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A professional update, as it were! @blockpartyapp.com has been acquired by @joindeleteme.bsky.social!

I started Block Party because I couldn't accept that simply being online meant surrendering control — over your safety, your privacy, your data. The internet is too important to opt out of, but it shouldn’t be the danger zone that it is by default.

The first version of Block Party was a viral anti-harassment product for Twitter with tens of thousands of users and devoted paid subscribers, including accounts with 1M+ followers.

Our users raved about how we transformed their online experience, and the whole trust and safety industry took note of what was possible with a tiny, dedicated team working on problems previously thought to be "just too difficult."

We were cited in an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, filed by Francis Fukuyama et al, as a leading example of middleware, a model for countering authoritarian capture of social media.

Some companies pivot because they realize they're just not headed in the right direction. Other companies get smacked in the face by a brick wall that materializes out of thin air.

Our brick wall took the form of Elon Musk buying Twitter and cutting off our access to the platform.

We were forced to re-conceptualize our product and business, but we stayed true to the mission of keeping people safe online, and it was a good push to go bigger. We expanded beyond Twitter to cover 12 platforms; we expanded beyond anti-harassment to security, privacy, and content cleanup.

That's the Block Party of today, praised by the Washington Post's tech journalist as "one of the most useful tech tools I've come across in years."

Like many an engineering founder who has to learn the hard way that even a wonderful product doesn't sell itself, I became our lead salesperson and we built an enterprise sales motion from scratch.

We closed deals with name-brand logos in tech, media, and finance, working with security teams to bring employees inside the security perimeter.

As we did sales discovery, we realized that virtually every one of our customers was also a DeleteMe customer, with the same buyer and the same buying reasons.

Our go-to-market playbook was basically to copy DeleteMe. Perhaps, then, the best way to scale would be to join them — and now, that's exactly what's happening.

The internet is not yet the safe, equitable, empowering place it could be, but I've never stopped believing it can get there. The mission continues. It just got a lot more powerful.