Open-sourcing Booklet

While growing Moonlight's developer community, I built a smart newsletter to create a personalized digest for each member. When I later looked at our analytics, I realized that the newsletter had ten times as many weekly active users as our website. I thought of the company as a web application, but for our community it was primarily a newsletter. The power of a newsletter is that it is asynchronous - you can read it on your own time and get a summary of activity. Chat apps such as Slack tend to require constant attention to keep up with what is happening. As I reflected on online community building, I wanted to build software for readers - something newsletter-first, for the majority of community members who just want to consume content. I detailed this idea later in Community-powered media companies: online communities tend to evolve into something like a group Substack. So, I started building Booklet as newsletter-first community software. In 2023, I launched FRCTNL, a…