Yea - I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term as they make it super easy to pay $8-15/mo which the best readers won’t even miss!
Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.
I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.
[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/
[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
So, while inevitable, I think it's still a good example of why one mustn't trust big corporations with one's work.
It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.
The risk with Substack seems much lower though, since you get to keep their email addresses and could export to another system if you become unhappy with Substack's methods in the future.
With FB, you didn't have email addresses, or a way to export your follower list to another platform, so the consequence of the platform misbehaving was much worse (which perhaps made it more likely the platform would misbehave, knowing that there were no escape hatches).
I think the model is a good one but I’m fully on board without wanting to risk being beholden to them or maybe patreon or others.
If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.
Yea there's a reason I bin everything that comes from that site to my spam folder.