Substack – Open Thinkering

One does not simply move off Substack

Posted on January 10, 2024January 10, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve decided to move away from Substack for my Thought Shrapnel newsletter. This is due to a fundamental disagreement with the platform’s hosting policies, particularly its accommodation of Nazi content.

In my search for a different platform, I’ve noticed that many people are migrating to Ghost. This seems particularly true for those with some technical background. Unlike Substack (an all-in-one platform for writing blog posts, sending newsletters, and posting social network-style updates) other options such as Ghost require a more hands-on approach to configure.

After looking at different options, and being advised by my network, I chose micro.blog. It looked like a simple, indieweb choice that is compatible with ActivityPub and can automatically send out a weekly digest of posts. The $10/month plan seemed ideal, and I began by importing posts from WordPress.

However, I encountered several hurdles:

Importing: the sheer volume of posts on Thought Shrapnel meant that the exported file was too large for the micro.blog importer, so I had to find a tool to split the WordPress file into smaller segments.
DNS: after adjusting the DNS settings to redirect to micro.blog, I experienced issues with email settings.
Email: despite moving everything to Cloudflare in an attempt to fix things, a problem arose with receiving verification codes, meaning I could no longer log in to micro.blog and complete the migration.

These challenges made me question whether individuals with less technical expertise could easily navigate such a migration? It’s not just following instructions, but troubleshooting, and indeed having the mental model of what’s going on.

Faced with these issues, I’m contemplating a return to MailPoet, an email newsletter plugin for WordPress I used before moving to Substack. However, it’s not without its quirks, such as random unsubscriptions and the need to comply with new email sender requirements from Google and Yahoo.

I feel like using platforms like Substack is akin to driving a car without needing to understand its mechanics – you just fill it up and go. Migrating to a different platform requires a deeper understanding, which is like someone interested in the ins-and-outs of car engines and maintenance.

These experiences highlight the complexity involved in migrating from an easy-to-use platform like Substack to alternatives that involve some technical input. You can’t tell people to just move off Substack. There are network effects. For some people, we’re talking about their livelihood. While there are more technical people who can fix this themselves, and better-off people who can get others to sort it out for them, what about the majority in the middle?

Personally, I’m determined not to return to Substack, but I’m still exploring the best way forward. To be honest, I just want something that works. Finding time to post to Thought Shrapnel is challenging enough, without all this additional drama.

I am so tired of moving platforms

Posted on December 27, 2023December 27, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

An abstract image depicting the theme of conflict in community moderation, featuring fragmented shapes and warm colors to symbolise the intensity and challenges of decision-making.

It’s only been a few months since I switched my Thought Shrapnel newsletter to Substack. The WordPress plugin I was using, MailPoet, was great, but despite my best efforts it kept marking subscribers as ‘inactive’. This happened to Laura as well, meaning that I had to keep re-subscribing to her newsletter.

Substack not only doesn’t suffer from this problem, but it’s got some really nice features. One of them, launched this year, is Substack Notes, which is a social network made up of writers and readers of publications. I’ve discovered some absolutely wonderful writing as a result.

No good thing can last, however, and of course, like every platform Substack has a Nazi problem. The thing is, they’ve decided to essentially do nothing about it. Doing nothing is a choice. Doing nothing keeps the money flowing. For now.

Many people who have decided to leave Substack have cited the Nazi bar problem. This is based on an anecdote highlighting the importance of nipping things in the bud quickly before somewhere becomes overrun with bad actors.

Venkatesh Rao thinks that the Nazi bar analogy is “an example of a bad metaphor contagion effect” and points to a 2010 post of his about warren vs plaza architectures. He believes that Twitter, for example, is a plaza, whereas Substack is a warren:

A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze. Warrens emerge through people personalizing and customizing their individual environments with some degree of emergent collaboration. A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. Plazas are created by central planners who believe they know what’s best for everyone.

No matter how Substack is organised, once good, influential people decide to move (e.g. Audrey Watters, Molly White, Ryan Broderick) then it’s game over. Just as with Twitter/X, a platform can still exist, but it’s become a toxic brand, synonymous with a certain type of person or politics. This article describes an original post by Xianhang Zhang who coined the term ‘evaporative cooling effect’ to describe this exodus:

The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community.

Moderation is hard. Everyone disagrees about who and what shouldn’t be ‘allowed’. As my experience on the Fediverse among very well-intentioned people has shown, it’s not just free speech absolutists vs everyone else. There are people, for example, who believe that pre-emptively blocking an entire platform is reasonable. You can end up in endless debates about theoretical situations.

By its very nature, moderation is a form of censorship. You, as a community, space, or platform are deciding who and what is unacceptable. In Substack’s case, for example, they don’t allow pornography but they do allow Nazis. That’s not “free speech” but rather a business decision. If you’re making moderation based on financials, fine, but say so. Then platform users can make choices appropriately.

A lot of people seem to be migrating to Ghost, which is a solid option: open source software from a non-profit foundation. I guess my use case is slightly different, in that I’ve only been sending out the newsletter roundup of my Thought Shrapnel posts on Substack. The posts themselves exist, as they have done for years, on a self-hosted installation of WordPress.

I’ll probably just end up defaulting back to MailPoet, or perhaps just not send out a newsletter while I figure out what to do. It’s such a shame, because I was really enjoying the Substack experience. I’m not sure if it would be enough for me and for others if the founders were to change their mind, but it has reminded me about how important it is to own and control your own content.

Image: DALL-E 3