From June 2017 into 2021 I founded, built, and ran Ferrous Core (CORE), an online gaming community based around Destiny 2 that grew to over 1,000 registered users with a range of 200-400 monthly actives. This map of content explains this post series. They are the full retrospective: why I started Ferrous Core, what worked, what didn't, and what it cost. They're written both to process the experience and to leave something useful behind for anyone else building or running a gaming community. > [!tip] Start here > The three-part retrospective is meant to be read in order: **[[Pt.1 - I Built a Community]]** sets the context and founding ideals. ## Posts - **[[Pt.1 - I Built a Community]]** — The origins: the context in which CORE came to be ahead of Destiny 2's launch, and the motivating factors and foundational ideals I wanted the community to foster. Read this first; it's the "why" the rest of the series builds on. - **[[Pt.2 - I Ran a Community]]** — What worked: the structural and organizational decisions that held up across four years and a thousand-plus users — from first impressions and web presence to how we communicated with the membership. Take them as good ideas for other gaming communities. - **[[Pt.3 - I Learned from a Community]]** — What didn't: misaligned mindsets, toxic elitism taking root, the rise and shuttering of our "hardcore" raid team, and other ways reality diverged from the founding ideals. Where Pt.2 is specific to gaming, these lessons generalize to organizations of all kinds, online and otherwise. - **[[Finances of a Gaming Community]]** — The oldest post in this folder, written in July 2019 while I was still actively running CORE: the actual IT stack behind the community and what it all cost to operate. A backdated copy of a post originally hosted on Medium and the community's own website.