Dear stranger,

Welcome! Pen is a website where you write letters to your closest friends. There are no comments or likes because the only way to communicate on Pen is via letter. There is no algorithm or feed of content made by strangers. You can send a letter directly to a friend or you can submit an "Open Letter" that gets shown to all your friends. You can only send one letter to each friend per day and only one Open Letter per day.

My friends and I made Pen for a few reasons. The first is that we wanted to have deeper, more meaningful friendships than short-form messaging allows; when you have to write more than two hundred and fifty words - which is minimum letter length on Pen - you tend to reflect more than you would just writing a text. The second is that we wanted to resist the enshittification of our brains. When our literary outlets are all short-form, like texting or tweeting, we don't have to think as hard and plan what we're going to say.

The effects of Pen are subtle but powerful. Each week of use seems to produce some new, interesting effect. So far, my friends and I have delighted in using Pen - we all feel closer and our brains work better. Plus, it's fun! We hope you and your friends find it fun too.

Sincerely,

Peter

P.S. Since there's no algorithm, it only really works if you have friends to write to! So, if you're the first of your friends who finds out about Pen, you'd need to BYOF (bring your own friends).