Congratulations on 100,000 registered users WPD!

I'll distribute this badge tomorrow to all existing accounts, but for now, a bit of verbal masturbation as I speak on this historic (lol) moment.

We've been here since 26 April 2022 - that is eight months. We have been online for less than a year.

From October until November 8th, the original domain - watchpeopledie.co - was stolen by Namecheap and we moved to watchpeopledie.tv with no means of communicating this move to our users, as our old address was stolen. Obviously we got .co back eventually, but it was a month later. To get the original people back, they'd have to randomly check the URL of a site that had appeared to be offline for over a month.

And many of them did eventually.

We have effectively been online for 6.5 months.

And yet we just hit our 100,000th registration.

That is a fucking LOT.

For comparison, our other main site - rDrama.net - has been around since May 2021: 19 months. We only have 15,000 users there despite extensive media coverage of problems we've caused for journalists and political embarrassments. For the past two months, WPD has gained more members each month than rDrama has total members.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's that awful Mastodon Social platform that's meant to be some Twitter killer since big mean Elon owns Twitter now. It is over SIX YEARS old. It has received tens millions of dollars in funding and hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising from news media raging about Elon and touting it as some big nu-Twitter.

Do you know how many users they have after six years and tens of millions of dollars in direct expenses with professional webdevs and corporate backing and everything?

2,500,000

We've existed for 8% as long and have 4% of the users with 0 advertising besides word of mouth. This place was put together by a couple of bored autists and it's maintained by the same and a very small collection of users who keep it clean of fedposts and such.

A mid-sized Mastodon instance, which they consider to be a few thousand users, costs its host several thousand dollars per month. And all it is doing is using preset infrastructure to serve up text and basic multimedia.

We run on a fraction of that and we are video hosting platform. We are also incredibly feature rich, with our own ridiculous digital currency (your coins), an item shop, a goofy hat shop, a casino, a plethora of very diverse and fun graphical themes (currently locked as I force Christmas on everyone), robust profile customization, live chat, thousands of user-created emojis and pieces of art, a dynamic layout, and all sorts of dumb but fun purely optional shit. We've been deplatformed from every level of service provider out there, multiple times. We've been locked out of payment processors. We've even been reported to the center for missing children or what the fuck ever by someone with entirely too much free time.

WPD isn't anything that's going to change the world. But it's a testament to what can be done if independent developers have enough alcohol and the balls to stand up to the tech industry. It's a site for watching shock videos and shitposting and it's got a gay orange cat mascot, but this is incredibly significant what you've all done here by just using that place.

Whether you've financially supported the site through a subscription or crypto, or told your friends about it, or just made a few comments, or even just made an account because I forced you to, I really do mean it when I say thank you for doing that. No bullshit about how we're all some big retarded family or whatever, or how I know you personally, or how you're here for any morally lofty reason or anything like that, but I am being entirely sincere when I say that I am tremendously grateful to each and every single one of you on both a personal and a collective level.

Thanks for using WPD and thank you for putting up with our downtime for the first several months as we sorted out service providers! We have a lot of exciting plans for 2023 for both the people who enjoy posting and using the optional features, and for the overwhelming majority of you who are just here to watch videos. Everything is going to continue to get better and better and I love every last one of you. Romantically. I want to marry you. Slide into my dms.

• clitpeeler 💋