Fatiman’s Street is being built to be a particular kind of room. This page is the room’s commitments, plainly stated.
The name
Fatiman’s Street is a merger of two histories.
Cécile Fatiman led the Bwa Kayiman ceremony in 1791 that sparked the Haitian Revolution. Black women’s voice as revolutionary force.
S Street is Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 1920s Washington, D.C. salon, where Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke gathered on Saturday nights. Black women hosting the rooms where literature gets made.
Together, Fatiman’s Street is a place where Black women gather, speak freely, and produce change. A diasporic street that exists wherever the reader is standing.
Why this place is being built
I wanted a place to call my own.
I have traveled from website to website, trying to find somewhere to put my writing and somewhere to read other Black women’s. Each place came with its own problems. Some let harm run rampant. Some buried the writing under algorithms that rewarded the loudest voice, not the truest one. Some asked me to pay for the privilege of being a product. Some asked writers to put their best work behind paywalls and then took a cut.
So I started building something different. Slowly, with no hurry, and with a clear list of things this place will not become.
The commitments
Fatiman’s Street is being built around five commitments. They are the reasons the site exists. They will not change when the platform grows.
No performance metrics
No public like counts. No view counts. No follower numbers on display. No trending posts. No bestseller badges. The writer can see how their own work is landing on a private page. Readers see the work, not the numbers attached to it. Writing changes when it is written for applause. I want the writing here to be written for something else.
No paywalls
All writing and art stays free to read. Always. Writers will be supported through other means: that work is ongoing and will be decided with the writers already in the room. What will never happen: a writer telling a reader to subscribe to finish a sentence.
No algorithm
The feed is chronological. The most recent work appears first. There is no ranking, no recommendation, no “for you” surface. You will not be shown what an algorithm thinks you want. You will be shown what has been made.
No AI-generated work
During the seeded phase, work generated by artificial intelligence is not welcome on Fatiman’s Street. This includes text written by large language models and images made by generative image tools. Writing that used spellcheck, photos that were auto-enhanced by a phone, and research assisted by AI are not what this rule is about. The line is creative decision. If the tool made the decisions and the human edited, that is AI work. If the human made the decisions and the tool helped, that is human work.
When the platform opens to the public, this policy will evolve. AI-generated work will then be accepted in a clearly labeled category, separate from human-made work, with disclosure required. Readers will be able to filter it in or out. The writers being seeded in now do not want their work mixed in with machine output, and I am not going to ask them to.
No white-dominant default
This is a Black women’s salon. Not Black women included. Not Black women featured. Black women as the room. The writers are Black women. The artists are Black women. The work is the work of Black women. Readers are welcome across the board, but the room is not built around anyone else’s comfort.
Where it is right now
The house is being built. Nothing is on the walls yet. The first writers are being invited by hand. When the room is ready to open, the people on the waiting list will hear.
Where it is going
After the seeded phase, the doors widen. The exact shape of that widening is a decision being made with the writers already inside. What does not change: the commitments above. The salon will grow. It will not become a newsstand.
Help build it
The waiting list is one way in. Writers and artists who want to be considered for the seeded opening can say so on the signup form. Readers who want to shape what this becomes will be asked, and their answers will stay private.
This is the slow part. The fast part comes later.