Version: Week Two

Tending the tree

A week ago I wrote about leaving Substack and planting something smaller in its place. I leaned on the image of a tree, a thing you put in the ground and then tend, as against the clearing-and-paving logic of the platforms I was trying to walk away from. The risk of publishing a metaphor like that is that you then have to live inside it, and a planted tree is never finished. It needs tending. Tending is unglamorous. It mostly happens where nobody is looking.

So this is a post about tending. Over the past week I added a number of small things to Tuhat. None of them are revolutionary, none of them will appear in a launch announcement, and most of them you will only notice if you go looking for them. But each one is a small decision about what kind of place this is, and I think those decisions are worth saying out loud, if only so you can hold me to them later.

You can now tell the machines to leave you alone

The one I care about most is the quietest. From today, every writer on Tuhat can ask the AI crawlers to stay away from their work.

You have probably read about this fight playing out elsewhere. The large language models are hungry, and the thing they are hungriest for is exactly what we make here: long, considered, human prose, the kind that took someone an afternoon to write and thirty years to be able to write. The default arrangement across most of the internet is that this gets hoovered up without anyone asking, to train a system that will then produce a flatter, cheaper imitation of the thing it ate. I find that grim. I suspect you might too.

So the new setting, which lives in your site settings, does two simple things. It adds a line to the file that crawlers read before they visit, the one the honest ones obey, telling the AI bots they are not welcome. And it adds a small instruction to each of your pages saying the same. Search engines are untouched. Google can still find you, your readers can still find you, the only thing being turned away is the machine that wants to digest you.

I made one decision on your behalf, which is that this is on by default. You are blocking the crawlers unless you choose not to. The neutral-seeming thing would have been to leave it off and let people opt in. But neutral defaults are never really neutral, they just quietly hand the advantage to whoever benefits from inertia, and in this case that is not you. So you start protected, and if you would like to feed the machines you can walk into settings and say so. Most of you, I suspect, will not.

I should be honest about the limits. These are polite signals, not walls. An honest crawler reads them and turns around. A dishonest one ignores them and takes what it wants, and there is no single approach to physically stop them. What I can do is make the wish unambiguous, easy to express, and on by default. The rest is somebody else's conscience.

You can see when someone wrote back

Tuhat has always had letters, a way for a reader to write privately to a writer about a particular piece. It is the opposite of a comment section. Nothing public, nothing performative, no thread of strangers shouting past each other. Just one person, having read the whole thing, taking the time to say something to you directly.

The gap, until this week, was that the conversation only really flowed one way. If you wrote a letter to someone and they replied, you had no good way of knowing. You had to remember, go back, and check. So now your inbox has a second half. Alongside the letters readers have sent you, there is a list of the replies to letters you have sent others. When someone writes back, you will see it.

And because an inbox that only fills up is an inbox you eventually stop opening, you can now tidy. Letters you are done with can be archived out of the way, on both sides, so the page shows you what is live rather than the entire accumulated history of everything anyone ever sent. Small thing. But the difference between a tool you keep using and one you quietly abandon is very often whether it lets you put things down.

You can search

This one is exactly as boring as it sounds, and I mean that as a compliment. There is now a search box. You type words, you get the posts that contain them. No ranking sorcery beyond relatedness, no personalisation, no learning what you click so it can show you more of it. It looks at the words on the page and finds the pages with your words on them. That is the whole feature, and it should be.

You can rename your user/page

I noticed a bunch of user2026 style users and assumed they were bots, I reached out to a few and they seemed to be real people that just assumed their wanted name was taken. One of the nice things about a new platform is that your name is likely free. Tuhat supports usernames from 3-32 characters, you can rename your site under site settings.

Organisations get a page too

The last addition widens the door slightly. Until now a Tuhat page belonged to a person, sat at tuhat.net/u/someone, and that was the only shape on offer. Now an organisation, a small studio, a collective, a project, can have one as well, at tuhat.net/o/something. Same rules, same thousand word floor, same plain pages, no algorithm. Just a different kind of name over the door.

Why bother saying all this

I could have shipped these quietly. Most of them are the sort of change that does not need a paragraph, let alone a post. But I think there is a difference between a place that is run and a place that is merely hosted, and part of that difference is that someone tells you what changed and why, in plain language, without spin.

None of this is growth. I am not trying to make a number go up. I added the things I added because a tree you have planted asks small things of you, week by week, and the work is to keep answering, quietly, in service of the few people who decided to read here instead of somewhere louder.

A handful of new paths through a small wood. That is the whole report. Thank you for being here.