...and most people have at least 2 accounts (one for porn?) but we won't talk about that ;) This may not mean much to you, but to me it's huge. Voat is in early alpha with a big backlog and a lot of polishing and refactoring waiting to be done, but we'll get there eventually.

I wanted to give you an update on what is going on "behind the scene". I will be graduating in about 1 week from now and getting my bachelor's degree. Immediately after that, I will be taking a much-needed 2-week vacation and visit my parents whom I haven't seen in what feels like ages. When I get back home after this, I will start packing my things and leaving Sweden (I am moving to Zurich, Switzerland).

Voat is still deep-down just my side-project, even though this thing has grown way beyond that. In fact, I never really expected voat to go beyond the first 10 users (initially, they were all my friends and relatives and we used voat as our own little platform). By word of mouth and somewhat unfortunate chain of events at that other website, voat got some unexpected attention and more people started to join.

The Washington Post mentioned voat and after that, PC Magazine did the same, and finally, Breitbart.

More and more people started to help out by fixing my bad programming or by contributing new ideas or features. Right now, a dude I never met IRL is finishing up the new voat API which is fantastic, btw and you should totally help test it if you're into that sort of thing.

Thanks to voat project, I learned quite a lot (which was my original goal with this project) about software development and I've even had the opportunity to meet the founder of doodle and a bunch of other interesting people. I am thankful for the input that voat community has been constantly providing on any good or bad thing I do as you guys help keep me in check and in a way, guide me through all this.

I don't know what the future holds. I don't want to show ads on voat and I don't want to beg for money (but you should totally donate via paypal to hello@voat.co and mention your username if you want a donor badge on your profile), so eventually we'll set up a form of freemium model where people, who want to get more out of voat, could pay for a year of voat premium for, say $10. You seem to be supportive of this concept as discussed here. The most important thing about this is that nobody would ever be forced to pay to use voat and we would never have to show any ads at all. This would be entirely voluntary.

Anyways, so far, thanks to voat, especially in the past 6 months or so, I haven't been able to get much sleep, always worrying about people waiting on their subverse transfer requests to get processed, about voat security... but whenever someone discovered a security issue, they reported it to me via PM or email without causing much fuss. You guys rock! I promise that, if voat ever becomes financially stable, I'll set up a "hacker fund" to reward people who discover security issues.

So there's that. A big thank you to all who helped create voat and a big thank you to all who use voat. And hell yes, a big thank you to all who donated and to those who would have donated if they had the means to do so. Life's hard as it is and as someone who's been looking for food in a dumpster (cool story, I may tell it one day), I totally understand.

Edit: good morning... and RIP inbox :( Thank you all who donated, the voat server has been fully paid for for the next 3, almost 4 months (unless we have to scale up if a lot more people join voat)!!! I'll try to respond to everyone asap. This is beyond crazy.