I stopped posting anywhere about two years ago. Not deliberately — I just noticed one day that I hadn’t written anything longer than a sentence in months, and that I didn’t miss it.

That bothered me more than it should have. I used to write. Badly, mostly, but often.

When I went looking for where that went, the answer was a bit embarrassing: every place I could have written had quietly taught me not to. Twitter caps a thought before it finishes, so I learned to have shorter thoughts. Substack wants a Publication, with a schedule and subscribers and a reason for people to give you their email, so I never started one. Medium wants Content. Tumblr I still like, but I wouldn’t send it to my colleagues. And Facebook stopped being a place people write anything at all a long time ago.

What was missing wasn’t a platform. It was a normal middle. Somewhere you could put four hundred words about your week without it being A Post, or a newsletter issue, or a personal brand.

What I actually wanted

Somewhere I could write like I’d write to a friend who happened to be interested.

No follower count deciding whether it gets seen. No algorithm optimising me toward whatever performs. No pressure to be useful or insightful or on-topic. Just: here is a thing I’ve been thinking about, and if you’re the sort of person who thinks about that too, hello.

That last part turned out to be the interesting bit. Most social platforms connect you to people you already know, or to people who are already popular. Almost none connect you to people because you write about the same things. That seems backwards to me. The friends I’ve kept longest from the internet, I met through something we were both obsessed with, not because an app suggested them.

So this is Rilezzz

It’s a social site where the feed is writing rather than status updates. No stories. No algorithmic ranking. You pick what you’re writing about — health, family, work, whatever’s actually on your mind — and readers find you through that rather than through numbers.

There’s a blank-page problem with any writing site, so when you choose a topic it offers you a few prompts. Not to tell you what to write, just to get you past the first line. What symptom did you ignore for too long? Who do you call when it’s bad news? What feedback stung because it was true? You can ignore all of them.

There’s also a private diary, for the days when you want to write something and specifically don’t want it read.

It’s early, and I’d rather say so

I built this on my own, and today I deleted about twenty thousand accounts off it — nearly all of them bots that had found an open registration form and helped themselves. What’s left is a small number of real people and a lot of empty space.

I could have left the number up. Twenty thousand users looks better than two hundred. But anyone who signed up would have found an empty room and worked out the truth in about four seconds, and then the number would be the reason they didn’t trust anything else on the page.

So: it’s early. The feed is quiet. If you write something here this week, roughly nobody will read it, and I’d rather you knew that going in.

What I can promise is that it won’t measure you. Nothing here ranks you against anyone, hides your writing because it underperformed, or asks you to post more often to stay visible. You write when you have something to say, and it sits there for whoever finds it.

If that sounds like the thing you’ve also been missing, come and write something. I’ll read it.