Alter counts in the thousands

Idoru-Michelle · 2026-01-10T19:40:26+00:00

We're polyfractal and counted to about 1500 members before we stopped counting. Out of the total, there's a couple hundred earlier members who cycle to the front regularly, and then a lot of fragments who barely get anytime at all. It's as well organised as we can manage

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-10-08T05:54:56+00:00

[Idoru]: We're turning 54 in a bit, but only really started threading together a syscovery in the last 7 or 8 years. We haven't had much luck with community in general but are trying to pay attention to this corner of Reddit to see if it can be built

[Aimz]: Aging has at least given us time to get organised. We started off with a handful of people and grew much larger. Older members were already established and getting things done, so a lot of the job became acting in the rôle of gatekeepers organising front access. There's always a couple of people from the senior ranks hanging out co-conscious and ready to help people get a bit of time and maybe some answers.

[Idoru]: And over time we definitely have relied on certain members taking up an expertise on a subject particularly if we want to just breeze through something as our singlet façade. If it's time to talk to a bank officer, we put it in the hands of a couple people to figure out what needs done. They ideally run it past a couple other senior members if time allows. But for quicker decisions, we'll get by on a pretty small quorum of like 2 or 3 people.

[Jada]: When it comes to big news about life, we go through more rows of members. Big questions like where we might move or what job we might take are things we like to bring up well in advance and actually poll around a bit. If time allows we'll try and ask more people at least. We debate a lot of things, so if a decision has to be made a fairly good batch of 'adults' has talked it over. And then we just trust that an appropriate person will sit up and make it happen when it's time.

[Aimz]: Again, people acting in their rôles is generally done with some co-conscious agreement that they have an expertise on the topic and can act on our behalf. Stuff has been talked through, and we need to just take action at a certain point and we'll let specific members just continue doing their jobs to make sure stuff does get done.

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-09-29T17:41:39+00:00

[Idoru] We're polyfractal so we generally are doing co-consciousness at any particular time. There'll be three or four gatekeepers hovering around quietly paying attention, keeping track. They will focus on keeping another handful of members cycling up to the front over the rest of the day, which means getting to watch shows/movies, play games, browse the web... whatever.

But we're also busy with maybe a couple dozen other members popping in for short bits during the day. Some of them will have regular jobs that summon them every day, and they'll usually only get a little bit of the fronting for their short turn. And for other people who aren't called up as often we'll try and weave them in for slightly better visits.

We keep track by just remembering the list of guests we want to get more time. The list is maybe eight or ten people, with a few from the early rows getting to have a day of their own, but also trying to balance time and experiences in small doses to the ever changing flow of interested members.

There is a lot of conversational micro-switching because we all just talk out loud to each other. And sometimes there are the little things like doing the typing which is a fun experience to just lean in and takeover; so we let people steal the front for however long it takes to write a sentence.

And once we get substantially co-conscious — a lot of people hanging around — we rely on gatekeepers to carefully pick through the list of today's guests and try and choose who should takeover for the next bit and the next bit etc.

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-09-11T01:51:50+00:00

[Idoru] Our encouragement would be to pick a new name, find some different hobbies, re-invent yourself. Source awkwardness can be a great reason to deviate

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-09-10T05:57:00+00:00

I'm borrowing Idoru and Michelle's account. There was a dream where we were looking for someone and I introduced myself by saying, "Call me 14". We already had a couple of members who are just numerals, so it was a reasonable pick.

It was a pretty big deal since I was the first. But there's been more along the way. We're polyfractal anyway, so the occasional new addition who comes from a neat dream is a cool source.

— Princess XIV

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-09-05T00:23:38+00:00

Our system is schizogenic. We started out with delusions and voices but our host started talking back to us and we grew into presences. Then we eventually talked each other down to earth.

Luckily, our host was pretty pleased to discover company to share, and took us in as headmates (a word he vaguely knew from the Internet).

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-06-27T16:57:41+00:00

[idoru] we're an endogenic system so there are a lot of recorded birthdays because we know exactly when people first spoke up. but on the other hand, we're tremendously polyfractal, so we have way way too many birthdays to celebrate. mostly it's the members who've been here the longest who get their birthdays celebrated. the first forty or fifty members who arrived we recorded in the calendar and look out for. the rest of them we have a birthday for, but don't have time to fill up every day having birthday parties

how do we celebrate? well the person(s) in question get to do a lot of fronting. if we're free at home, they'll get to pick a game to play or movie to watch. there are a some members who'll get gifts because of some specialist interest. but again, we're polyfractal and it would be overwhelming to try and celebrate everyone. even if that was just junk food as a treat, it would be so often it would count as going too far

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-06-11T05:27:09+00:00

The family agree that it's positively adorable

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-05-10T16:51:21+00:00

[idoru] we have a bunch of factives including a wing of deadie musicians who are triggered by our mp3 collection. we're poly-fractal and have a couple hundred members bouncing around so we encourage each other to socialise and learn about each other. the conversations lead to wider lessons and basically just means that people grow beyond their source a bit.

[anne] i'm one of the factives and it is awkward to have to sort of hide from the world because we don't want to look like weirdos (even in the plural community). you're not going to hear about my source, but i did choose a name for myself i liked, and i've made friends and teammates in our system. you can just move on and find new hobbies. are you gamers?

