Welcome to Overstory!

Overstory is my indieweb project. It isn't quite complete yet. At some point in the future, it will have all kinds of fun functionality, but for now we have:

• a rich text, collaborative editor with media embedding
• media upload support
• importing other blog exports if you want to move

Posts are special in Overstory. You get one post a day, and all the posts go live at the same time (noon UTC) every day. You can comment on posts (you get one comment per post) and react even. Comments and reactions also go live at noon the next day. Don't keep refreshing the page, the database doesn't update until tomorrow.

We're designed to be a kind of social, online third space. I've had a lot of time to think about what I want in a social media platform, and this is trying to embody that. Besides the usual "you can write a post and other people can follow you and read your posts" we have:

• Clubs, which are joinable, often discoverable interest groups. Clubs can put out calls for writing, you can either re-share an old post or write a new post to respond to the call. Your responses to calls do not count towards your 1/day limit, but you can only respond to a call once. Clubs also have space to share real-world locations and meeting times, plus other club fixtures coming soon.
• Topics. Like many other things in Overstory, Topics are limited. You get one per post. You can just add whatever you want, like a hashtag. Once enough people are posting about a thing, it becomes a Topic. You'll find other posts at the topic page. This is how you discover other writers.
• Letters. Correspond with your friends with letters; you can write to as many people as you'd like, but letters don't get delivered right away - they show up the same time all the other posts do.
• Zero Numbers. I think. I tried to eliminate likes and reposts. You can't even see how many members are in a club or how many replies are on a post (although you can probably count). I don't want to encourage people to care about numbers.

We have no algorithm for surfacing content into your feed. Your edition contains all the stuff written in the past day. If you want to find more people to follow, look to other writers in the topics you write about. Shared attention is important. Join clubs. Answer calls.

This is a site that tries to be built around consent and trust from first principles. In addition to following other people, you can vouch for them. Vouching provides a web of trust and crowdsourced moderation mechanism; this will be evolving over time. All our profiles are private by default; you need to opt in affirmatively to allow others to follow you (or approve followers one by one). I'm doing my best to bake consent into every action on this site, please help me make it even better.

If you want to post here, you can! The waitlist is taking requests, visit https://overstory.social and you can get on there. We have a supporter program too, which mostly just helps defray the hosting costs, but also: supporters can post publicly (once a day!) and share their work with the world; you can wire up a custom domain and set your home theme. This makes Overstory a pretty good place for your blog.

If you want to contribute time, money, ideas, or code, let me know. This is a passion project; I want to make sure it is amazing.