To all of our new Friends, we're happy you've joined the Ello party 
:
To optimize your Ello experience, I'd like to provide some tips/advice. Learning a new platform can be confusing and daunting, especially when it's in beta phase and everything isn't working perfectly. We know that there are lots of bugs, and we're working as quickly as we can to fix them 
Please take a moment to check out the Help and About sections, where you can learn about Markdown post formatting, emojis and what Friends vs. Noise are.
We've have a ton of great feedback already, and I can tell you that my favorite features that are coming soon include:
- Media embeds (Soundcloud, Youtube, Vimeo, etc)
- Blocking another user, for safety and harassment concerns
- Private accounts, where you need to approve followers before they can see your content. Privacy and safety is very important to us.
There have been many questions about our business model, and a lot of people quickly assume that we're going to turn evil. The basic freemium concept is that we're going to roll out lots of small features that will allow you to enhance your Ello account. As a simple example, imagine paying $1 to be able to upload an animated .gif for your avatar. You can read a bit more about how we plan to sustain Ello without ads over here.
When it comes down to it, we hope that you stick around to see where this all goes. Please remember this is a beta platform, and that we didn't quite expect the level of interest that has crashed down on us in the past few days (our small team is playing a bit of catch-up right now). We're trying to build a positive, artistic community, without the evil, complicated bullshit that we've come to expect from big social networks that come from Silicon Valley. We want to hear from you and we truly appreciate your support as we turn Ello into something great.
Lovingly and thankfully from Denver, Boulder and Vermont,
/cc @budnitz, @todd, @lucian, @gv, @jayzes, @mk
