Last week I had an inspiration from the fact that the old mormon.org website was redirecting to a new domain. Plus, I was working through writing my own exit story to help me process all the deep emotions involved in a personal faith transition. I combined the fact that I was perturbed that my old profile was no longer available and the new one I was writing and thought there should be a new site with the same type of profiles, but for honest and open stories. It had always bothered me that the old site was so sterilized and censored.
So, this all combined into a site to not only house my own story but to provide a platform for anyone that wanted to share theirs as well. It would be a new mormon.org, and I saw that wasmormon.org was available, so I nabbed it because I liked the play on words; the intended audience is anyone that was Mormon. I spent any spare time that week building out a simple site that allowed registration and contributions, as well as listing the stories, and then I deployed the site to a live server and shared it with a few friends!
The site had over a thousand visitors in the first week and dozens of registrations. Plus, it went from a single profile to 13!
It’s amazing to go from idea to fruition and actually engage users to contribute content in such a quick time frame. Just 2 weeks ago none of this was here, but now it’s a budding community. The site must be filling a need that people have to speak their truth and share their stories. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to contribute.