Changelog: v0.5.0

Weighing Words

When I first created tuhat, I had a straightforward idea. Short-form content was leading to a degradation of humanity’s conversations: directly, through our inability to write full sentences, and indirectly, through how and what we were writing being co-opted by outside pressures.

Instead of taking the time to consider ideas, people had hot takes. Instead of writing a thoughtful reply, you got a heart or a thumbs up.

I spent a few weeks trying to write and engage on another platform, and every other post was trying to game the algorithm, both a computer algorithm and a human one. “If you are new and looking for followers, post your link and I’ll follow you,” all because a post with many comments would get boosted and they’d get attention. Then the hook was the second algorithm, a kind of quid pro quo idea: people would follow me, assuming that way I’d follow them back.

Needless to say, those tactics don’t work on tuhat. There is none of the first, and no mechanism for the second.

There is also the question of the thousand words. Why 1000? It’s somewhat arbitrary. I’m a sucker for round numbers; 755 words doesn’t have the same feeling. I also like naming things, and these days finding unique names with a free domain is exceptionally hard, so tuhat it was.

As a native English speaker, even though many of my first words were in Haitian Creole, I can’t help but see the world through English eyes and an English-speaking brain.

As people started to write in other languages, I was delighted and added site translations and language-specific homepages. The latest language to be added is Turkish.

A thousand words in Turkish isn’t the same as 1000 in English, due to the way the grammar works: sentence structure, conjugations, etc. The same is true in Polish, Arabic, and, unsurprisingly, languages like Korean and Chinese. There is probably some real scientific, linguistic study of the expressiveness of particular languages.

I spent a fair whack of time thinking about the right numbers for each language, doing analysis of example texts that are translated into many languages, and how they vary in length. Then I erased all the code and removed the 1000-word requirement. If you want to write a two-word poem, you can. The minimum was dropped several days ago, and people continue to write long-form content. The experience of tuhat, the editor, and the way posts are displayed are not conducive to writing a lot of short-form content.

Collectives

I’d previously mentioned the existence of /o/ sites, like this one, /o/tuhat, which are organizations rather than users. Originally this was exclusive to people paying for the platforms I’ve built for small South African businesses, e.g. werkr/winkl, and my latest community organization platform, folk thing, for their newsletters/blogs.

Then I noticed a pair of users had hacked a way to do something similar by having multiple accounts and linking to their user accounts. I appreciate this kind of ingenuity, so I set them up as their own org: o/badmeritcollective. They helped me out with some teething issues to properly support multi-author ownership, and there we are. There is still no automatic way to form a writing group. If you are two or more existing tuhat users who want to put together a shared publication, use the contact form and let me know what it should be called and your existing usernames.

In addition to supporting individuals, I’d be delighted for tuhat to be used for zines, community newsletters, you name it. The layout tweaks made last week already enabled more of a newspaper feel, but I am sure more could be done to better support the needs of groups of writers. If you have an idea for a feature or a layout improvement, please contact me.

Author Support

One of the first questions I got when I started tuhat was: how will authors make money? I’m naturally averse to associating any of my creative pursuits with financial remuneration, yet I know that for many, their creative work is their livelihood. Much like building and running digital platforms is mine.

At first I looked into building a bespoke payment solution, but luckily someone has already done what I wanted, and it’s called Liberapay. It’s an open-source nonprofit that is funded through the same donation model it enables.

One caveat is that Liberapay is intended to fund open-source projects. That means no special tiers, bonus material, or paywalls. It’s a recurring donation model for the public work you make, which everyone has access to.

This table gives you a clear picture of what you’d actually get if someone were to support you. Everyone uses Stripe under the hood and requires independently setting up an account with them.

tuhat support

Instead of some elaborate bate and switch, where we get you hooked on the promise of a free product and then start selling your data to show you ads, or otherwise enshitifying the platform. We want to use the sam Liberapay model to support our operational costs. If you take value from tuhat, believe in the project, and can afford to support it. We'd greatly appreciate it, our Liberapay account is linked to 8by3, the umbrella org for tuhat.

Licenses

You can set a license for your writing, as I don't have a right to give your content away the default is Copyrighted to you, but there are several other CC (Creative Commons) licenses you can choose from.

Small Fixes

1. Bug: Code blocks and numbered lists weren't saving properly
2. Feat: Added table support to the editor
3. Feat: Added ability to download post as an epub file for offline reading
4. Bug: When renaming a user, if you have stored images the paths are updated
5. Bug: Local auth tokens weren't automatically renewing on expiry