Well, here we are. In 2022, with an app and website, after literal years of fighting the ban hammer. This isn’t just the next step for Atlas, but the next step for our little corner of the internet. The team has put countless hours and money into getting here. Web buildout, legal incorporation, financial support from you all, app development etc. And this post serves as an update, in what is the first week after we have taken some control back into our hands. No more fear of posting content that is extremely important, but may get us banned. We don’t have to live in fear of the Meta algorithm picking and choosing when we get banned. We literally own our server and control what gets put on our site.

Like this: Terrorism. Taliban. ISIS. Bombing. Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurayshi.

See? Not afraid.

Woah, watch me go. No fear of posting pictures that go against social media guidelines.

We can post what we want, and how we want. We are and always will be: unbiased and unfiltered. This website and app give us the ability to report how we have always wanted. And it gives YOU the ability to keep up with the news without fear of losing us. On one hand, our core principles are the most important. We are starting to take steps towards more independence and scaling our news production. We have a legitimate passion for what we do and we want to do more. On the other hand, we know that Atlas is more than just an Instagram page now. It’s a community of readers, that humbly cherish what is now, a legitimate publication. You want more. And we do too. You have asked for a lot of things like podcasts, full merch, etc. We now have the availability to put resources towards those things. And in the spirit of that acknowledgment, we want to bring more value to you: the reader. This brings us to our first update on our progress.

The Day We Launched

After months and months of work by the entire team, collaboration across different roles, and an effort built out of necessity, we were able to bring a website and app into fruition. This didn’t come without challenges, and we are far from where we think Atlas can go. We aren’t aiming for small-time goals such as a podcast episode here and there. We want White House press credentials. We want IN the rooms when news happens. We want to make Atlas a staple in the world as a leading source for unbiased news and quality analysis. And when we were building these pillars, we constantly were asking ourselves: “do you think they would like this?”. They, meaning you. We wanted to build the best possible product for you. And by product, we mean Atlas as a whole. And as it came to launch week, we were confident in our ability to usher us, you, and the community into a new age. Sure, we have a lot more to do. There are things we want to change on the app, people we want to collaborate with. But as a whole, we pressed the button, turned it on, and made the post announcing that the day had come.

And shit. Lemme tell you. You guys are absolutely insane. So insane, that you crashed our dedicated server within 5 minutes. We had to call the server manager, in which we were told, “We are looking at your analytics, and recent access to the site seems like a DDoS attack. As a result, we are putting a full block temporarily to investigate who is trying to do this.”

But it wasn’t an attack, it was literally you guys trying to access it at one time, which is insane and honestly cool to see. So we got this resolved within a few minutes and we were back up and running.

And here are some numbers as of Tuesday morning. These stats are from 4 days…

What’s Next?

And this brings us to the concluding thoughts over the weekend. The team is very well equipped to make Atlas into something only previously dreamed of. Years of experience in e-commerce, web development, data, traditional investing, advertising and a plethora of other things. This team will be able to deliver on projects to the highest of quality.  And this type of post will come out pretty regularly updating everyone who is a loyal follower of what’s next. Right now we are working on:

• Dark mode for website and app– Not a necessity. But for some reason we had lot of feedback of wanting that feature and it isn’t to hard to do, so the dev team is doing it.
• Bug fixes for website and app– we didn’t know what might need fixing until we had users on the platforms using them. You’ll start to notice some changes over the next week with bug fixes, menu changes, and new UI features.
• New writers/contributors- we have some really good pages that have joined us. You’ll probably notice Tessaron’s posts so far (which has been great), and a few others like Our Wars Today and Rose Warfare (and all the others as they get accustomed to posting). These are friends who have joined together to build a community where all the pages can contribute without fear of getting banned. And with that theme, we are starting to look into hiring some journalists to help with some other categories. Business and politics is currently being headed up by Stanford. So expect some new authors around to help.
• Value stacking- we are starting to roadmap where we will go next. Thus far, we have literally only been news. But we want to do more. And you have asked. We will be bringing some HEAT to the app in the future and we are starting with a bang. We are starting to roadmap podcasts. It may take a month to get up a running, it may take 3. But we are working hard at it. And boy is it going to be good. We have some great guests in mind, but we have to build the infrastructure first. Podcasts will only be available in the app.
•  Posting avenues- Going forward, a lot, if not most of our articles will be small excerpts on the social media platforms (as they have been), with a direction to the website/app to read more in depth information that would never fit on an Instagram post. If we want to be around for the long run, we have to make sure we are mitigating risk to our online presence. This means posting TLDR on social media and having everyone go to the website/app for further analysis when it comes to certain topics, such as terrorism. Some people won’t like this. But, this is a must as it’s only a matter of time before we get flagged, and eventually deleted again (if we don’t change). But also, there will be some articles that are only available on the website due to the content. Even more, some analysis pieces will only be available on the app. We are bringing some super in-depth analytics tools to the platform. This means military discounts, student discounts, special offers, interest-based offers, and a whole suite of technical stuff you would get bored with but will be added to enhance the reader experience.
• Comments- a big part of our readers like to join the discussion. Some like the deep analysis. Some like to shit post. It’s all over the place but it’s a big attraction to what people enjoy. And as of now, during the free trial period, comments are off. This is mainly because we need to focus on growth and bug fixes. But it is also because we want to bring a quality comments feature to the app. The business side of Atlas believes we get banned on social media a lot because the algorithm is picking up a lot of traffic from comments. That’s one of the main attractions to having our own discussion comments on the app: being able to manage it ourselves and not get banned. But we are making it way better. We’re talking upvotes, downvotes, rewards for upvotes, moderators, comment sharing, and reposting. Currently, everything is in beta but the dev team is working diligently.

TLDR

Atlas has been around for 8+ years. Through multiple pages being deleted, censorship, and dealing with the risk of legitimately being gone forever, we jumped off the deep end and went head first into this new journey. We want to make Atlas a recognized publication with award-winning journalism, and part of that journey will be progressed because of your support.

People say all the time “we couldn’t have done it without you” just as a tagline for social credit. But in our case, we literally couldn’t have done it without your support. And this is just the beginning. We have some crazy crazy things planned and the team as a whole is excited to bring our vision to you.

Who knows what the future will bring. We plan on doing this for a long time. Most of us want to make careers out of Atlas. But for now, we are a bunch of dudes who love what we do, and are trying to consistently make it better.

Thanks for supporting us.