For those of our readers who are already on The Speakeasy, this is largely a recap of things you already know. For those of you who haven’t taken the plunge, consider this an invitation.
All you really need to know about The Speakeasy can be found here. It’s a social media app that Facebook and Twitter users will find pretty familiar after about 10 seconds of navigating it, as it works a bit like the Big Tech apps do. But it’s a whole lot different in other respects.
Unlike Facebook, which is now “fact-checking” people who refer to the Boulder mass-murderer as an Islamist with fraudulent articles claiming there is “no evidence” to suggest this (really, Lead Stories?) or Twitter, which deplatformed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after she tweeted “He is risen” in celebration of Easter, The Speakeasy isn’t into censorship or treating its users like dirt.
So it’s like Parler and Gab, right? Well, no.
Parler and Gab have a problem – actually more than one, but specifically one – which is that nobody is on Parler or Gab to talk about anything but politics. And that makes Parler and Gab boring to be on after a while.
At the Speakeasy, the content is contained in all different kinds of groups. There’s a food and drink group (Speakeasy Eats), a movies/TV/books/music group (Speakeasy Scenes), a humor group (Speakeasy Laughs), a Speakeasy Health group, groups on stock trading, sports, business, home improvement…the list goes on.
Only one group on the app, The Hayride Channel, is expressly political. So you can engage on pretty much any topic you’d like.
We’re even beginning to set up groups based on geography. Speakeasy Louisiana is the newest group on the app and it covers whatever is going on in the Bayou state.
Hayride readers, particularly those of you who read the site on your mobile device, will like this – you can access an ad-free version of this site via The Speakeasy so those ads don’t clog up your reading of the articles. Lots of you have told us you’d pay us whatever we want not to have to see those ads – well, a premium subscription to The Speakeasy will run you only $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year, and all the ads go away using the ad-free Hayride through The Speakeasy. And it’s as easy as can be – just click on The Hayride’s logo from the home menu on the app and there comes the site with no ads. Hayride links from the social feed of the app also lead to ad-free content for folks who have the premium subscription which costs not even three bucks a month.
Those of you who have asked how you can support the site will be pleased to know that this is it. Feel free to become a premium Speakeasy member and get all your friends to do the same and we’ll be finely supported indeed.
There’s a podcast I’m doing on the app. It’s a video livestream which hits on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and it’s interactive – you can use the chat feature on the livestream to ask me questions while I’m doing it. The podcasts are all archived, so they’re accessible via the app. We’re actually in the process of building a whole network of podcasts the app will carry.
And this week, Speakeasy subscribers will begin getting free access to all of the novels I’ve written. I’m putting the finishing touches on a 2nd edition of Animus, which will debut in the Tales of Ardenia channel on the Speakeasy, and dropping chapters into the channel at the rate of one a day starting today. This is happening in advance of a book app for the novels we’re building which will go live by this summer. And of course we’re less than a month away from the release of the third novel, Retribution. The Tales of Ardenia franchise is migrating its home to the app from Amazon, though we’ll keep selling books on Amazon for now. And the app is open to other book properties.
Not to mention other channels, which are coming. Web publishers, podcasters, authors, filmmakers, YouTubers, you name it. It’s going to be big.
Folks who are in the app love it. It’s still young and it’s still growing, but it’s a great little community so far. We think it’s going to grow up big and strong, and we’re excited about it.
You ought to check it out. Here’s a direct link to join, though you’ll want to download the app for your phone to get the full experience.