I fell down an internet rabbit hole this week. After posting my frustrations with Substack’s increasingly steep slide towards becoming a walled garden, a number of people got in touch - relating their annoyance too.
Substack used to be simple. Online newsletters with email subscriptions. Then they added comments, likes, notes, chat, and all manner of other things that nobody really wanted or needed - and all of which required membership in one way or another.
Fish in a barrel.
So I started looking at options.
Wordpress.com is still out there, and Automattic’s founder - Matt Mullenweg - is still waging an idiotic war against WP Engine. Regardless of my issues with Matt’s behaviour, Wordpress.com (the hosted solution) is a walled garden, and always will be. I get it - there are advantages to forcing your audience to have an account - likes and comments can’t be traced to somebody otherwise.
The default behaviour of Wordpress - behind the JetPack plugin - is the same as it always was; with commenters email addresses being recorded for blog authors to discover. Not a lot of people know that. More than once I have reached out to a commenter, and they were shocked to discover that any blog they had commented on within the Wordpress ecosystem has their email address.
Blogger is still out there too - acquired by Google in 2003, and then left to rot for the last twenty years. I looked into importing some of my posts into it - to see how viable it still is - and the importer repeatedly fell over without reporting any issues.
I wandered over to Wix - who seem to be spending more than the GDP of a small African country on TV and internet ads at the moment. Quite apart from their AI designer not creating responsive designs, I was also shocked to discover that much of their blogging user interface is set in stone. Given the cost of the platform (it’s not free), I was genuinely shocked.
I took a look at Squarespace too - another darling of the commercial advertising world. I built a company website based on Squarespace a couple of years ago, so know exactly what it’s capable of. It’s probably the best option - but also not free.
I looked at Ghost a little while ago - the content management platform started by a group of ex-Wordpress engineers. It’s very good, but also quite expensive, and it’s treatment of email subscribers leans heavily towards monetising them.
I even looked at Jekyll - the static site generator built into Github - that allows anybody to create a blog from a pile of markdown files (and guess who has 6,000 markdown files). It works well, but would mean strapping on a third party subscription engine - something like follow.it - which is messy, and a bit clunky. It also doesn’t handle images easily.
We all know where this is going, don’t we.
I’m not leaving Substack.
I don’t want to run my own platform - and I don’t want to surrender to the entry requirements of Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, or wherever else. Of course as soon as I post this, Substack will probably change their commercial model and force my hand - but for now, Substack does seem to just work.
I might switch liking and commenting off though. It doesn’t really need it - and people can email me if they want to pass judgement about a post. It’s only when liking or commenting that the heavy handed membership workflow kicks in. If the blog had no likes or comments, it wouldn’t have the opportunity to hassle people.
Anyway.
It’s late, and I’ve just written several hundred words about nothing at all.
I’ll try to do better tomorrow.