Changing Tides

It's a big day: Pine.blog is now free to use!

Pine.blog has been out for over a year now and it's been getting better and better over that time. However, although quite a few people have signed up, most have stopped short of signing up for a premium subscription. At first I thought that adding a free trial to Pine.blog would help, but that doesn't seem to do much to encourage signups.

I want Pine.blog to be useful to as many people as possible because I think Pine.blog and a lot of other Open Web tools (i.e. Micro.blog, Mastodon, etc) represent what social networking should be. In order to reach a wide audience, Pine.blog needs to let people know what it is and then convince them to use it. I've made pretty good progress on that first goal: Pine.blog's traffic numbers keep going up and responses are generally positive, it's just that those numbers don't really translate into subscriptions.

In that light, Pine.blog no longer requires a subscription to use: just create a free account and you're good to go! If you want to organize your feeds into multiple timelines or start a blog^* you'll still need a premium subscription, and don't worry, you still get a free trial.

At time of writing, the newest version of the iOS app is "Waiting for App Review", so you'll have to sign up on the website to start a free account, but you can use the app once you've created your account.