fernsy
| Fernsy | |
|---|---|
 Fern's Discord pfp | |
| Joined | April 2018 (site) April 2021 (Discord) |
| Origin | Edit The Text |
| Aliases |
|
| Gender | Transgender woman |
| Notable actions/creations | Being an admin |
| Socials | |
| Webpage | fernsy |
| Other general information | |
| Residence | Either Chicago or Oklahoma City; deliberate ambiguity |
| Nationality | American |
| Religion | Irreligious |
| Real name | Lauren Fern[a] |
fernsy, formerly known as yagton or Chatrumor, is an American OWOT user. Since 15 May 2024, she has been one of the Discord server's admins. On 1 July 2024, she came out as a transgender woman.
Name
fernsy is a diminutive of Fern, her post-transition middle name and nickname. This name was chosen as a tribute to a close transfem friend whose middle name is Leaf.
A past name of hers, yagton, is still in collective memory, though not preferred. It is a blend of her former middle name Ashton and the acronym YAGNI ("you aren't gonna need it").[b]
History
Edit the Text(Pre-OWOT)
Fern discovered OWOT from Edit the Text (ETT), a site operated by the Huang twins. On the site, she made a bot to save a page regularly, reverting any edits made by a certain IP address, though Fern's adversary eventually created a bot to spam writes to the page, defeating her. Fern prevailed in the arms race against this adversary by reprogramming the bot to post a frequently-changing link to a random page, until 2018, when ETT shut down.
ETT had no ratelimits or size limits, leading to the strategy of "nuking", where users would simply upload a large amount of text to a page to prevent it from being loaded by users' browsers.
In March 2018, Fern created her Discord account.
She first discovered OWOT in April 2018, later joining the OWOT Discord server in August 2021.
Campaign for Discord Admin
"And from what i've seen, Yagton would genuinely do a pretty good job in keeping this server clean, and while he isn't as active as i am – despite having around the same amount of passion as me in desiring this server to be moderated – he definitely is more active than you are, so that's a plus." - AndreiXYZ
OWOT's lack of adequate moderation, on both the canvas and the Discord server, has been a long standing issue within the community. A major source of criticism was that all of the previous admins were appointed purely on basis of being OG users of the site. This older set of moderators were infamous for being uniformly inactive, and left almost all administrative functions to FP, who had to balance his responsibilities with IRL obligations and left many problems to run rampant within OWOT.
In May of 2024 Fern petitioned to become admin on the Discord specifically, putting forth a proposal for ironing out the server's rules. Her qualifications included being a long-time user who was active in calling out misbehavior within the community.
The push to install Fern as an admin was met with significant support from the userbase, with AndreiXYZ in particular rallying users to private their worlds until a new admin is appointed. FP gave Fern moderator permits on 15 May 2024, after which Andrei congratulated her and expressed optimism for the site's future.
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AndreiXYZ ranting in length about OWOT's need for a new admin(as captured in the May 11th issue of Our World of News) -
Fern's application for Admin. -
Fern's memorandum. -
Andrei congratulating Fern after she is made admin on the OWOT Discord(15 May 2024)
Actions as Discord Admin
As the result of a community poll, Fern made the #ideas and #questions channels into thread-only channels during April of 2025. She later replaced them with forum channels according to the results of a later poll in May.
Miscellaneous Discord Activities
Fern is a cat enthusiast and runs a thread named "a large amount of cats," which has accumulated cat photos for over a year is the server's most active thread by far. Since then the thread has inspired a truly massive amount of copycats; similar threads such as Fox's "a large amount of foxes" and D9eoead's "a large amount of sea creatures" have been catalogued in a master thread named "a large amount of 'a large amount of' threads."
Fern is also active in the "trans discussion" thread, which was started by Andrei to document her transition.
Relations to Other Users
Fern is generally well-respected within the community, even among those who take issue with her being a trans woman.
AndreiXYZ
Andrei has been friends with Fern for years and petitioned strongly for her to be made a moderator on the OWOT Discord.
He was also the first person in OWOT to learn of her transition, and playfully hinted at it for months before the big reveal. After the reveal he organized all information about Fern's transition into a thread in the #trash channel.
Since her promotion to Discord admin, Andrei has stood with Fern on most moderation issues and helped her gather evidence against misbehaving users. Notably, however, he has criticized her for not taking action against Lemuria despite repeated cases of rage-baiting.
FP
Fern has taken care of most administrative functions on the Discord ever since her appointment in 2024, though she would still report issues to FP on certain circumstances.
Jamel
Throughout early 2025, Fern had timed out Jamel multiple times for his opinion on trans and gay people. This had contributed to a long running animosity between the two, though by the end of May Jamel had resolved to be more accepting of the LGBTQ community.
Lemuria
Lemuria values Fern for her attention and would frequently call to her for validation, or for support in Discord drama.
On her part Fern has historically been more patient with Lemuria than other members of the userbase. In the past she had repeatedly given him constructive criticism and advice about his attention-seeking tendencies.
Lemuria was also the author of a large portion of early revisions of the OWOT Wiki article on Fern, though Rscr has since added a significant amount of text themselves since.
Loss of communication
The Lemuria-Fern communications blackout began on 19 April 2025, marked by a significant decrease in communications traffic between Fern, an administrator for Our World of Text's Discord server, and Lemuria. Fern continues to communicate with Lemuria in a "professional" context; she takes moderation reports from Lemuria and occasionally gives non-personal replies, but ignores attempts to initiate personal conversations entirely, and the frequency of contact has significantly declined.
Additionally, after reading new versions of the OWOT Wiki article on Fern where it was written that Andrei and Fern have been friends, this caused Lemuria to further resent Andrei, due to him suffering a major decrease in the frequency of communication with Fern, and thus, a decrease in attention, and seeing his primary enemy on the site being on good terms with a person who was once the sole source of attention.
Poopman
An inactive admin, and one of OWOT's old guard.
Poopman was yet another user who argued with Fern over his opinion on trans people.
Sammich
Yet another OWOT old guard.
Sammich protested Tat's ban by sending a series of incendiary messages within the server, including one in which he purposefully misgendered Fern.
Fern did not make any public statements about this incident, possibly to avoid admin in-fighting. Alternatively it was possible that she talked to FP in private, since Sammich's admin rights were revoked soon after.
On his part, Sammich took the whole situation lightheartedly and reminded everyone that he was simply ragebaiting.
Tatejo
In 2023, Tatejo had also argued with Fern over his beliefs about trans people. But by late 2024 they had (informally) agreed to put their differences aside.
In May 2025 Fern and Andrei opened an investigation for Tat's past offenses, including offenses of alt abuse, general toxicity, and (possibly) conspiring to take down the website. Tat gave a lengthy appeal in his defense, but ultimately accepted his year-long ban from the server.
Personal Life
Fernsy was born in Oklahoma, in the United States, c. 2005. She first began programming at the age of 11, c. 2016.
Fernsy worked at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where she once lived.
Sometime in October 2024, motivated by Oklahoma's anti-LGBT laws, she moved to Chicago.
Gender transition
fernsy had been aware of her transgender status since around 2018, but was not in a position to act on it, as her parents were unsupportive and she lived in Oklahoma, a state with several anti-LGBT laws.
AndreiXYZ, a close friend of fernsy, was one of the first to know.
On 1 July 2024, she announced that she was transgender.
Trivia
- Despite basing much of her personality around cats, Fern doesn't actually own a cat herself.
- But she has a roommate with two.