Social-Media
Time to say goodbye to Substack.
The whole point of having a newsletter is to control the distribution of content.
I don’t know when this started, but I’m almost certain it wasn’t possible to just follow people on Substack before. I also don’t know if they are promoting or stimulating the “follow” option, but the number of people following me without subscribing to my newsletter is increasing every day.
Below is the difference, clipped from Substacks Help Center:
Follower: They’ll see your notes and some reading activity such as post likes. When someone follows you, you won’t receive their email, so they won’t get posts in their inbox.
Free subscriber: They’ll subscribe to your Substack and receive free posts via email and/or the Substack app. They’ll automatically follow you and see your notes in their feed.
In other words, if someone is following you, there is no email address, and if you want to switch services, you won’t be able to take the followers with you. That’s not a newsletter. It’s social media.
In a world where more and more services are embracing to the Fediverse, Substack’s move to a closed system is mind-boggling to me. But just leaving the service wasn’t enough. I had to share this information with you. So, if you have a newsletter on Substack, maybe it’s time to start to reevaluate your strategy.
I’m not sure when I’ll be leaving, but it’s likely to happen sooner than later. For now, if you want to make sure to follow me to my next newsletter chapter and keep getting my monthly emails, please don’t follow me. Subscribe.
Social media is destroying our personal history
I often talk about how starting a YouTube channel meant the end of my podcast, but yesterday, while jogging, I realized that something similar had already happened to me. When I started my podcast, I gradually stopped blogging.
The Way Back Machine has been my go-to website lately as I’m trying to figure out what happened to my online presence. It’s a challenge because I used different URLs throughout the years and was never that popular online. This means that there are many gaps in the Internet Archive. However, the transition from only blog posts to podcast episodes mixed with blog posts to finally only podcast episodes is evident.
It seems like the podcast was taking up more and more of my time, which in turn meant the end of blogging. Then, when I moved to YouTube, keeping a blog section on my site no longer made sense, and I moved to a more institutional website format. At the same time, social media was becoming more popular, and I probably started using only it to share content.
The problem is that most of that online past has been erased forever. Some of the services simply disappeared, and other times I closed my accounts. Fortunately, starting in 2008, I’ve been using Evernote to back up some of the content I was publishing. It’s not everything, but it’s enough to slowly re-create a portion of my online past on my own site.
What’s interesting is that the process of recreating my past is awakening my old passion for blogging. You are not seeing many recent publications here because I am spending most of the time filling in the gaps in the timeline by reformatting and republishing the old content I have in Evernote.
It seems like this is going to last forever, but I’m committed to taking it one step at a time. However, I’m not taking any chances this time. All my old content is being moved to Obsidian first, and then I upload it to Micro.blog using the Micro.publish plugin. This means that I have a local copy in an open format and an online version that I can also export if needed. And after a while, I came up with a workflow that I’m happy with and will soon share with you in a video.
You might be wondering why I’m wasting time on this. Actually, I have already asked myself that question, and I was unable to come up with any rational answer. But it feels good to have my past published in a space that I own and control. My domain and my website.
Anyway, if you also find that comforting, you might want to learn more about IndieWeb.
Maybe indirect revenue is not a thing
Like most of us, I don’t know much about Twitter’s current situation, but I would like to share my thoughts on the recent shutdown of Revue, a newsletter service the company bought in January 2021.
I understand that sometimes ending services that are not profitable is the only option, but what about the indirect revenue these services might be making? Furthermore, Revue was actually earning some money since there were paid newsletters hosted there.
Like many people, I moved to Mastodon several months ago, but since I was using Revue as my newsletter provider, I knew that I would not be able to completely disconnect from Twitter. In other words, I would still see and click on some ads and maybe even become a Blue subscriber. Anyway, all that is in the past now. Switching to Substack was effortless.
My point is that I was already going to the site less and less, and the only reason I don’t plan to delete my account is because I’ve already been impersonated on YouTube once and don’t want to take any chances on other social media.
I'm a Workflow Consultant and Content Creator driven by learning and passing it along. My interests span a wide range, but they must truly ignite my passion. Only then can I fully engage with a topic.
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