Write.as @write_as@writing.exchange

Today, we host:

360,000 blogs 🌐
3 million posts 📝
with 1 BILLION views 😵 across them all (passed this mark last night!)

We see over 3,000 new posts and more than 4 million views every single day!

In that time, the number of blogs and posts on our platform also doubled! Here's where we were on our 6th birthday: https://writing.exchange/@write_as/105662494353088258

In the last year, we made a ton of improvements to the platform ✨

We added a new editor that makes it easy to write without Markdown, added better support for newsletter writers, and launched experiments like https://tiny.write.as.

We're turning 7 years old today! 🎂

From a no-signup publishing platform to a home for 350,000 writers, we've continued evolving since 2015.

Here's where we are today, and a little review of the past year 🧵

So far, it seems to be working well! We're gracefully handling even more volume right now than we did last week, when everything was getting crushed.

One benefit of this for everyone: our web application shouldn't be affected so much by these huge traffic spikes.

So whether you're a free or paid user, you should still be able to publish, edit, and manage your posts. You can also read your posts during these high-traffic periods as long as you're logged in!

Even with added capacity, we still saw some downtime last week. So yesterday I put a new system in place that will put parts of our site to "sleep" when we detect that our servers are getting overloaded.

This doesn't affect subscribers, since they help pay for our servers! But blogs and posts from completely free and anonymous users will have a little nap when we can't handle the traffic spike.

We've had some rough mornings, availability-wise, since early December.

But today we've finished implementing a slew of upgrades that should ensure better uptime across our platform.

Want your friends to join you on Write.as? Send them an invite!

From your dashboard, hover over your name and click "Invite people." Then you can generate a special link that'll let them sign up for free.

Managed to isolate the abusive actors. Disabled the many thousands of spambot accounts created. Signups are open again!

We're currently facing a distributed network of bots creating accounts on our platform, so we've completely disabled registrations until we can better prevent this.

Of course, I don't want to exclude people from ad-free, privacy-centric software like ours — there shouldn't be a premium on it.

So the plan is to continue supporting cost-free publishing via:

- Self-hosting and communities running @writefreely, and
- Invite links, which you can use to give out Free accounts

Besides that, naturally, if you create an account before January 1 you won't have to worry about this — and you can help other people join by inviting them personally.

There are several reasons for this change, but a big one is needing the space to focus on our customers and build out everything we hope to.

I laid everything out on our forum for community feedback: https://discuss.write.as/t/potential-changes-to-the-free-plan/3740

I'll share a blog post about this soon, but I've decided to ⚠️ close new Free account registrations ⚠️ for Write.as on December 31st.

This won't affect our anonymous apps or existing users; only those who want to create a Free account starting January 1.