What hopepost is.

Hopepost is run by one person, anonymously by design — someone in recovery, based in Australia, who has spent enough nights on the receiving end of a hard day to want to leave something useful for the next person. Moderation, design, code, and writing are all done by the same person. There is no public face, no founder LinkedIn, no Instagram. The work has to stand on its own. If hopepost ever needs a moderation team, those people will be added carefully, in service of the original mission rather than growth for its own sake.

Anyone who has been through something hard can write a letter. Anyone struggling can read one. Both stay anonymous. Writers don’t perform, readers don’t feel watched. The exchange between writer and reader is the whole interaction.

No accounts. No profiles. No signal back to the writer that the letter was read. This is deliberate. The emotional contract is that the letter exists, freely, and will find someone who needs it. Anything more would change the contract.

Every letter is reviewed by a human before it reaches a reader. Letters that romanticise harm, push religion, give clinical advice, or read as performative rather than felt do not get published. The bar is whether a stranger in a hard hour would feel less alone reading it.

Letters are reviewed by a real person before publication. They are not reviewed by clinicians, and hopepost is not a substitute for professional support. If you're in crisis, please reach out to a service that can help. See Find Help.

• Not a substitute for therapy.
• Not a crisis line.
• Not an app to engage with. No notifications. No streaks. No feed.
• Not a community. No comments, no replies, no reactions, no counters that turn letters into a popularity contest.

If any of those is what you need, the Find help page is the right place to start. We list crisis lines by country and link to other letter projects we admire.

The person on the other side of a hopepost letter is just someone who recognised the weight of what another person might be carrying. If you’ve been there too, write a letter when you’re ready. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Letters are lightly edited before publication, and it’s the recognition, not the prose, that matters.

We’re not the only people doing letters. These projects do different versions of the same idea, and we point readers to them often.

• Reasons to StayClinically-moderated letters specifically for people experiencing suicidal thoughts. If you're in that place, this is the project to read.
• From Me to YouUK charity that teaches anyone how to write a letter of comfort to someone going through illness, isolation, or grief. The project hopepost's first-line prompts are modelled on.
• Letters to StrangersYouth-led nonprofit running letter-exchange programs in schools and communities across dozens of countries. Pairs strangers to swap letters about mental health.
• Letters Against DepressionVolunteers write physical letters to people experiencing depression.
• More Love LettersStrangers send handwritten letters to people nominated by someone who loves them.