Inside Lower Duck Pond, the nicest town on the internet

When Uncle Todd found his auto shop robbed yet again, he did the neighbourly thing and posted about it on the local town forum. 

“I’ve had enough of these rowdy kids thinking that they can break and enter into my auto shop without me knowing in the middle of the night, dressed like hooligans,” he writes. ​“We as a community have to do something!”

Seems straightforward enough, but a glimpse at the comments section and the picture starts becoming a bit more complicated.

“So, I should stop handing out lock picking kits now??” Fast Fingers replies indignantly. On the other hand, Sam Charles, Private Eye and Bird Enthusiast, notes it was better than the kids hanging out in the cemetery.

“God knows, that led to a couple of purported hauntings, a potential possession, and at least one gruesome murder,” he adds. The kids had, in fact, stolen some screwdrivers, but Sam Charles is fairly sure any resurrections were out of the question.

If it all sounds a bit odd, rest assured: in Lower Duck Pond, this is a perfectly normal exchange.

But then again, Lower Duck Pond is a bit odd, too. Its location is mysteriously murky, ranging from the continental US to a small corner of Germany. Its inhabitants? Varied. Clowns, kleptomaniacs, entrepreneurs and walruses – all are welcome here, and the population currently hovers around 2,500 regularly contributing townsfolk, and over 150,000 members in total.

Welcome to /​r/​HaveWeMet. Imagine a city’s Facebook group without the city, or your local Nextdoor neighbourhood – one where everyone knows everyone, and everybody is in everybody else’s business.

Opening the page brings up an array of conversations, some more immediately bonkers than others.

“Underwater poker championship trials are now on Tuesdays,” says popiclack, whose flair reads ​‘Eye Witness for Hire’. ​“Ducks aren’t allowed to play. Gophers aren’t able to coach. Can anyone spare me a giraffe for collateral?” 

Under that, ZephyrGale143 (aka ​‘Old Hag in the cottage by the forest edge’) has added, ​“would you accept two llamas instead of a giraffe?” (No answer.)

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As Devuluh, the subreddit’s creator, puts it, ​“It’s an endless and collaborative exercise in improvisation.” One that rewards creative thinking, a penchant for the bizarre and a willingness to lean into whatever happens to be going down at the time. 

He set up the page in 2017, while he was still in high school. As he tells it, he was inspired by subreddits like /​r/​totallynotrobots and /​r/​outside – ​“Ones where users assume a role and do not break character no matter what.”

“The idea was that you’d post something completely mundane like a real-world news article, and users would comment as if they knew you,” he says. ​“It quickly evolved to be something much bigger. An entire town with its own lore and history was something I never could’ve envisioned, and I think it’s a beautiful development.”

Said lore is complex and ever-changing, but there are a few concrete facts. It’s called Lower Duck Pond, though this was not initially even its name – in the early days of the sub, Devuluh hosted an event where users could submit real-life news headlines for discussion. One of those happened to be an article about a dog chasing ducks at a place called ​‘Lower Duck Pond’ in Ashland, Oregon. 

The name stuck. Now, ​“it remains one of the few officially recognised facts about the town.” 

He adds, ​“I think a lot of users imagine LDP to be a small American town – maybe by virtue of Reddit being predominantly American – but the location is kept intentionally vague to reduce creative constraints.”

Vague enough for users to put their own spin on things, despite the fact that the town’s official currency is dollars. ​“In my mind it’s always been more of like a little East German town where there’s lots of trees,” long-term contributor Gale says. ​“Everyone has their own interpretation of what it’s like. It’s kind of frowned-upon to force your vision onto other people.”

In keeping with that, the town’s vibe is entirely decided by the community. Many long-term contributors, such as Gale, swap in and out of characters, constructing new ones and discarding old ones as they go. Take the example of John Levee, a character who would post detailed fictional weather reports daily, fleshing out the world with mentions of chilli con carne communal cookouts and clouds over the town.

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That was, until Levee posted his final goodbye, explaining that he was taking a position ​“as the professor of meteorology at Lore NW University” and leaving Lower Duck Pond for the foreseeable.

“I wasn’t expecting it to have the profound effect on me that it did,” Devuluh recalls. ​“It felt like both a loss and a bittersweet ending for this character.”

Individual stories often become part of the town’s wider mythology. There’s the jazz festival, ​‘hosted’ every year by another user, where the writer works in references to other recent posts from members of the town.

Sometimes, storylines intersect: when Cora Springsteen, City Council Member, posted about a truck labelled Duck Corp leaking toxic chemicals outside her Stardrop Café, Devuluh posted a follow-up urging Lower Duck Pond’s residents to take action. 

“Join us on the 27^th outside Duck-Mart to show them we won’t tolerate their behaviour!” he wrote. ​“For those of you out of the loop, Duck Corporation is the multi-million dollar company responsible for Duck-Mart, Duck Properties, and other tacky, duck-related names you might have heard around town.” 

The duck-related content is the other constant here. Mentions abound, from Sam Charles, the aforementioned Private Eye and Bird Enthusiast, talking about tracking down ​“warehouse rubber duck thieves” to Duck-Mart (which was recently besieged by North Koreans), to The Duck Post – the town’s local newspaper.

Given that the first rule of /​r/​HaveWeMet is not to break the illusion around it, a lot of people come to the subreddit cold – like Gale, who had his first run-in with HaveWeMet just before the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The whole point of the subreddit is that you have this town forum and it basically looks like a real town, but it doesn’t exist,” he says. ​“A few months before I actually started posting in it, I came across it and I was so confused. I was like, ​‘What is going on?’”

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Soon enough he – like I – was hooked. How could you not be? Where else is it possible to collaborate with complete strangers about everything from bin collection days to pretend neighbourhood disasters like the ​“block party incident” – which, as one commenter writes, was ​“wild and I wouldn’t change a thing”? 

Importantly, everybody here is welcoming and friendly. Members who join are asked to create a persona and name themselves in their flair. Posts are encouraged, civility is mandatory and roleplaying as a sweet old grandma who loves to bake cookies is pretty much the order of the day. Double points if you run a sewing club – one of my personal favourites is ​“Stitch & Bitch”, which is looking for new members because the ​“gossip has gotten stale.”

In an age of uncertainty and ever-worsening news, perhaps it’s no surprise that people have turned to roleplaying small-town life as a source of comfort. Devuluh describes it as an ​“escape; somewhere they can be someone else and not think about the real world for a bit.”

But Lower Duck Pond has grown beyond that, too – becoming a place for people to connect and even make friends. Gale tells me that he’s made several through the subreddit, with plans for a European meetup sometime this year; apparently, one cross-continental couple even fell in love and started a relationship as a result of meeting at Lower Duck Pond.

“Most subreddits have regulars, but the regulars of HaveWeMet have this very intimate dynamic where they recognise each other’s writing styles and memorise details about one another’s many characters just for the sake of good storytelling and improv,” Devuluh says. ​“I’ve seen people use other platforms to talk out-of-character and plan big dramatic stories, or expand the ​‘universe’ in other mediums like podcasts or short stories.”

There’s also a real-world impact at play here. ​“This is very personal, but it has taught me a lot of values,” Gale says. ​“Which is really weird to say, but I come from a pretty conservative area in the Netherlands. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it’s a small world.”

Through /​r/​HaveWeMet, he says, ​“I really got to know other people, other writers, and I became more accepting. I would say things in my writing that were honestly kind of offensive. And people pointed it out and I would honestly have no idea. Then they explained it to me, and I learned.”

Which is to say, what you get out of Lower Duck Pond is what you choose to put into it. 

Vicky Jessop is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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