When you look at our long term stats we've been losing players over the last 6 months in terms of online activity, however the new players have remained around the same (For the most part). This means we know we have an issue with player retention at the end of the day rather than promoting the server (Generally speaking again).
In an effort to kill a few birds with one stone, we decided that the best route forward would be to diversify TF and offer different game modes that players could chose from, and where possible do so with minimal developer effort for the time being, this way our dev team could focus on the work on Freedom-01 and usually I've found more players = more motivated developers.
We started this process by acquiring the Skyblock server from an existing community and started to work towards integrating it to be part of our wider network, however with the backlash and abuse that was received, work has since ground to a halt with this (Though some will probably pick back up). At the same time as this we were working to move to a new forums to help the community better connect outside of the game, were developing the anarchy gamemode, were working on the planning for a totally bespoke game-mode that we were hoping to get the developers to start working on in the near future and had started looking at what we needed to do to help improve the Freedom-01 infrastructure sustainability.
As a result of the abuse that I and other executives got, the vast majority of this was burned and I decided that if the community weren't willing to back what I wanted to do with TF as owner, there was little point throwing more capacity, time and money behind it.
Right now for me, I view TF as being in a "Sustain" phase, we'll keep the lights on, we'll keep things as up to date as we can, but I can't see us doing any major innovative things until something changes. The 90% of the community that abuses me and the executives and are generally speaking the loud voices on the community are generally the same 90% of players that haven't joined the server in months, and don't actually care about our community's experience in game. That's not the case for all our community, but a lot of the forums and discord community don't play the game...
For me to even consider putting more of my time / money into new game modes or major re-work / improvements, the community needs to make a shift to actually care about it's longer term success. I'll keep TF running until we reach the point there are no players left that join the game... But at the same time we will start finding that plugins are harder if not impossible to update, and our ability to be agile and responsive will continue to deteriorate unless things change for the better.
For me and a lot of the senior staff on TF, it's often not a welcoming community to be a part of, I'm abused by people on a weekly basis, and if I removed them from the community I'd get abused by more people for "Silencing those who speak out against me" I'm sure.
TLDR - Some of the community need to stop being dick bags and want to change, or we'll just keep going how we're going.