Greg’s cat has been missing for a couple of days.
Naturally, his neighbours have been trying to help. Tina, who lives nearby, remembers seeing him at her own cat’s wedding. He had apparently got “super drunk” and was last seen wobbling outside the park. Duncan, the town skeptic, says he saw a woman in a tan trench coat carrying a briefcase that was meowing outside the new optician’s office around the time Greg’s cat disappeared.
Perhaps there is a cat snatcher. Have all the cats just decided to vacate the neighbourhood?
Just like any other small and tightly knit locality, word and help spreads fast. People know whose cats are whose. They know who feeds them, where they wander and which houses they might turn up at. They have theories, suspicions and enough local knowledge to help look.
There is just one detail that makes Greg’s search slightly unusual.
The neighbourhood is fictional.
Lower Duck Pond, or LDP, is a community on Reddit where thousands of people have collectively built a small town out by simply writing themselves one; Cynthia is looking for cooking advice before a summer festival. Humanoid is being told off for wearing mismatched shoes — a Croc with a snow boot apparently being beyond the bounds of acceptable local fashion. Elsewhere, residents are protesting a power plant being built across the lake.
The town keeps growing through multiple acts of improv: One person adds something, another person says, “yes and”, then someone else comes along and makes it part of their own life. Someone tried to make a map too, but LDP doesn’t have geographical constraints or any longstanding border disputes. It is an ever-growing space which can house any institution, idea, and has enough room to keep everyone housed.
If someone wants a library, they post about finding a cool book, and suddenly there has been a library in the LDP for centuries. The result is a peculiar kind of internet community. People aren’t necessarily coming to Lower Duck Pond to show off a more exciting version of themselves.
Humans have long gravitated towards fantasy and making something that can be moulded based on their fancies and dreams, but the peculiarity about LDP is that the fantasy is to just be mundane.
Whether it was Dungeons and Dragons in the physical world or something like LDP in the digital realm, humans have found ways to step into lives that are not their own and invite others to believe in them for a while.
And every good story needs to have something moving its plot/character forward. If D&D had dragons to slay or jealous vampires to defeat, the mundanity of LDP also needed something to shake it up once in a while.
One of the LDP community FAQs is: “Does everyone here need to be so happy all the time/Does life always have to be perfect?”
The response: “No, bad things can happen in Lower Duck Pond and its citizens. Please keep in mind that r/HaveWeMet is used by many in the community as an escape from daily life. While there are some triggering topics that are banned, you are allowed to shine a light on darker topics. We do ask that you do not try to derail another user’s thread into darker territory.”
The chaos or the possibility of creating chaos in a world where the consequences remain contained behind the screen and can itself be toyed with is one of the many reasons for LDP’s popularity. Devuluh or David had created this forum because he just wanted to see people be something for some time in a place somewhere else. By keeping the restrictions to a minimum, he has let the community take his intent forward.
Conspiracies, occult activities, and murders have started becoming common in LDP. People come to the forum to shine light on bad things they may have seen or experienced or feared before and let it be played out in a contained space with others without having to worry about their real life.
Given an empty canvas, people do not imagine a utopia but another world with uncertainty, conflict, and fear alongside community. In a time and age when the meaning of peace has started becoming more an absence of war, the people of LDP are either just mimicking the idea of normalcy they have internalised or exercising agency to repeat the same bad things that are happening to them in the real world.
But in this fictional land, conflicts can’t exist for the same reasons they do in the real world — there are no actual gains. Nothing that happens in LDP has to matter beyond the thread. Hundreds of people still choose to investigate, argue, speculate, and rebuild.
That choice to act is what makes the town interesting. The residents are never forced to continue someone else’s story. They could ignore the missing cat, scroll past the conspiracy, or leave the murder unsolved. But they don’t. They make this fictional problem their own. Not necessarily make it better or worse, just collaborate and say, “yes, and.”
It is becoming part of something whose reality depends entirely on everyone else’s willingness to believe in it; a reminder that one exists alongside everyone else.
In imagined worlds, the dark events aren’t something one must persevere through one day at a time; instead, they become a way to escape the world outside by gaining agency.
They can become a way of testing the boundaries of behaviour without having to live with its permanence. That is what makes these alternate lives so compelling. They allow people to play with versions of themselves and of the world that reality does not always permit. A person can be cruel without becoming cruel and heroic without having to save anyone. The fictional distance makes room for impulses that may never have anywhere to go in ordinary life. LDP’s residents are not necessarily trying to escape into better versions of themselves. They are trying out possibilities, especially the uncomfortable ones, and watching what happens when other people play along.
The writer is a trainee journalist at The Indian Express. akriti.kanodia@expressindia.com
Whether it was Dungeons and Dragons in the physical world or something like LDP in the digital realm; humans have found ways to step into lives that are not their own and invite others to believe in them for a while. (Express Photo) 
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