A new blog post appears! Please accept my apologies, as we have been terrible about updating those of you that are not in our Discord server about the progress of launch and development. We will be making sure that this doesn’t happen any further, you can expect regular launch updates here on the blog moving forward. A lot has changed since I last provided a launch update, I’ll try and cover it all here in as much detail as possible.
Our team continues to be blown away by the demand we see for Submit. When I started out on this project, just over two years ago, I knew there was a need for something like Submit, but I didn’t quite understand just how badly folks are looking for a new social network one that is safe, inclusive, privacy-first, engaging, and genuinely innovative. As of writing this blog post, we have over 107,000 users on the waitlist, nearly 11,000 active accounts on Submit itself, and just about 5,000 users on our Discord.
If you haven’t yet signed up on our waitlist, we’d encourage you to reserve your username by doing so! You can sign up for the waitlist here.
Since March, we’ve been hard at work enabling features, services and functionality on Submit, and inviting users from our Discord and the waitlist to help us test it. We’re getting close to enabling all major social functionality, including the following features:
There’s a whole host of underlying functionality that comes along with those such as mentions, additional privacy and security settings, and much more. The most important thing to understand is that all major social functionality will be enabled for all users on September 4th, 2023.
This list of features also only marks a subset of the total functionality and features that we will roll out, albeit a large portion of it. New features and functionality will be continued to be released and developed long after this initial feature launch date!
We have one other important date to announce, the end of the wait list. All those currently on the waitlist will be invited to create their account no later than September 4th, 2023. At this point in time, the waitlist will be disabled and anyone will be able to sign up for an account and immediately start using Submit.
In addition to continuing to build out Submit and the overall platform, we’ve also been hard at work growing the team that builds, moderates, and maintains it. Over the last few months we’ve hired three (3) community moderators, one (1) Sr Full Stack Engineer, one (1) Sr Frontend Engineer, and still have three (3) moderator roles open, and one (1) Sr Frontend Engineer role open. You can learn more about our open positions on our Careers page.
As our new team members get through their probationary period, they’ll be introduced to the community via our on-platform announcements, in Discord, and eventually on our soon-to-be-released Team page.
It’s important to understand that Submit is currently in early access. This means that things aren’t complete, some things are difficult to use, and some things don’t work as intended (or don’t work at all). This will change over time and will get considerably better after September 4th. If you’ve received an invite to Submit and aren’t comfortable using Submit in this state, it’s totally okay to wait until after all features are available! If you do choose to use Submit now, and help us test features and functionality while we roll out, that is great, and we greatly appreciate it!
If you want to provide feedback and report bugs that you find, the best way to do currently do this is on our Discord server in the #early-access-feeback and #bugs channels. In the future we will add non-Discord ways to submit this type of feedback as well.
As we get closer to September 4th, we are ramping up invites on a daily basis. Throughout most of June and July, we averaged sending roughly 500 invites a week. We are now moving up to sending roughly 2,000 invites every week, both through the waitlist and in the Discord. If you are currently on the waitlist, we can’t tell you exactly when you’ll get an invite, but it’ll be between now and September 4th.
Apparently there has been some confusion about Submit and Discord, something that I wanted to clear up once and for all. You do not need to be on Discord to use Submit, now, in the future, or ever. Discord is something that is entirely optional and that will never change. If you do want to participate in our Discord server, we’d love to have you! You can join the Discord through this invite link.
At the end of every week, we hold a fireside stream to discuss what we’ve worked on that week, what we’ve deployed, and what we’re working on the week after. We also run through some stats, go over any announcements, and open it up informal community Q&A. These streams usually last about an hour and are currently hosted in our Discord. We record each of these streams and you’ll be able to watch them all back on Submit shortly, once we’ve enabled video for everyone.
While we currently host these in Discord, eventually they’ll be hosted on Submit itself, most likely starting in September. If you want to get the most up-to-date information on launch and what’s going on, I strongly encourage you to join us for a fireside!
We’ve rolled out a new feature to make enabling backer status on the platform easy, as well as making gifting backer status simple. When you choose to back Submit financially, you’ll receive a backer code, you can choose to use this code yourself, or give it as a gift. Each code is one-time use, doesn’t expire, and is good for whatever term of time that you choose to back for (you cannot gift month-to-month backer codes).
As always, backing is never expected nor required, Submit is free to use for everyone!
That being said, platforms like this are very expensive to run, and ultimately, we live or die by the support of our communities. With new features rolling out, and more and more of you starting to get active on Submit - now is a great time to become a backer and help support the platform and our mission of building an inclusive, safe and privacy-first space for all humans to share and explore. If you’d like to learn more about backing, please check out the backer details.
If you aren’t on the platform today, backing gets you access immediately, and with Backer codes now enabled, these make great gifts too! Backers also get unique profile badges and achievements, additional features, and we continue to add more ways to reward those who do decide to back.
If you’re considering backing and are comfortable using Venmo (@submitgg) or Cashapp ($submitgg), we need your help testing out our new banking integrations with these services! They are much better than Patreon (fees wise), but please use whatever you’re comfortable with. When sending to these accounts, please only put your waitlist email in the comment! If you do use Venmo/Cashapp, we offer a bit of a discount on some tiers too:
Patreon prices are listed on our backer page.
I’d like to highlight the support of all of our incredible Backers and express my deepest thanks for their support and help in achieving our mission and goals.
Thank you for all of your support and your patience while we get through our initial launch, I can’t wait to see all of you on Submit!