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Notes -
I'll second AliceMaz's writeup, albeit with the caveat that the server in question there was unusually large. Most long-lived servers usually only get in the high double-digits of regular players, and correspondingly a lot of social rules are more varied and sometimes superstition-like (eg where are hoppers acceptable is a surprisingly complex question).
The BlanketCon 2022 postmortem is more about the technical side of a fairly short-lived server, but you can kinda see the motions around what social rules were working under the hood at the time.
Unfortunately, a lot of good pre-YouTube era stuff was written up on the old minecraft forum, and has since evaporated for GPDR reasons. Most analysis these days are in video form on YouTube, and they're often made by people who conflate the technical build side or lets plays with the social rule one, or only include the social rulemaking by accident. And even on YouTube, a lot of multiplayer SMPs are either more Let's Plays or outright scripted events. Or are just 2b2t voyeurism: there's some social stuff to Nocom/Randar/whatever, but it's not really a social rule-making thing.
I'd be interested if anyone's more familiar. I can think of a half-dozen Oilfurance-style stories for the short-lived SMP server I helped with a few years ago, so it's kinda surprising that nothing else is showing up on Google, but I dunno if anything I've got would be interesting enough for other people.
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