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Hello, Steemians!

A lot of you have noticed that I include a footer on most of my posts with an image for #thealliance.  A few of you have asked about what that is, so I thought I'd give a quick explanation and tell you about my journey to become part of the alliance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLd40ddnN7c

## Family

The quick explanation of #thealliance is that it is a family.  We are a group of people that interact and support each other along our steemit journey.  We stick together, but we also hold each other accountable.  We want to have a reputation of quality content creators that support each other's individual efforts as well as group efforts.  We support each other by commenting, upvoting, resteeming and promoting each others' posts.  It's really that simple.

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## My journey to the alliance

Like many, my Steemit journey has been pretty slow.  I'm not one of those $100 post guys.  I hadn't really used too many voting bots, but I noticed that a lot of the top posters were.  I decided to give it a try and had a small amount of success.  Somehow, during this time, I saw a post from @sneaky-ninja.  It was a cool little bot that posted storylines along with his bot service and he mentioned #thealliance.  At the time, the only way you could use the bot was to be a part of the alliance.  I thought that was a cool idea to have a bot exclusively dedicated to the community, so I started looking into joining the alliance. **Note, snaeky is now available for all of Steemit.

### Recon
Before I ended up joining some cult, I wanted to check it out and see what it was all about.  I began following the #thealliance tag and checking out their posts.  I would upvote and comment on the posts I thought were good, but I didn't just blindly upvote in order to kiss up to the alliance members.  This was a bit out of the ordinary for me as I mostly just roamed the poetry tags.  Overall I was impressed, not so much by the content (though it was always good quality), but by the interaction.  I didn't necessarily join Steemit to make money...I mean I did, but I never really expected it to be any real income.  All I really wanted was for someone to read my shit and let me know what they thought.  After my recon, I was convinced that the alliance could do that for me.
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One day, I finally saw one of the Notes issues put out by the @thealliance account.  They mentioned that they were close to their 100 member limit for core members and there wouldn't be any more afterwards.  I replied to that post and expressed my interest to join.  They directed me to the discord server and I began chatting with them.  They had me post links to my posts in a channel and they reviewed the posts and gave coaching on how to make it better.  Initially, I was denied membership.  I'll say that during that time, I happened to be into crappy limericks, and that it wasn't my best work by far.  Still, I respected them for holding a standard.  I kept posting my links there and listening to their suggestions.  I saw the performance of my posts improve and started getting a little more feedback.  I was bummed that I wouldn't be a core member, but I was still happy to be getting some coaching from folks who actually seemed to care.

During this time, I still continued following the #thealliance tag and supporting the works I liked.  I felt like they were a good community that deserved support whether I was a part of it or not.  They were good for Steemit.  

One day, out of the blue, they let me know that they added my name to the list.  They purged some inactive members, and that left an opening for me.  I have been there ever since, and I have met some great people and learned a whole lot.  They are my family, and I know that if I ever needed anything, they have my back.  That's what's it's all about.

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