Thank you for shaping Switter’s first 50 days!
We’d like to open by saying a massive thank you for helping shape and be apart of the first month of Switter. It’s been a wild ride but the community feels stronger and more united than ever before. We’ve put a little bit together about the journey so far and beyond.
Switter stats from our first 50 days
- 76,638 users
- 930,139 toots
- 17,266 listings (In the last 30 days)
- ~1.5 million listings searches
- ~20TB of bandwidth
- ~246 million requests
Who is J?
Ever wondered about the man behind the magic (by magic we mean technical jargon and all-nighters). Jack (aka @J) has finally quit his civilian job to work on Assembly Four full time and can introduce himself a little better. He’s written up a fantastic blog post about our journey with Switter so far and all the little bumps along the way.
Take a gander over on: https://medium.com/assembly-four/my-six-week-rollercoaster-ride-172eb58ba80e
Swittart by Switthearts
We love it when ya’ll get creative. This month’s Swittart is from DollymopUK and it’s going to be on the wall at Switter HQ.
International Whores’ Day (aka International Sex Workers’ Day)
We’ve put together an awesome little side project to help connect workers across the globe for IWD18. Through our personal network and Switter, we found that many workers have started running their own workshops and meetups. We thought it would be great to centralise this so every worker is able to host or find an event near them.
You can find or submit and event in your area over on: https://www.internationalwhoresday.org/
If you’re running a workshop, event, or know of one you think should be added, shoot us a message and we can add it to the calendar. For events which are sex workers only, we can redirect workers to you for vetting. Locations can be kept broad if discretion is an issue.
Emojis!
We’ve upped our emoji game!
Donations
Switter has grown at an unprecedented pace. We’re less than 2 months old and we are already the 4th biggest Mastodon instance! However, with our growth also comes with increased costs.
Switter currently costs about $1200–1500 AUD a month to run. This includes infrastructure and services like content distribution network (makes media load faster), sending emails, and monitoring tools.
We are all working on this full time and funding everything ourselves. Turns out lawyers a wee bit pricey especially when it comes to wading through the unknown territory of FOSTA/SESTA and we are committed to keeping Switter online and thriving. If you haven’t heard already, we’re now taking donations.
A few people have asked why we don’t just charge for the platform but we do feel a little uneasy about doing so. We want to keep Switter open and accessible for everyone in the sex industry, regardless of location and demographic. We understand that subscriptions are something that some people can afford but there are many who can’t and we’d like to ensure that they are also allowed to roam free on the platform. Hence donations or a “pay what you feel” seemed like the best option. Eliza, Jack and I have big plans for the future of Switter and are hoping to grow this into a fantastic platform for the community.
It doesn’t sound like much, but if you have a few dollars that you can spare per month, it would be a huge help to keeping the community running and help us execute new features and improvements faster.
If you’d like to donate you can do so via LiberaPay.
All the best from the team at Switter
