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2022 Challenge: Weekly Filet, All Around the Globe

On August 21, I launched a challenge: By the end of the year, I'd like to have at least one reader in every country on Earth. This community of readers is large and strong enough that I think we can make it happen, together. This page is regularly updated to show how we're doing.

The List

Currently, we still need to find readers in 68 countries. The largest countries with not a single Weekly Filet reader are now DR Congo, Angola and Afghanistan. The latest countries where we found the very first reader were Uruguay and Uzbekistan.

👀DR Congo✅Iran
✅Tanzania✅Myanmar
✅Sudan✅Iraq
✅Uzbekistan✅Saudi Arabia
👀Angola👀Afghanistan
✅Mozambique👀Yemen
👀Nepal👀Madagascar
👀North Korea👀Niger
👀Malawi✅Mali
✅Guatemala👀Chad
👀Somalia✅Zimbabwe
👀South Sudan👀Rwanda
👀Guinea👀Burundi
✅Tunisia👀Haiti
✅Jordan👀Cuba
👀Tajikistan👀Papua New Guinea
✅Sierra Leone✅Togo
👀Paraguay👀Laos
👀Libya✅El Salvador
✅Kyrgyzstan👀Nicaragua
👀Turkmenistan👀Congo
👀Central African Republic👀Palestine
👀Liberia✅Oman
✅Panama👀Mauritania
👀Eritrea✅Uruguay
✅Armenia✅Albania
✅Qatar✅Jamaica
👀Moldova👀Namibia
👀Gambia👀Botswana
👀Gabon👀Lesotho
👀Guinea-Bissau👀Equatorial Guinea
✅Trinidad and Tobago👀East Timor
✅Mauritius👀Eswatini
👀Djibouti👀Fiji
👀Bhutan👀Comoros
👀Guyana👀Solomon Islands
✅Montenegro👀Suriname
✅Cape Verde✅Malta
✅Brunei✅Bahamas
👀Maldives👀Vanuatu
👀Barbados👀São Tomé and Príncipe
👀Samoa👀Saint Lucia
👀Kiribati👀St. Vincent and the Grenadines
👀Micronesia👀Tonga
👀Antigua and Barbuda👀Andorra
👀Dominica👀Marshall Islands
👀Saint Kitts and Nevis✅Liechtenstein
👀Monaco👀San Marino
👀Palau👀Nauru
👀Tuvalu👀Vatican City

Here's how you can help:

  • Have a look at the list of countries below. Know someone in a country that yet has to record its first Weekly Filet reader? Invite them to sign up by sending this special link to them.
  • You are a Weekly Filet reader and your own country is marked as 👀? Let me know so I can fix the mistake. The reason for this is that I don't have country data for all readers.

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About the data (if you're a nerd like me)

When people sign up to the Weekly Filet, the country they are currently in gets recorded based on their IP address. That's what I'm using as the closest available proxy for the list you see above. There are a number of factors that make this proxy differ from reality.

  • When people use a VPN or are travelling, the country that gets recorded is not the country they live in.
  • Sometimes, for technical reasons, no country is recorded at all.
  • I'm not using realtime data, so some people who signed up recently but are no longer reading are still included.

For most of the countries on the list, this doesn't really matter. For the purposes of this challenge, we're only interested in whether there is at least one reader per country. Most countries have dozens, some have hundreds or even thousands of readers, so we can be pretty sure one of them is correct. It's sketchy only for those countries with only one or a handful of readers. The best way to fix this...is to get at least dozens of readers from each country 😄