In September 2023, I deleted the biggest rave WhatsApp group in Mexico City. 800 people. Gone.
It had gotten too toxic. The group that started as a tight community for sharing cortesias and talking about dark music had become something unrecognizable — drama, personal attacks, the kind of energy that makes you dread opening your phone. I pulled the plug.
This is the inflection point in SLIST CDMX’s community history. Everything we do differently now traces back to what went wrong in that group.
The original SLISTMX WhatsApp structure was purpose-built. Rave-specific chats for different venues and promoters — Bar Oriente, CSR, others — where guest lists, meetups, promos, and ticket links lived. Then general chats (chisme, music exchange, LGBT+) where the chaotic discussions, self-promotion, and public forum energy happened.
The design was intentional: funnel people from scene-specific rave chats into general chats where people from different scenes could meet, share music, explore each other’s worlds. On event days, reverse the flow. The cross-pollination was the whole point.
At 800 members, the architecture broke. Too many people in a single space with no real moderation infrastructure. The general chats became noise. The drama became self-sustaining. People were creating conflict for entertainment because the group was too big to have real conversations anymore.
The rebuilding taught three lessons that became permanent doctrine.
First: split by topic at 500 members. When we rebuilt, we created sub-groups — psy techno, disco house, different genre verticals. Keeps engagement high and prevents the main chat from drowning in noise. The general chat stopped being a dumping ground and started being a living room.
Second: moderation bias toward action. The admin team adopted a “remove first, ask questions later” philosophy. No porn, no nudity (a CP sticker incident could get everyone banned from WhatsApp), mute and remove rule-breakers including promoters. Gretz handled moderation with zero tolerance. Six-month appeal window after removal. Timeouts preferred over permanent bans unless it’s a sexual violation.
Third: distribute moderation to avoid the optics of a dictatorship. Better to have another admin who hasn’t been interacting with the person make the call. Removals happen silently — don’t say anything, let the chat react. Anti-FOMO management became policy: actively delete messages from people saying they can’t attend events. Those messages influence people to stay home. Only positive attendance signals allowed.
The rebuilt community was tiered. About 100 people in the Nalgoticas group and Patreon got first access to cortesias. Then the main chisme chat (the rebuilt version, smaller and moderated). Then a 1,800-person announcement-only group for broadcasts. Then Instagram stories last — lowest priority, public-facing.
Each tier earned access through engagement, not just following. There’s a certain investigation before cortesias reach completely random people.
The irony of the collapse is that it produced something better. The 800-person group felt like community but it was really just an audience. A big chat where nobody knows each other is a broadcast channel with a reply button. The smaller, moderated, tiered structure we built after is actual community — people who know each other, who show up for each other, who have reputations to protect.
The chisme stuff started as a revenge plot. Then everyone copied it. Then mine got too toxic and I had to kill it. Starting it again was the hard part — building something that could survive its own drama.
Communities that can’t survive controversy don’t deserve to scale. The 800-person collapse was the test. The rebuild was the proof.