Some Thoughts on Shouting Into the Void

It's been exactly one month since I moved off Substack. I really wanted to write about that today, but I wrote 1700 words that felt disjointed, so I hit pause. Then I tried instead to write about de-gamifying our brains, but honestly, that idea was so boring and half-baked that after 700 words I worried you'd all unsubscribe. At that point I thought maybe I'd write about why I was so spaced out all day, but that felt too personal. When I moved this newsletter off Substack I secretly swore I'd never get super personal here again. That's not currency I want to trade in any longer.

By this point it was 6:30 pm. I couldn't call it quits because I promised myself I would send out (at least) one newsletter every Wednesday. I'd rather send out something half-baked than nothing at all. So! When all else fails, start over and make a list.

Without further ado, I present to you this half-baked three item list that I wrote in two hours. It's a quick brain dump – some stuff I've been thinking about since I moved off Substack, and some vague (VERY vague) gesturing at what we need to do to improve the experience for others. And by others I mean all kinds of people on the internet who might want to write a little bit or just read some fun stuff. Not just big name creators or people who (like me!) want to make something serious out of this endeavor.

NUMBER ONE: MAKE IT LESS LONELY

Man, I hate to say it, but one thing Substack has going for it is activity. It's buzzy. People are on the platform. Even if no one ever saw my stupid Substack "Notes," at least people acknowledged the actual big posts I shared. They favorited them, commented, shared them. Plus I could connect with people in all the different little chats. Substack has a very active chat function that is, I hate to say it, pretty cool. Each newsletter has its own chat, separate from individual direct messages. They were busy with people talking about stuff! It was happenin'!

The second I moved off Substack and published my first post on Ghost, it was like night and day. Please forgive me but it was... a ghost town. I don't fault Ghost for this, because it's a different platform. But I do fault my own expectations, and the exhortations of everyone around me. "Switch to another platform! It's so easy! It's great!" Yes it's relatively easy to do the actual platform switch (assuming you are not an idiot, which I was briefly, but it wasn't totally my fault, long story), but "it's easy to switch" is really misleading. What happens after you switch? How do you grow your audience? How do you go back to the old way of blogging when social media has trained you to expect and respond to specific stimuli, like network effects, or favoriting and commenting?

Fun fact: I now have more subscribers on Ghost than I did on Substack. I probably could have grown my audience more on Substack if I'd been consistent and focused from the start – lesson learned! – but even with more subscribers, it still feels kind of lonely. Every time I punt a newsletter out into the universe, I have to remind myself that metrics don't matter, stupid favorites don't matter, numbers don't matter, what matters is showing up and doing the work. This is unsatisfying on the days I pour my heart into a newsletter. It's also hard to believe on the days when I rush to bang out some bullshit, like today. You might argue this is what something like Bluesky is for, but I was not smart enough to build an audience during the early days of Bluesky, nor was I lucky enough to benefit from the mad rush of everyone fleeing X in recent months.

Now, you might also argue that a real writer shouldn't care about things like this. If you do, I will ignore you. We don't live in those days anymore, pal. You can see the effects of this all day, every day all across social media and on a million different websites. How many people post, send out newsletters, share their podcast, and get zero interaction, zero response? How many of them give up? Or worse, how many of them get frustrated at being ignored while they watch someone else share stuff that's not objectively better but gets a big reaction? Do you ever wonder if this is partly why so many people become so increasingly unhinged online?

Not to worry, I've been doing this long enough that I will not lose my shit or get sucked into some fringe group simply because not enough people clicked a little "heart" on some dumb thought I had. I will also continue to post about my work on Bluesky and do the work needed to try and build my audience slowly. But if even I am feeling frustrated, that tells me we do need to pay attention to this. We can't just yell at people to leave Substack (or not join in the first place). We can't simply tell them it's easy to switch. We can't cajole them and then have no plan for them after they do so because they will be very mad and they will go back to Substack when they realize how much harder it is to build an audience. Don't believe me? Here's someone saying exactly this in my mentions (in response to someone else):

Which brings me to the related NUMBER TWO: WE NEED TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR READERS TOO

You know what else is unfortunately nice about a platform like Substack? All the newsletters you follow are right there. When they publish, you can see them all in one place. You can find them even if you miss emails because they go to spam or because you, like me, have created such a mess of your inbox that you're frequently tempted to burn it down and start over. Plus you can comment and follow along and participate in a way that feels cohesive.

In other words, it's basically social media with the added option of long-form writing and the ability to send a newsletter to subscribers' email addresses. It's really hard for any other platform or service to compete with this because that's not what other services do. And we don't want them to! We don't want more walled-garden, centrally controlled platforms that trap us as creators and as consumers.

And you know, even if it's nice to have them all in one place, that doesn't take away the biggest hurdle, which is paying to access content with every single creator you want to support. That's one unfortunate benefit of traditional social media with advertising: You're paying with your data and your attention, which sucks in the long term for humanity but in the short term is easier than deciding which writer deserves than $80 you probably can't afford.

Obviously there are solutions to these two problems – there are amazing publications and collectives that are doing great work like Defector and Flaming Hydra. They have a lot of great names producing great work, and they prove the viability of and need for strong independent online publishing. But there have to be more options than this. We have to develop more ways to build community, to boost traffic, to increase a sense of visibility. Not everyone has tens or hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Some people are doing great work and can't gain traction. Plenty of creators are filling a niche but how is anyone supposed to find out about them? There have to be federated or open-source solutions to some of these problems. (If you don't know what either of those things are, don't worry, I've got you covered in a future newsletter when my brain is back online.)

Which I guess brings me to NUMBER THREE: NOT EVERYONE IS AS TECH SAVVY AS YOU THINK THEY ARE

This is something that I have to write a lot more about (again, I've got you covered) but for now let me say that just because you think something is easy – and maybe it really is – does not mean someone else will, or that they will want to make the effort to do it, no matter how important it is. Big platforms are obviously successful in part because they claim that turnkey solution ease-of-use territory in the industry. Anyone who has ever tried to change privacy settings knows this is bullshit but in the grand scheme of things, these products are designed to not only be easy-ish to use in some fundamental ways. They're also sticky. Addictive. Make you wanna come back for more. They make people feel Not Dumb.

But just because everyone can get online and do a bunch of stuff on the internet and social media does not mean they have a deep facility or endless patience with the fiddly bits of moving to a less overtly appealing (from a pure usability standpoint) platform. It also doesn't mean they prioritize developing that facility or patience. Just because I think about this a lot doesn't mean everyone else does. For most people, making the internet a better place is, like, low on the list of priorities in any given day. That should be obvious if you spend even five minutes online, since some people seem to actively want to make the internet a much worse place.

I've been thinking a lot about the ways community can rally to support people with all the processes of moving away from those big dumb platforms, as well as make online feel welcoming and not overwhelming after they do it. I have ideas I'm noodling on but if you have any examples of cool stuff people are doing/talking about/writing about already, please let me know – I'd love to learn more about it as I'm cooking on this.

If you read it this far, thank you, and sorry? See you next Wednesday.

Lx