Like in many more cases which I have not mentioned here.
I passed the ownership to one of the member who later left himself and passed to another one.
Though still, I continued to speak against wrong things. Below is an example of me raising voice against rescheduling of classes in official group and gaining lot of support along the way.
“The members of the group don’t talk to each other. The conversations are almost always like DMS to me . They just come here to talk to me. The group is basically dead when I am offline.”
This is what I learned the hard way and wrote it in my personal notes during my tenure in Telegram group.
Learning from my observations, I started encouraging participation through daily programming, doubt solving , memes and chit-chat threads, weekly non-fiction literature reading threads.
From start, I have allowed plenty of freedom to members both in main group and by creating an off topic group.
My groups also had a rule which prohibited “restricting freedom of speech of others”, which was strictly enforced.
As I mentioned above, my groups were very free. However some things were restricted. I had create set of rules what was prohibited and how do I define that.
The restricted things included: pornography, gore, restricting freedom of speech of other, promoting commercial products or services.
There was a clear hierarchy of “punishments” and awards. Which ranged from 1 minute mute, mass social rejection(in form of blocks by members), to permanent ban. Though they were not necessarily punishments. As some people voluntarily requested mutes if the group was too addictive or distracting for them.
There was a system of appeals. Offenders could debate it in Janny Chat, and appeal by writing an essay acknowledging why were they banned, what rule they broke, and how would they act in future
Awards included badges, on platforms which support those, exclusive access to certain groups, leaderboard and more. Some members though “flexed” their status of having a high message count, and being an older member to newcomers but it was all playful banter.
Bots proved to be really useful and they are what made MHPC group so successful. I really missed them on WhatsApp and Matrix. But more on Matrix as it had a bigger spam problem and it was ironic that an open source social media standard did not any bot community.
Being a moderator is not an easy task. An ideal mod would have knowledge of local languages, tech savvy, respect for freedom, would not get triggered by insults, explict or shock content.
Since all of the members were random internet strangers, giving them power to irreversibly destroy a group did not look like a fair deal to me.
Even if I had given power to some member, it would be unfair to others one. Because it would be all my subjective opinion and I might get accused of favoritism.
Thirdly, as you might have noticed above, they were in the group because of me. They did not connect with anyone else. They left when I left. So appointing a leader to which members did not connect would be wrong too.
Fourthly, The empirical study conducted in Fanclub proved that I had highest influence. The fact that none of the groups flourished after I left, even though I had appointed leaders, is an another empirical evidence for my claim.
However, that does not mean there was complete "fascism" in my groups. In fact, I encouraged the members to participate in legal matters of groups by holding regular polls, and having a seperate chatroom named "Janny Chat" for anyone who wants to talk to me and mods.
A person asked me why did I create my own groups instead of participating in other's group. Well there are lot of reasons for that, such as lack of freedom, unfamiliarity, but the biggest reason is moderators.
In almost all groups I have been banned from, I was banned because the moderators saw me as a threat to their influence. After all, the true leader is one who has influence. And who likes getting their power getting snatched.
They didn't like how an outsider is leading conversations, influencing members to vote against his ban in polls etc. In some cases, even mods themselves have disputes on whether to ban me or not. As one of the mod unbanned me and invited me again, but I refused citing that I have created my own group.
However mods do not know that these bans do not do anything, other than temporarily reliving their insecurity. Because majority of groups do not have any USP, and bans are easy to evade. In many cases, like B in my fanclub, people who supported me have willingly left the group to join mine, and some of the groups I have created were result of ban.
If we look at above example, you can see that my influence was growing, students were reporting errors in study material, challenging authority. So the moderators bannned me along with 3 others who supported me.