A totally legitimate interview of our core team by an eminent journalist (real)
First of all, what do you mean by community blog?
A blog which is community-owned (right now, just me) and operated. Non-Profit. Exists purely for the sake of providing a safe space to write for the community.
What Community?
The Queer community. Focusing on the trans experience of their world.
How do you know who is queer?
I don’t. That’s why the blog will always stay invite-based. I invited queer people I know. Next, users get to decide who they let in. You will be inviting people in. I trust your judgement.
Do the members need to maintain a tone or something?
Nope. Unless you put in your legal name, who will know it is you? Use that anonymity wisely. Maybe make seventeen blogs for all seventeen of your personalities with different languages, dialects, and word associations. The sky is the limit. I always wanted to start a mysterious blog where I’ll talk only in binary and Morse code. Maybe I’ll do that now once I’m free.
What is your vision for the blog?
None. The community members get to decide that. I am a facilitator. I had the know-how, so I did it. I needed a blog for myself, so I decided, why not make it available for others? You are the writer, dream up a vision and make other writers agree with you.
What about hosting costs?
It’s currently about INR 3500 to host all services minus the human labour cost. This specific blog is hosted on a 2 CPU + 2 GB RAM system, with 60 GB of storage. We have 1000 GB of Bandwidth for data. I host this blog on Digital Ocean, and I pay for extra protection. The cost is expected to go up when the blog needs more storage. I also intend to host an image-sharing service later if there is a demand. That will drive up the cost as well.
How will you pay for it?
So far, I am paying for it out of my pocket. But I have some ideas. I am also publishing books, and profits from that will be diverted to maintain the blog. I also intend to sell merchandise to recoup some of the costs as well. And beyond that, I am collecting subscriptions and donations via https://wree.quest. I have another website, which can be accessed at https://daxayoni.com, that exists to aggregate all my official publications. However, https://daxayoni.com/ will never post any article from https://daxayoni.blog.
How about the writers?
Glad you asked. You should be able to edit the styling of the blog and add custom headers and footers that stay the same in all your posts. Add your UPI address or QR code so people are able to support you directly. You can also set up Patreon or buy me a coffee to collect donations as well.
All the blogs also have web monetisation enabled. Web monetisation ensures that every time someone visits your blog, you get paid a small amount of money. It’s in its early days, so not a lot of users, but this is being proposed as a web standard. Once that happens, you can get paid without ads. You can be an early adopter with us to ensure your right to get paid for your honest work. We are also not Google searchable or trackable, and we also have no trackers beyond as stated in the privacy policy. We also can’t see anything about a user except their username, the physical space their content is consuming, and their public blogs. That’s it.
That’s it?
That’s it. If you wanna know more, you can always reach out to me. My socials are available at https://wree.quest