Ghosting SubStack

This will be my last post on the SubStack platform. All going well, it will also be the first new post I’ll be able to promote using my own domain name. Or to be precise, a subdomain (blog.disintermedia.net.nz). From now on I’ll be referring to SubStack as SS, an ironically appropriate abbreviation (see below).

Once I’ve posted this piece, I’ll be migrating the Disintermedia blog to a community-hosted instance of Ghost (https://activitypub.ghost.org/). Thanks to Dave Lane (@lightweight) for supplying a test server, and walking me through a Ghost set-up. Also to Prodigi.nz for agreeing to provide gratis hosting where I can dogfood some services under disintermedia.net.nz. The plan is to move the blog there, but until then it’s squatting on Dave’s server.

If you’re interested in some background on why this is happening, read on. If not, no worries, I’ll do my best to put up a new blog piece for you soon. One that isn’t meta-discussion about blog hosting. But I’m hitting the road for about a month any day now, so … we’ll see.

The story so far …

In my comeback piece back in July, I explained that I was starting to feel uncomfortable about contributing to the network effects of SS. Because it seemed to be moving rapidly away from its original model as a commodity service for self-publishing writers, and towards being the kind of Walled Garden “social media” platform I’ve been railing against for more than a decade.

I briefly teased Ghost as a possible replacement. Because of being Free Code software I could use with any hosting provider. But especially because once version 6.0 was released, it would officially support publishing into the fediverse.

But I also made it clear I wanted to evaluate my options carefully, so I didn’t end up having to move the Disintermedia blog yet again, as another hosting service enshittified into a DataFarming platform1. In hindsight, to be honest, I was suffering from decision paralysis. Exactly the kind that stops so many people setting up a fediverse account, leaving them stuck on corporate platforms just like I was.

Then in early August, after my health scare, I announced that Ghost 6.0 had been loosed upon the world. Adding that the only thing giving me pause was the new analytics engine that I’d only just learned about in the release announcement.

At that point I was still in evaluation mode, and to be honest I’ve yet to deep dive into how Ghost analytics works (I’ll come back to that). So what changed?

The worm turns …

While taking some time off to recover, I got hold of a bunch of TV shows, movies and documentaries to keep myself entertained. One of them was a 2016 documentary called Tickled made by David Farrier. One of my countrymen from Aotearoa, now resident in the US2.

Like his more recent doco Mr Organ, which I saw at the cinema, Tickled was a journey down a bizarre and disconcerting rabbithole. I was intrigued, and I wanted to know how the story had panned out in the decade or so since the film was released. So off I went to search the web3.

One of the things I found was an article on David’s WebWorm newsletter, but it was behind a paywall. Fortunately I found an article where he offered a subscription to anyone struggling with tight finances. After an exchange of emails, I now have one. Thanks David!

But getting back to my story, I found that offer of complimentary subscriptions in a piece about David’s decision to leave SS. He moved WebWorm to Ghost in mid-August, and you can now find it in the fediverse at @webworm@webworm.co4. The story of his journey with SS mirrored my own, progressing from confidence, to concern, to consternation. As I said in my July piece;

I wouldn’t boycott a helpful local appliance store, just because a bunch of ideology-policing neo-McCarthyists accuse them of selling photocopiers to political Bad Actors. The same principle applies to an online platform, supplying self-publishers with a nonpartisan service.

Thing is, I’m less and less convinced that the reality of how the sausage is made matches this image of the folksy neighbourhood butcher.

David’s piece confirmed my suspicions, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Rather than the digital equivalent of selling photocopiers and toner, SS was actively encouraging people to check out publications written by unambiguous neo-nazis. While at the same time censoring an image of a starving child in one of David’s posts about the genocide in Gaza5;

Something about Nazis being actively pushed to some Substack users, whilst a photo of a starving child got auto-censored, made me snap. As in I yelled “OH FUCK OFF”, very loudly, to myself, in my one-bedroom apartment.

As he put it in a follow-up piece;

I think it’s super important to note that we’re not talking “newsletters with a Nazi symbol” - we are talking full blast Nazi newsletters. Hitler himself could have written them. They’re that Nazi.

Now, I’ve always argued that anyone who wants to censor someone expressing their political beliefs - however misguided or even horrific - has to offer a damn strong justification. Hell, I was once called a “free speech totalitarian” by a fellow Indymediatista. Despite the fact that the one thing all totalitarians have in common is a penchant for censorship, regardless of their stated ideology (yes I’m looking at you Melon Husk).

It’s worth noting that the freedom to hold and express opinions isn’t unique to the US constitution, as people sometimes claim (or at least imply). The UN lists freedom of expression in their declaration of universal and inalienable human rights. The SS founders’ seemed willing to go to bat to defend this right, and this is one of the reasons I decided to recreate the Disintermedia blog on SS. After recovering from the 2020 disappearance of my former host, CoActivate.org (big thanks to the maintainer for his years of unpaid service).

But what SS are doing now is indefensible. I don’t want my blog pieces served up with a side salad of fascist propaganda any more than David does. Reading about his reasons for making the move lit a fire under me. Damn the analytics, continuing to publish on SS was no longer an option.

Damn the analytics …

Speaking of which, I totally understand why Team Ghost prioritised adding analytics to their platform. All their major competitors offer it - including SS - and many organisations wouldn’t use a newsletter service that didn’t. Let alone pay for one. Ghost may be not-for-profit, but they still have to pay their staff and keep the lights on.

Including the analytics package in the Ghost 6.0 release, along with full source code, was a principled decision. Allowing anyone worried about the privacy of their readers, or the security of their data6, to dig into exactly what it does and how. If anyone’s done that and found anything concerning, please let me know and I’ll look into it.

Anyway, for the Ghost instance I’ve set up for Disintermedia, I’m just going to make sure analytics are turned off. They seem to be opt-in, which is good. At the end of the day, I don’t really care if anyone is reading my blog.

Don’t get my wrong, I like it when people do read my writing. I like it even more when they argue the toss with me about something I’ve written. I’m flattered when anyone values it enough to follow, subscribe, or chuck some change in the tip jar, and I have set up my Ghost instance to process payments (hopefully).

But as Cory Doctorow said in a piece I read on his Pluralistic site7, some of us write because we can’t help it. We have an itch that must be scratched.

It’s helpful to get paid for writing, especially long form writing that requires some serious research and fact-checking. But if nobody wants to pay for our writing - or even read it - that’s not going to stop us writing. I believe Cory said you’d have the pry the keyboards from our cold, dead hands to stop us, and I couldn’t agree more.

And so to conclude …

If you subscribed to Disintermedia on SS, your subscription has carried over to my newly minted Ghost. Hopefully. If anything seems to have gone wrong, please do let me know and we’ll figure it out (update: turns out sending out posts by both email and the fediverse is much more complicated than I'd hoped, but I'm working on it).

If you’re reading this because you found it on SS, come find me at my own site; blog.disintermedia.net.nz.

If you’re reading on that site right now, welcome! Have a look through the archives and consider subscribing. If you like what you see, and you can afford it, please consider making a donation. All my activist work is voluntary and funded out of my own pocket, so every little bit helps. I’m happy to rework any of the writing here for commercial publications, if you’d like to offer me a commission.

Onwards to a world without DataFarmers and technofascists! See you in the fediverse …

Image:

• "Moving house from #408 Frankfort Street to #2 Milton Street East Boston" by Boston City Archives, licensed under CC BY 2.0.