Waterfall Staff

Waterfall - End of Year Two

Once more we find ourselves in Waterfall's birth week - the initial launch being on the 10th December, and the first advertising being done on the 17th - so it's time for the annual reflection post! Waterfall has been around for two years now.

The Past

First, I want to give a huge shoutout to the community. It's been a shit year for everyone and I'm not going to say The Phrase™, but everyone on here has supported each other and propped each other up when they needed it, and made some fantastic pieces of artwork to boot. Be proud of yourselves, you've earned a rest.

Waterfall went through some changes this year, mostly behind the scenes. It went back to being officially a solo, personal project, and funded entirely by Patreon. Subscription features were scrapped, and the plan now is everyone gets everything. More on that later.

The Present

Waterfall is in what I'd call a "stable" state. More users join every day, at a steady rate that's not terrible, but not impressive. Overall activity seems to increase more or less on par, but again - it's not terrible, but not impressive. A lot of people are waiting for the rewrite update and the app, so this is understandable.

The Future

Using the above, I can start to plan for the future. First, premium subscriptions - there won't be any. The more I thought about it over the last year, the more I realised I absolutely hated the idea. It's artificially limiting to people, and it's a very corporate kind of move. Considering half the reason I started the site was because I was tired of corporate bollocks, that didn't sit well with me, so it's gone - there'll be milestones on the Patreon instead that unlock the extra features for everyone on the site. I want to see if I can make that work instead. It'd be sweet if I could just do it without the milestones but realistically, since I'm doing this instead of getting a Proper Job™, I need to pay the bills I guess - but overall, I don't want this to just be another corpo site that sells your data (which I don't do, by the way. No data selling, at all. The only income is patrons).

Immediate term - get the rewrite done. I was hoping to deploy it on the 17th, as you know, but getting enough sleep and dealing with depression is a full time job on it's own, so I'm relaxing my schedule a bit and using the extra time to do some things in the pipeline that'll make my job easier as I go, since I've neglected that over the last two years. It's still coming as soon as I reasonably can get it out of the door though.

I got sent an ask on Tumblr while I was writing this about how Pillowfort coming out of beta affects the site - the tl;dr is it doesn't, but the full answer is linked there if you feel like reading it.

The App

The app. It's well overdue, but good news - I have a working prototype. It's able to login and view posts, and make extremely basic text posts. That's progress, and not bad considering I've been building it while rewriting the entire site from scratch, I think. The main barriers right now are getting network detection to be a bit more reliable (we've all gotten pissed at the "connection flimsy uwu" messages on the Tumblr app), and getting a decent text editor written for it. Battery usage is also irritating me at the minute - it's probably fine and I'm just being a perfectionist, but I want to see if I can get it a bit lower. That said, I expect to start betas within a couple months - active development on the app will resume once the main rewrite is out and any bugs have been fixed.

The Site

Over the next year, something I really want to focus on is community building. I want to implement tools you guys can use to build your networks, reward good contributions and stuff. I also want you guys to be able to, if you want to be, more involved in the site's development, so I set up a proper place to request features and report bugs.

Obviously, getting more folks here is going to be the biggest driver, so please feel free to spread the word about the site in the meantime!

I'm in the home stretch with it all, and I'm excited to see if you guys like what I'm cooking up.

Environment

As with last year, I calculated the environmental impact of the site, and offset the carbon. This year, I split the offsetting funds between a wind power project in Rajasthan, India, and a project to bring clean water to families in Laos. Also as with last year, I threw 20 bucks to Team Trees.

Conclusion

We've come a decent way this year, though not as far as the first year - but that's fine. We've all had a crappy year. Let's hope next year is better, and we can make this place something good.

I owe a lot of the success of the site to you guys for sticking around and making it what it is.

Thank you.