Why start a Substack now?

It’s a fair question. The freeze peach “debate” is designed to dehumanise me on three fronts and pave the way for me being stripped of human rights and murdered. Naturally I’m not happy about the fact the management here not only passively hosts but actively platforms nazis, terfs, anti-vaxers, and plenty of other groups who use me as a distraction while they seize money/power.

Sadly I couldn’t find a connective platform which doesn’t. 🙁

As soon as any corner of the internet gets a decent number of users the people who want to kill me move in. And, unless they’re forced back out, they work on taking over.

Substack has made it clear they’re not going to force these people out. So why am I here?

Pragmatism. While I expect SS is readying to jump down the slippery slope of marketing to extremists, this was the easiest place to get started writing a blog and connecting to people. That second part was what drove my decision.

There are a lot of trans writers, queer writers, disabled writers, and other marginalisations represented on SS. The recommendation system works for them as well as the bigots. I’ve found loads of wonderful people to subscribe to - and so long as they back up their subscriber list regularly, I won’t lose them if they leave the platform. Collecting that list, forging connections with these peers, would be far harder if we were all in isolated silos.

Setting up my own “silo”, aka personal internet real estate, aka author website, is something I’m working on. I’ve seen too many platforms either collapse or go rotten to consider myself wedded to any external solution. (I overall hear good things about Ghost, though apparently they also have a nazi problem, but as previously stated that’s almost a given. Still looking into options.) But staying educated, staying involved, being an effective community, requires being able to find each other.

So I plan to be on whatever platform helps me find people to connect and work with. Once that platform becomes untenable/unsafe for me, I’ll migrate to another.

Maybe the burgeoning open-source social media movement will herald an end to that pattern. I’m hopeful but I suspect the core issues will remain; moderating is expensive whereas letting people like me kill ourselves is cheap.

For now my plan is to shout over nazis until they’ve finished infesting the management and I have to unmoor and float off.