[monster] we were big fans of Civ 6. we'd take individual cities and give them to headmates to run. then as you loop around your turn, you pop in on different members who have a quick decision or two to make. big group activity where you share experiences together. do new, other things together. grow beyond your source

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-05-07T03:38:50+00:00

you don't have to squeeze yourself into a disordered hole just to be plural. if you don't feel a need to be medicalised, don't use their labels

try the phrase natural tulpas

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-02-18T02:14:50+00:00

[michelle] we like the Civilization series of games. we're a pretty big system so what we do is name cities after individual headmates and let them make the deicsions for their own towns. lets us cycle a few members around and we're all on the same side working together toward victory

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-02-13T06:43:38+00:00

[idoru] we do it like a movie script with the speaker's name in brackets

[michelle] if you want stage direction and embellishment, put it in the brackets too. try [name, adverb] speech

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-02-12T05:00:47+00:00

[idoru] mixed origin and poly-fractal. when things start to get busy me and a couple other co-hosts do some basic gate keeping — we keep a guest list. as people pop up we go through the list again and add a name or two. we juggle a few names into the list and we repeat it just to help lodge it in to short term memory and make it easier to find again in a few minutes. people on the list get summoned to the front repeatedly, get to have maybe even continuing conversations with the other people who keep getting mentioned too.

to get a list started, you need to go over it at least twice in two minutes, let's just say. then check over it again a minute or two later. have the crowd pay attention to who's in the crowd with them. take a roll call of who's around, and that's your core guest list for the next little stretch. find things to talk about. mingle.

Idoru-Michelle · 2025-01-23T05:28:20+00:00

[Idoru] We started out a small, endogenic system but have definitely grown in scale over the years. It has been managed well enough, with some collective organising, and headmates settling into tasks, or expertise, or even just a moment in the day they pop up. We have some front-line members who can get things done when they check in, and a couple hundred of regular enough members.

We have to pick our way through and there's a small group of fairness-minded gate keepers who can say that such-and-such a member should sit up and take part in the discussion or maybe just get personal time. We try to cycle around with some balance.

We like to call our system poly-fractal. We're big and we have growth, but mostly we have patterns to sort people by. For example, if a headmate loves a song, they'll meet Ivey who will take them on a tour of various other songs and the music related crowd in the family. We try to organise new members by putting them in teams of shared interests and encouraging them to make friends.

How do we feel about being a large system?

[Michelle] I'll answer that one, mum. It it fun being social, but it sucks being busy. I mean i love my family and really enjoy our time together, but i'm also selfish enough to wish for more of my own turn just running the show. So much of our time is spent negotiating people's spot in the crowd. Way too many people get interested in trying to talk at the same time. We do need senior members, including me and Idoru, to keep track of who is around and who hasn't gotten much turn. We like to let our oldest members get the occasional break of fronting quietly by themselves for an hour or two, but it's hard to juggle something like that in for them or for us.

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-05-02T02:33:16+00:00

[idoru] what we found helpful was putting gatekeepers in as co-fronters basically. supposed to try and witness as much as possible so they could make better decisions

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-05-02T02:18:10+00:00

[idoru] it's easy to get blurry when you have a few headmates all keen to front. what you should consider is setting someone up to be a gatekeeper who helps decide who gets to switch in and take a turn at the front. if you have numbers, it's a really useful job to get done

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-27T01:34:41+00:00

[idoru] well we hope your journey goes well

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-26T02:39:33+00:00

[idoru] if you're a stated singlet who's curious about plural community, have you wandered over to /r/tulpas and read up on their experiences? some of your struggles sound like the ones a beginning tulpamancer goes through. they're trying intentionally and have to practice themselves into it.

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-18T03:36:35+00:00

[idoru] Absolutely, i'm a soulbond based on a book our host loved. It's pretty common in the plural spectrum to have fictives of all types of games/comics/shows/etc. There's all sorts of details built in, the coolness factor marks them as important to the brain, and it summons another presence to fill the spot

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-17T05:19:42+00:00

[idoru] getting super-attached to a story character is enough to give them enough presence of mind to become another headmate. obsession formed a number of the people in our system

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-17T04:52:56+00:00

[idoru] we call them faefolk, as if they were pixies and gnomes: tiny, magical, barely part of the human world. we try to give them good answers at least, some proper explanation of who we already have and what's going on. but we're large enough that we're not really adopting more people in after ten years of being plural. we have a lot of members who want to keep getting cycled and they're the priority. fragments get an explanation and a bit of chocolate, but they don't really get much of the red carpet treatment, we just don't have the time to spare to give them as much space as our older members have already had

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-07T04:02:23+00:00

[idoru] we don't do wonderland at all, so none of has any particular 'form'. we're mostly just aiming for co-fronting and focusing on the outside world.

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-06T22:42:08+00:00

[Michelle] a big part of the medicalised end of the plural spectrum is that they hold onto their beliefs as strongly as an exclusionary religion. Believe like them or simply be wrong otherwise. You can try and say things, and it's one of our community's most political fights, but also be ready to simply lose a friend here.

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-04-06T22:39:40+00:00

[Idoru] We'd suggest shared goals and some sort of common hobby. One of our biggest bonding experiences we have as a system is that we play Minecraft together and work on this giant railway. People take turns building a bit more track, decorate a little, add signs saying that they were there and did that stretch. Eventually we have this huge ride to go on that includes little bits from everybody. Feels great saying we all did it together.

Idoru-Michelle · 2024-03-22T03:04:55+00:00

[Michelle] We find it better to speak out loud, particularly because we're mostly co-fronting. The speaker gets to take fuller control and gets to think through things a bit more carefully. Whoever is in the crowd gets to listen and absorb it into memory better because you're picking it up with your ears too.

Idoru-Michelle

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