Subject: Expanding the universe

Hi ~USERNAME,

Thanks for joining cosmic.voyage and making it such an awesome
place right out of the gate. I've been thrilled waking up each day
to the new stories. We have so much fun chatting about
possibilities in IRC, too. It's an inspiration to write more,
which I really appreciate.

Let's keep this momentum going, okay? Everyone is fairly engaged
so far, but I know that as the shiny paint begins to dull some of
our writers will slip away or visit less often. (That's totally
okay! I can't wait for the surprise visits we'll get from our
infrequent writers in the months ahead.) But while we still have
the energy and plenty of resources let's attract some new people
too.

Our system load is rarely over 0.01, even with the people that sit
in tmux and IRC. This may be a tiny instance, but it doesn't take
much to run text stories. I think we can scale quite a bit before
processing or bandwidth looks problematic.

If you know other people who like to write, invite them along with
us on the journey. While some technical skill is required to use
the system, that should be part of the selling point, not
a detriment. Part of our experience is using these primitive tools
and it's a very simple gateway for new *nix users to get their
feet wet.

Over the holiday I plan on recording some tutorials that will walk
users through all the steps necessary to create an account, add
a ship, send a long message, add a ship description, and so on.
Once they're ready I'll share the links out over email. In the
meantime, I encourage you to help be ambassadors to new people as
you've already been doing. 

I've gotten so lucky with the crews that have taken the cosmic
voyage so far. You're all brilliant, creative, and kind. Let's
keep that up and invite more!

In case you joined in the beginning when things were a little more
ad-hoc, here's our current process for becoming a new user:

1. pick a username 
2. send me a ssh pubkey

That's it! I'll add the user to the system using that pubkey. Once
they're in, the welcome email should tell them how to do all the
next stuff, like creating a ship and logging messages.

We've got 23 users as of this email. Let's see if we can get that
over 50. :D

Bon voyage, 
tomasino
