Our first fundraising drive is here! And here's what you can expect in the next version of Uncharted Blue

Whew! All right, after a hectic few months I think we've got the basic structure of Uncharted Blue squared away and you can begin to see what we're trying to accomplish here. Now it's time for an update on what's coming next—and time for our very first fundraising drive.

You can contribute in two ways: you can either give a one-time "tip" by clicking here or visit your account page to bump up your account to a $5 per month version that has absolutely no extra features other than being able to boast that you're giving us $5 a month.

Subscriptions to the site are free. That's going to continue to be true forever: paywalling off good content while "A.I." and disinformation specialists continue to flood the internet with bad content isn't a tenable societal plan. It will, and I mean this sincerely, kill us all. But we do need some way to pay the bills that come with running our little-but-growing website, and that means having a good ol' fashioned pledge drive. No, there will not be tote bags.

If you'd like to help us grow into the sort of site that can compete with the big ones, we need your help. But we only want your help if you can really, truly afford it. We're all very tired of the election season's constant declarations that if this or that entity doesn't get two more dollars by the end of the quarter they will have no choice but to feed their children to bears. We're over it.

So whether you can afford to pitch $2 our way, or $25, or $200, or $0 but with a thank-you attached, we'll be grateful for all of it. The money will go to three things and ONLY three things:

1. Paying off what it took to create this site and keep it running (not a lot!)
2. Giving us breathing room while we develop the next, much bigger version of the site (more on that below!)
3. Building up a paid writing staff, please? (they would like this very much!)

That's it. Those are the only three expenses. There are no Vice Presidents of Such-and-Such here that need to be paid, there's no secret investors, there's none of that. My expenses have consisted of developing the site you see here and paying its monthly bills. What we really need, if we're going to be successful, is to be able to pay our writers rather than relying on goodwill and free time to produce each story.

I will eat my arms off before allowing Uncharted Blue to ever be the sort of place that has more vice presidents than actual writers. It will never happen. I'm building this place to be about progressive-minded writing and only progressive-minded writing. That's the plan that's resurrecting The Onion. It's the plan that's kept lean sites afloat even as the ones run by hedge funds or brunchlord menaces tell each other that if they can't turn their Brand into the corporate equivalent of Optimus Prime there's just no point in carrying on.

A place for readers, and a place for writers. That's what I'm trying to build here—and what I want your help with.

The first goal of this fundraising drive is to pay off my startup expenses and make sure I can pay the monthly expenses that keep things running. The second, more ambitious goal—the longer-term goal of this and every future fundraising drive—will be to provide income to the writers who have signed on to be a part of this. That includes myself: My family continues to insist on things like "eating" and "having electricity," and both of those sound like things I myself would like to have.

I'll be honest here: it's maddening to have to start from zero yet again. If we raised just 10% of what My Previous Employer usually raised in a year, just a measly ten cents for each one of their dollars, we could have a half-dozen writers on staff here and give healthcare to every single one of them. And the site would look spectacular. The odds of this one end-of-year fundraising drive being able to pull that off are, at our size, nearly nonexistent—but we've all got to start somewhere, right?

That's the broad outline of what we're planning. Now it's time to talk about what the next version of Uncharted Blue looks like—the reason I'm often scarce even on my own homepage. In the background, I've been Doing A Thing.

Those of you who've known me for a while know that I actually held two roles, at My Previous Employer. The first was writer. But many years back, I also acted as chief architect for that site's complete update and redesign, the one that added nearly every little feature you still see there today. You can still see the bones of that now-old redesign in lots of places around the site, it's held up rock-solid despite a decade of technical changes around it, and we did the whole thing with a staff of just three people.

Well, now it's time for me to do it again.

So that's what I'm working on: A new generation of website that focuses on all the things we got right the last time around, but does more. And that means the next version of Uncharted Blue is going to have:

Community diaries. We can't do without that. Much of the media has retrenched into little siloed operations with very little opportunity for readers to participate in the conversation. At the same time, large social media companies like "X" (pfft) and "Meta" (pffft) have degenerated into places with active contempt for their users.

There's no point in having a site that prioritizes writing if the community can't be part of that prioritization! The power of the internet is its ability to connect you to someone, somewhere, who knows one specific thing in more depth than you could possibly hope to. None of those people are professional media pundits. They're you.

Plan on seeing community diaries here. It'll happen. I'm working hard on it.

Better comments. The Ghost commenting system is bare-bones. In researching other commenting systems, I've yet to find any that are completely satisfying; infinitely nested comments are a must, but there's a lot more to a "good" commenting system than that. I think I can design a better system—one that's better than anything currently out there, in fact.

So I can tell you that we'll absolutely be adding the ability for any community member to write stories for themselves, and we'll absolutely be reengineering the comments section into something I think everyone will fall head over heels for. When it comes to the specific details of what that looks like, however, I want to keep my mouth zipped until we get much, much closer to turning the whole thing on.

When will that happen? It's going to be months, not weeks. I'm aiming for the first quarter of next year. Maybe. If all goes perfectly.

That timeline, however, depends on fundraising. Being able to provide an actual income to writers would free me up to research, design, and code on a daily basis. If that doesn't happen the site's new version will still happen, it'll just take longer.

So there's my pitch. I absolutely hate anything that involves fundraising—and wasn't about to start a fundraising effort during the most consequential election of any of our lives because people's money and attention needed to be focused on that, not on me. But now it's time to turn this little site into a Big One, and if you like what you see so far and have faith that I and the other writers can turn it into something valuable, really valuable, then please pitch in.

I'm not framing this solely as a subscription drive for a specific reason: For now, it's an effort to get a bit of seed money. If you've liked my work, either as a writer or as main architect of that website I built for My Previous Employer, consider this the first chance ever to put a tip in my jar in thanks.

Or maybe you just want to be able to brag, when Uncharted Blue takes off and the rest of the internet WISHES IT WAS AS COOL AS US, that you were on the ground floor when it happened. You were a founder of that future greatness. The greatness of using animal pictures rather than Trump's unbearable face. The greatness of being able use swear words in posts about Elon Musk. The greatness of telling Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos where he can go and how he can get there.

And with that, we flip the switch on our first fundraising drive ever. Welcome one and all, and please give what you can so that we can grow this little website into something special.