Minverse

"A new Miiverse clone. Written from Scratch. Created for Miiverse fans."

Minverse was a cancelled Miiverse clone that was scheduled to come out in mid-2020. According to the trailer, Minverse's contributors consisted of Jo, meltstrap, Luna, Oman Computar, Ashley, Proto, FunnyBone, Luke64, and Kiiwii Birb. It was cancelled in Spring of 2020.

History

Minverse was in development since late 2019, months after Indigo and Oasis shut down. The project was led by user Jo. The Minverse Twitter account (@miinverse) was created on December 2019, and started tweeting teaser videos, one from December 22 and another from December 28. On December 31, 2019, the account tweeted the trailer for the site, with the domain being minverse.miiversecl.one. On the same day, the account tweeted "song is c418 - beton if you're interested. shoutout to @c418 for doing such a good song.", referring to the music used in the trailer video.

Jo posted screenshots of Minverse on the Minverse Discord server, including the screenshot on the top of this article. Most of these screenshots showcased a "theme" feature which changed the logo, palette and background of the site to match a clone (or Discord).

Additionally, the server also has a dedicated bot known as Minbot. Minbot had several features, but its main purpose is for administration. Minbot was a modified version of a bot Jo made called "Red", which was hosted on the same server. The transcript for the bot's rules and point system can be found here.

Development

The development of Minverse was separated into 3 teams: Australia (backend), New Zeland (3DS/WiiU), and Tazmainia (Web Frontend).

The backend was supposed to be written in Express.JS, but the development decreased drastically when the lead backend developer, Luna (known as Robby at the time), was hospitalized due to her declining mental health. Due to this, she was not able to keep in contact with the rest of the team, and therefore could not work on the project at all. Since everything depended on the backend being finished, the whole development team fell apart. When Luna eventually found out, most of the project's developers had left.

Jo Steps Down

On January 29, 2020, Jo stated on the Discord server that she would be stepping down as the site's main developer, claiming that she didn't care about Miiverse clones anymore. On February 2, 2020, she issued a public statement on the Minverse situation under the link catgirl.party/minverse.html, where she claimed that she didn't want to be associated with the Miiverse clone community because of the far-right users joining the servers.

On February 15, 2020, Jo transferred ownership of the Discord server to meltstrap. meltstrap claimed that the project would be coming back.

On February 26, FunnyBone announced that he would step down from the development team to focus more on Uiiverse.

Luna's Statement

On March 16, 2020, Luna, one of the developers, tweeted a pastebin regarding Minverse, saying that development for the clone has "halted".

Project Termination

On April 30, 2020, the Minverse Twitter account tweeted a message saying, “not happening. bye.” The statement suggested that the Minverse project has been cancelled.

Project "Revival"

On May 4, 2020, Proto announced that the Minverse Discord server will stay up if the server gets at least 100 members. He also stated that Minverse would continue development. This announcement was based on a post meltstrap (now known as mintphin) made about Minverse not coming back due to the lack of a Discord server. The goal was reached the next day.

Despite the alleged "revival" of development, Mintphin later stated that Minverse was officially cancelled.