I've Been Here for Years
Next week – in 9 days, to be exact – I will mark 20 years writing on the web. I know this because of a calendar entry I made when I hit 10 years that reminds me. Sadly, not because of said post from 20 years ago, which is no longer online. A lot of what I have written over the two decades – thousands of posts – remains online, but a lot also doesn't. Publications come and go. And platforms come and go. Only the web remains. And while I wasn't savvy enough to recognize that in 2004 when I was just a bored young person living by myself in a new city, I do now.
That's why I went with Ghost when it came time to start this publication last year. I had been writing a newsletter on Substack which had a decent following. And I had a publication on Medium with a far larger one. But in trying to set this up for long term success I decided a (nice and modern) set of tools that were open source and provided a lot of flexibility would be best. Yes, it lacks some of the network effects of a Substack,1 but again, I've been doing this a long time. These days, I favor longevity and control.2
Anil Dash pulls no punches. "Don't call it a Substack" is a rant both against associating your work with a corporate brand and against this particular startup:
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Long before Substack, I actually started playing around with newsletters on a platform called Revue. Sadly, those newsletters no longer exist because Revue no longer exists. Twitter bought it and killed it. But wait, those posts actually do still exist! In my inbox. Email, the true cockroach of the internet, will never die.
That's the good news for those publishing on Substack. And yes, that platform has elements of it which allows writers to take their readers (as I did) and even payments (via Stripe) with them. That's good. But it doesn't negate the fact that Substack has more recently been practicing in some of the dark arts in order to keep writers (and their subscribers) locked-in to the network. Things like features conflating the notion of "subscribers" and "followers". The whole weirdly insulated Twitter-like network "Notes" thing. Etc.
Regardless, the reality remains that while Substack has some heat at the moment, all such fire inevitably fizzles for one reason or another. And again, all that's left is the web. And email. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen it time and time and time again. And it has led me to look enviously at folks like John Gruber – who has his own take on this matter today, more objecting to the way all sites using Substack are presented, which I definitely agree with – and Dave Winer and Jason Kottke, who have planted one flag in the web and stayed put.3 Not jumped from new publishing platform to the next to the next.
Back to Dash:
Links are powerful — that's why Instagram and Twitter and Threads punish and limit them, and why Substack tries to take credit for them. And that's why "wherever you get your podcasts" is such a radical concept — like email, it's a medium that the tech tycoons don't, and can't, own. People can read your writing "wherever they get their email".
Yes, though links only retain their power if the content on the other end of them doesn't vanish. Email is a nice insurance policy. But you should aim to house your writing in a home on the web that won't vanish.
1 We'll see if what they're attempting to do with "Fediverse" integration changes this at all.
2 And to be fair to myself, and Medium, and even Substack, I thought that by using my own domain, which I insisted on and which all eventually supported, I was protecting myself and my content just in case I ever had to move it...
3 Dash himself has been at it since 1999, though I believe moved his site a few times, but took his content with him!