Day 10 of Building Crowdwide — The Newsletter Is Getting Smarter, and V2 Is Coming!

YAYAYAYAYA!! Welcome to the 10th article of no-filter, no-sugarcoating building Crowdwide!!

So today's progress for Crowdwide is:

1. 11 members
2. 38 posts
3. 4 communities

I feel like the progress is getting steady... When I started building this, compared to days 4–6, it has reached a very stable state! Similarly, V2 is going to be released with very stable and smooth finishing touches!

So yeah, Crowdwide V2 will be released on 1 November 2026.

Crowdwide is pretty much finished feature-wise, with a wide range of lists, and now only a few things are left to polish, as far as I've noticed.

So, every Sunday, a newsletter is sent to all the users who subscribed to it.

And I noticed a pattern.

The number of posts in each user's newsletter is inconsistent!

You know why??

Because I was trying to build it so that users get articles, posts, and polls in such a way that they love reading those posts and articles.

So it goes through your interests, finds what suits you best, and provides sections like:

• For You
• Trending
• And etc.

Before this Sunday, the newsletter was the same for all users, but I tried to build personalization this time, and this Sunday was the test for that new newsletter.

And it's working very well!

For those users who used Crowdwide very little or moderately, they got fewer emails. Those sections are like Trending (same for everyone) and You May Like (if you used it very little).

The mailing system is working fine as wine for now!

Also, you may have noticed that I've added some formatting options to posts!

And in emails, they appeared like this:

# Heading — listing items — ** this is bold and italic...

So I tried to remove it.

Not only from emails, but I removed it from the website too. Now you'll see the formated text or only the text, but those useless symbols won't destroy your experience.

Feeling more polished.

Isn't it? Isn't it?? Don't lie? LOL...

Also, I got some suggestions from users.

By Neeraj:

1. Facebook group admins who are fed up with Facebook's tools and want a calmer home for their group. They post in r/CommunityManager and r/socialmedia. Invite them to move or start their community on Crowdwide.

2. Small Discord and Telegram community owners who can't get discovered. Crowdwide gives them a public page that new people can find.

3. Tiny local businesses and creators (Etsy sellers, small cafes, indie game devs) asking for cheap ads in r/smallbusiness and r/EtsySellers. The 25 free Waves make it a no-risk first campaign.

4. Indie makers launching products who need early users (Indie Hackers, r/SideProject). They're active posters and cheap advertisers.

By Madan Dhoundiyal:

Invite your most active member to co-host one of your communities. People stick around when they have a role, not just an account.

I just wanted to keep everything transparent and clear, so I'm going to discuss each and every suggestion here!

About Neeraj's suggestions

I have never used Facebook, so idk much about it, but ngl, I feel like Facebook has a mostly older audience, and I don't think it's worth targeting them.

The second idea feels really useful because Discord and Telegram have so many channels and servers. Growing a community is really hard, so I'll try to contact some Telegram admins and Discord server owners and suggest this idea to them.

The local businesses idea also seems useful... pretty useful!!

If any indie game dev or seller is interested right now, just tell me in the comments. I'll definitely arrange a setup for you to try this feature. It's free forever, with no risk of real money, so you can try it!

And the fourth one...

THIS ONE IS TOO MUCH TO THE POINT!! YEAH, I BUILT CROWDWIDE FOR INDIES!! COME ON INDIESS!! IT'S YOUR CHANCE!!

About @mohan_dhoundiyal Madan Dhoundiyal's suggestion

This idea is great!! Just like Madan Dhoundiyal!! LOL.

Currently, I have a total of 11 users, out of which I've noticed 5–7 users visiting at intervals of 2–4 days.

All 11 users visit at intervals of 5–7 days!

2–3 users are regular daily users, mostly, from what I'm noticing in the stats!

I think I can talk to those 5–7 users who visit at intervals of 2–4 days.

BTW, no forcing, just asking. If you don't mind, Madan, have you joined Crowdwide?

I have two active communities. I can make you an admin of those two communities.

TBH, your advice is really useful!

Appreciate you, and I'm thankful to you!

The midnight incident 💀

Also, yesterday at midnight... I was staring at the logs, monitoring the behaviour of the system, and...

I noticed that emails had stopped working!!

I didn't change anything in the code. Nothing changed in the repo.

I rechecked the whole code, like:

WHAT HAPPENED?? WHAT HAPPENED?? WHAT THE GOAT HAPPENED?? SYSTEM ROT HAPPENED?? DOT HAPPENED?? BOT HAPPENED? FORT HAPPNEDED??...

But then I remembered that I don't have a proper, professional-looking domain.

So I went to my Google Cloud project and found the problem: the refresh token had expired.

(2 minutes of silence for the refresh token 💀)

I'm still using the testing setup in my Google Cloud project because my domain is free, and to get verified and published, you need a proper domain, which I don't have.

And the refresh token expires in just 7 days, so...

I just opened my OAuth 2.0 Playground, generated a new one, redeployed, and all set!!

One more thing I noticed...

Also, TBH, before building Crowdwide in this day-by-day public progress series, I used to write 99.9999999999999999% of my articles with AI, but now I don't use AI for these articles, just to correct punctuation, and that's it...

And I noticed a pattern: posts written by AI get fewer views and lower engagement, while the ones written by me got 1.7K+ views in under 6 days!!

WOOOAHHH!!

Do you agree with this?

I will not let you die, Crowdwide, that easily!

Further, don't forget to share your views!

🌐 Try Crowdwide: https://www.crowdwide.run.place

💻 GitHub: https://github.com/DeveloperPuneet/Crowdwide

CRITICISE ME!!