Time to Say Adieu
Time to say goodbye to Substack - This will be my last post from here.
If you read the last post, I was musing about the possible need to move this site off of Substack. I did get some feedback, and a few people made some pretty strong arguments (especially in email). I thank those who responded for the discussion.
Alas, the token purging of a handful of admittedly awful sites was the ultimate in weak sauce. I have continued to follow the threads, to understand a small slice of the problem, and it is getting ugly.
The people that have come out of the woodwork in the last 6 weeks or so are truly abhorrent. It appears that there is a cohort that go hunting for principled individuals, and then bombard them with invective and frankly insane posts. I am not joking that I have banned more people in the last month than I did in 14 years on Twitter.
A fellow writer, Joshua Drummond, did a 60 minute dive into the cesspool. The irony is he had to use Bing to search for themes, because Google actually has some controls to prevent the return of results that are offensive on the fascist scale1.
If you question whether there are reasons to be concerned, that is a sobering read. I will admit that you may need some eye-bleach on that traipse down the nutty fringe.
The problem as I see it is that these people exist, and they will publish somewhere. But it is clear that the founders of Substack are just fine with accepting their 10% rake. And the post above mentioned that this is likely a few million dollars a year.
Look, I get it, running a platform isn’t cheap, and the business model of freemium that Substack employs incentivizes them to grow the paid audiences of all their publications. Thus, to cover the bills, they need revenue, and the model they chose back in 2017 when they launched was to provide free services, and to collect a share of any revenue from the newsletters that have attached a Stripe account.
That is a viable business model, but it has perverse incentives. If a big account posts a lot of offensive garbage, and you are getting thousands of dollars a year from their subscribers, it can be a mighty tempting incentive to ignore some truly awful people.
There is another platform that is going through some things, that would be Twitter2. Elon Musk’s management of that site has made it virtually useless for building a sane audience. Hell, I used it over the last 7 years to grow this audience, and to expand my readership, but once the blue check debacle, and the reinstatement of some of the most toxic humans on the planet has made it not worth the effort. I deleted my last account – the one I used to promote these posts – once they blocked the sharing of links from Substack. One last look around last April (2023) was full of a lot of amateur porn, peppers, and Musk toadies who dominated the threads there. I deleted it and never looked back.
Where to go?
At first, I thought I would just spin up a self hosted Ghost install. And frankly, I have been futzing around with that for the last two weeks. No joy. I made a few mistakes, but even when I got it working with a one-button install, I failed to get the mail delivery to work.
There are two near analogs plus hosted Ghost, one more primitive, one that is closer to the look and feel of Substack. Beehiiv is the close analog, and Buttondown (if you want to see this in action, click here) is the more primitive. Then there is the Ghost(Pro) service. All three of these are a very different monetization model. You pay a fixed monthly rate for your service, pricing that scales with number of subscribers. No rake. No implicit or tacit approval of the content by the platforms.
My needs are modest. I am at near 100 subscribers, and I can’t imagine a scenario where I will have enough of an audience to consider monetization. I fit tidily in the smallest tier, and that costs less than a pint of beer a month (although I rarely drink anymore) and I can afford that to feed my “hobby”.
Right now I am leaning towards the hosted Ghost instance, and am working on that as my transition plan. I expect it to take most of a week or two to handle (I do still have a day job after all). The trickiest part will be moving the domain3 without being too damn disruptive.
I am getting too damn old for this shit.
If you want to poke about, you can find it at https://the-product-bistro.ghost.io all the posts are there, and I will be doing some design and theme work to make it mine. You can even log in.
What you need to do in the transition
Well, nothing really. You will get this email, and then the next publication, you will get it from the new platform. You will have to log in if you want to add a comment (and I hope you do), but if you just read the email, that is all you need to do.
Logging in is easy. You will see a log-in prompt at the top of the screen, and when you click on it, type in the email you used to originally subscribe. You will then get an email with a link to log in. No passwords needed!
For me, there is a little different workflow on the back end, and the post creation is a bit different. From what I can tell on the import in the test site, all the posts moved, all images were copied into the Ghost CDN, and the links seem to all work.
Please continue this journey with me
In closing, I will be making this move, and I am hoping that you will continue the journey. If you wish to depart, you can unsubscribe, and I won’t be upset.
If you want to drop me a note, you can reply to this email, or hit my email directly. Believe it or not, I like to get and answer emails, especially when they are not work related 😀.
I do have a LOT more tales from the trenches to share, so I really would like you to stay the course!
It is pretty fucked up that Google is more constrained than Substack’s terms and conditions.
Sorry, I refuse to call it X. That is a stupid name, and Elon Musk is a fucking idiot.
Oh, the irony. The only money I ever paid to Substack was the $50 they charge as a one-time setup fee for the domain. How ironic is that?