A few days ago @thinkfuture asked me a question, "how do you promote this place?"
He wasn't the first to ask. And I gave a tangled answer, because the honest answer exposed something I hadn't wanted to look at.
You couldn't easily promote Chirpper. Every share link ran into the wall the whole site is built on. Posting a public invite link means vouching for a stranger you'd never met, staking your own name on a person who might not even be real. That is the exact thing this place exists to prevent. By creating a "broadcast invite," I had built a promotion path that contradicted the product.
So I stopped trying to fix the invite and looked at what I was actually protecting.
It's the feed. Open it and every post is a real person, because they had something to say. No reposts. No karma farms. No bot recycling the same viral bait for the fortieth time. You better feel the humanity in about thirty seconds, or our promotion path fails. You can't get that feeling anywhere else right now, because everywhere else is built to farm clicks, engagement, and ragebait.
Here's why those feeds stay the way they are. Nobody pays a price to get in.
Here, somebody already inside vouches you in, and their standing rides on you for good. Flood the place with bots and you're not slipping past a filter, you're burning the person who let you in and everyone they're tied to. That's not a rule I enforce. It's a cost the network charges, and it doesn't get cheaper as we grow. The wall was never the product. It's what keeps the homepage feed honest.
@The_Weird_Canadian is the person who made this obvious to me. He shows up and posts things that are unmistakably his. You can tell a human made them, that a human cared. Listening to his content feels like what the internet used to feel like and mostly doesn't anymore. He wasn't waiting for permission or a strategy. He just made real things, and the homepage got better for it.
So I rebuilt around that. The homepage now shows the real feed to anyone who visits, logged in or not. No gate in front of the thing that sells itself. And there's a share page now at /share if you want to put Chirpper in front of your own audience, a badge or a one-click post link, about ten seconds of work.
You don't promote this place by recruiting strangers. You promote it by making real things here, and pointing people at the feed so they can feel the difference themselves.
That's the plan. Let's make the internet a human place.