The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators

A few days ago, I launched a silly little web project the same way I have been doing for years. This one was different though, because people cared about it. Or at least, they cared about talking about it. As I wrote a few days ago, I launched fanfiction.lol, a fork of the open-source repository Archive of Our Own. I decided to post about it on my poetry Tumblr, since the only reason I use Tumblr at all is to post my poetry. And I also blazed the post $10 for fun, which is the Tumblr version of advertising a post. I've blazed posts in the past, trying to get people interested in my low-cost writing school or my values-driven webdev studio and they got a dozen or so notes. So I naïvely assumed that this project would have a similar fate. It didn't, it got thousands of notes, and the site got nearly 200 sign-ups so quickly that I exceeded the free plan of my email provider SendGrid—who then blocked me from paying for a monthly plan because their KYC policy meant I needed to send them my…