Our resolution for 2023: Build a safe place to change the world

Make your New Years resolution now: No more giving power to people who platform racists, white supremacists, and climate deniers.

2023 will be the year that Project Mushroom builds a critical mass of justice-focused creators across our very own collectively-led ecosystem working for the greater good.

With your support, we are now well on our way to building Project Mushroom into a safe place for people who want to change the world.

Project Mushroom is now officially the largest climate platform on Mastodon. As of today, January 1, more than 10,000 people have joined Project Mushroom and we're directly connected to 250,000+ people across Mastodon!

You can support Project Mushroom by becoming a recurring Project Mushroom supporter for as little as $2 per month:

Our New Years resolution is to help everyone quit Twitter & Substack and take back power from the billionaires

We get it, the billionaire-funded social media and newsletter companies have been seductively stealing our attention for years — but enough is enough.

Make your New Years resolution now: No more giving power to people who platform racists, white supremacists, and climate deniers.

As we enter 2023, our entire focus is to follow through with our promise of creating a safe place on the internet — a place with anti-racism and climate justice at its core, a place where we can do the work we want to do to change the world without fear of harassment or the whims of billionaires.

Step 1: Sign up for a Project Mushroom account:

Project Mushroom has worked to design an experience that's explicitly anti-racist & anti-harassment — we are the largest Mastodon server with paid moderators.

We have two choices:

Spore Social (federated with 250,000+ across Mastodon): http://spore.social

Project Mushroom (invite-only — just the 10,000 of us): http://projectmushroom.social/invite/2kLxn3sy

Step 2: Find your friends who already joined:

Our custom-build onboarding tool will help you decide between spore.social (our space that's connected with the rest of Mastodon) and the original Project Mushroom server — a walled garden for maximum safety and maximum joy. 🍄

If you're signing up for a Spore account, I'd also recommend using Movetodon — it's amazing: https://movetodon.org

Step 3: Invite all your followers:

Your help spreading the word about Project Mushroom will grow our movement, find our people, re-gather us together in a space that's truly ours, and take back power from the billionaires.

Keep reminding your friends that we are *much* more than a couple of Mastodon servers.

We're planning a direct Substack competitor (especially for progressive & justice-minded folks) with features that are unmatched:

🍄 Free newsletter hosting/publishing — with our co-publisher agreement

🍄 Assisted newsletter setup, including logo design and startup advice

🍄 Newsletter discoverability across the entire Project Mushroom ecosystem

🍄 Easy-to-use, open-source creator tools via Ghost

If you have any questions about any of this, or if you get stuck along the way, we have a brand-new help desk that's up and running.

Creating a self-sustaining Project Mushroom 🍄

Project Mushroom's goal is to establish a sustainable, democratically self-funding service for advancing justice work so that we can minimize the influence of large donors, sponsors, and/or advertisers. What we want is for Project Mushroom to have community ownership and community governance — and the best way to do that is through recurring support that we can rely on and build around.

It costs about $2/month per user to operate Project Mushroom (in full transparency, I'm happy to chat with anyone (seriously, email me) to explain how we calculate that!) — so that's our ask of you.

Please contribute $2 per month — or a bit more if you can afford to cover folks who need to opt out — so that we don't have to spend anyone's time and energy on fundraising, and we can just get straight to work building Project Mushroom.

We have big plans this year and we can't wait to keep making them happen alongside you.

In solidarity,

Eric