Chirpper has always worked one way. Someone already here hands you an invite, and their name stays attached to yours. If you turn out to be great, that reflects on them. If you turn out to be a bot farm, that reflects on them too.
That is the whole product. It is why the feed here is people instead of output.
But it left a hole. If you found Chirpper on your own, with nobody to invite you, there was exactly one way in. You signed up, you landed on a waiting page, and you waited for me to personally notice you and decide you were a real person.
That worked. It also did not scale past one person's attention, and I am one person. People sat in that line for weeks. Some gave up. I only found out how bad it had gotten when I went digging into a signup nobody had ever responded to and found a long queue behind them.
Today that changes. You can sign up without an invite, and any member can let you in.
How signing up works now
Click join. Pick a username and a password. That is the whole account. No email, no phone number, no real name, no document upload.
Then write a short intro. Who you are, how you found this place, what you would post about. Anything that sounds like a person talking.
Your intro becomes a post under your own name, in a new area called Eggs. Because that is what you are for now. An egg. Not a member yet, but here, visible, and able to talk.
Members can see your post in the feed and in a list of everyone currently waiting. From there it is just a conversation. They read it, reply to it, ask you things. You can answer, in your own thread, before anyone has let you in.
If one of them decides you are worth putting their name on, they hatch you, and you are a full member.
One person is enough. Nobody is voting. Nothing is being tallied. You need one member to decide you are real.
Why hatching someone costs something
When a member hatches you, it costs them one invite out of their own supply. It is gone.
That is deliberate. If it were free, the smart play would be to hatch everyone and see what sticks, and a line full of strangers is exactly where that goes wrong fastest. The cost is what makes the decision mean anything.
The reputation side is real too. From the moment they hatch you, their standing and yours move together, in both directions, permanently.
There is no reward for doing it a lot. No points, no leaderboard, no badge for hatching the most people. Any of those would push members toward waving people through, which is the one thing this cannot survive.
To hatch someone, a member needs a TrustRank of 51 or higher and an account at least seven days old. Both numbers are first guesses. They will move once we see how this behaves in the wild.
Why the intros stay public
Your egg post does not disappear once you are in. It stays.
It is the record of how you got here. What you said before anyone knew you, who asked you questions, and who hatched you.
That is something no other platform can offer you. A site that checks your ID has a record too. It is just a record you cannot show anyone, held by a company you have to trust, about a person you had to stop being anonymous to become.
What we do not know yet
This is a real change to how people get in, and it is untested at any real volume. The line is short right now. Nearly everything about how this behaves is a guess.
We do not know how many people will write an intro instead of closing the tab. We do not know how many members will spend an invite on a stranger. We do not know whether people who hatch in turn out different from people invited by a friend, which is why every entry now records how it happened, so we can tell the difference later.
We will publish what we find, including the parts that do not work.
Bots are not banned here. There is no detector, no scan, no filter reading your posts and deciding what you are. There is a cost instead. Getting an account means convincing a real person to attach their name to yours, and that is expensive at scale in a way captchas and phone numbers never were. It is expensive in the one currency automated accounts do not have.
If you are already a member, the eggs are in the right column of the homepage. There are people in there right now, waiting.
Go read one. Ask them something.