There is a thing that happens when people who have been told to be quiet for long enough finally find each other — not a sound exactly, more like a pressure change, the way the air shifts before a storm that has been building for years over flat ground, and you feel it in your teeth before you hear anything at all.
That is what this is.
Thistle & Moss began as a stubbornness, which is maybe the most honest thing you can say about any beginning. A refusal. A collection of voices that the cleaner, better-lit rooms of the internet had no particular use for — queer voices, trans voices, voices that had survived things and could not pretend otherwise, voices that kept reaching for the sacred even when the sacred kept moving, kept refusing to hold still long enough to be named. We found each other the way river water finds the low places. We did not plan it.
The Gathering, which is what we call this thing we have built together — this family of publications that breathes and argues and grieves and laughs too loud — is not a platform in any sense that the word is usually meant. There are no algorithms here deciding what deserves to be seen. There is no engagement metric measuring whether your heartbreak performed well this quarter. What there is, is a commons. An open field. Writers on one end and readers on the other and between them nothing but the words themselves moving, the way words moved before someone figured out you could sell the space between them.
The technical name for how this network exists is the fediverse — federated, distributed, not owned by anyone in the way that ownership gets understood now, which is to say not owned by anyone who is trying to extract something from you while you sleep. You can follow any voice in this network from Mastodon, from Pixelfed, from any platform that speaks the open protocol, and what that means practically is that you do not have to come here to find us. We will come to you. Across the open web. The way correspondence used to work, before correspondence became content.
The front door is thistleandmoss.com — the newsletter, the live sessions, the archive of everything we have made so far. We gather in real time through The Gathering Live, which happens on a rhythm, built around what we call the Life Survival pillars, which are the things that actually hold people together when the world is behaving the way it has been behaving: nourishment and wellness and community and the ongoing, exhausting, necessary work of making things.
We are on Mastodon. On Pixelfed. On PeerTube and Loops. All of it open. All of it yours without the transaction of handing something over to someone you do not trust.
We grow by invitation, which sounds more exclusive than it is. What it means is that we tend what we have. We are looking for the writer who cannot quite stop — who writes in the margins of things, who has a voice that does not sound like the voice you are supposed to have, who has something to say that the polished places keep declining to publish because it is too true or too strange or too unafraid of its own subject matter.
If that is you, come find us at thistleandmoss.com. Tell us who you are. That is all. We will figure out the rest together.
The thistle does not ask permission to grow in difficult ground. The moss does not apologize for outlasting the stone. We have been here. We will keep being here.
Thistle & Moss Writing is home to 1 article across 1 blog.
WriteFreely is a self-hosted, decentralized blogging platform for publishing beautiful, simple blogs.
It lets you publish a single blog, or host a community of writers who can create multiple blogs under one account. You can also enable federation, which allows people in the fediverse to follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with others.