The Workshop
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The Workshop is an English-speaking, international pen spinning community created by Hobby, a former UPSB moderator.
History
The Workshop was originally created in November/December 2018, following the announcement of the closure of UPSB in October the same year. Prior to this, the remaining UPSB members had been staying in Discord servers created before the closure of UPSB, such as the r/penspinning server and Mango's Pen Spinning Discord. It was announced publicly on January 28th, 2019 on Hobby's blog[1], and a public link allowing anyone to join was shared on his blog in April the same year[2]. It was also advertised on the UPSB facebook page following UPSB's closure[3][4], leading to the common assumption that The Workshop is the de facto continuation of UPSB, although Hobby denies this idea.
Fen Spinner split
Following the events of a voice chat on September 11th, 2020, the small discord server Fen Spinner formally split away from the workshop and established itself as a separate, alternative pen spinning community, blowing up to 50 members overnight. Tensions between the two communities have remained high ever since, with attempts to deny the existence of Fen Spinner as a valid community.
Decline in activity and closure
Following the split, Hobby since took an inactive role in the server's management, promoting Padrace to co-owner after Coffeelucky stepped down and leaving him to manage the server. Padrace would soon after become inactive himself, but not before permanently banning key Fen Spinner members in 2022, putting a hard divide between the communities. With Padrace not present, The Workshop became unmoderated in practice and fell into disarray, with spinners moving to Fen Spinner, Spindys and IPMC for discussion.
On October 20th, 2024 the server would close for good following an announcement from Hobby.