bye bye substack

why and what now

As you may have noticed, I’ve migrated the newsletter to Ghost. After 5 years of blogging through Substack, I’ve decided to leave the platform. This is my final post here. It includes some practicalities.

WHY

• Some of my readers had expressed their frustration over Substack’s hands-off stance on content moderation. In July, I documented and echoed NYC-based studio L&SD’s concern over Substack’s support of fascists, which had also led them to abandon it.

• Substack uses the content published on its platform to train AI models like ChatGPT and Google Bard, unless the “Block AI training” option is activated in the privacy settings. Whilst no platform is perfect, there is no explicit mention of Ghost using published content for AI training and it is more protective against automated scraping and crawling.

• Perhaps due to Substack’s growing popularity, the following of my newsletter increased exponentially. Meanwhile, the engagement seemed to crumble, with less regular, meaningful and intimate conversations about the posts. This affected my writing: I lost confidence in my vulnerable musings, idiosyncratic ways of illustrating, connecting and organising ideas or my clumsy non-native English nor AI-copyrighted prose … I even doubted the wider purpose of the whole endeavour.

• Some Substack publications seemed to veer towards a clickbait-y approach with more and more journalism branding or pseudo-hot takes. I still follow and really enjoy a lot of newsletters here. I admire anyone who manages to remain engaged, engaging and weird despite the general homogenisation of content and writing styles. But sometimes Substack does feel like a social media platform designed to build the largest following and generate money.

• In fact, I grew increasingly frustrated at Substack’s subscription plans. As I was preparing for my sailing trip, several readers offered to support me financially but didn’t want to go through Substack (which takes a cut on all-paid-subscription revenue) or felt uncomfortable with the minimum amounts set by the platform (arguably, I would, myself, support more newsletters/podcasts if the monthly plans were more affordable).

As I wrote here, I think platforms dictate content. Perhaps they also shape intentions.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be loud, famous or rich. I think I want to keep things raw, messy, intimate, transparent and independent—perhaps even sustainable?

WHAT NOW

• If you were a paid subscriber who supported my work through Substack with an annual donation, you should have been notified and will receive a partial refund for your contribution through their system. Please reach out to nono at gigsta dot de if you don’t receive this in the next few days. There was no way to import/export this kind of subscription, meaning I have lost several hundreds of euros and you’d need to re-apply for a subscription plan through my Ghost page if you wanted to re-direct that money. You can do this by going on this page: https://fictionsandreflections.ghost.io in the top right, click “Sign in”. Once you’re logged in, click on “Account” in the top right, then “View plans”.

• If you are a paid subscriber who is supporting my work with a monthly payment, your payment should continue but through Ghost and Stripe. 5e was the minimum amount on Substack but you can now change this to your convenience. Same steps as described above.

• If you are a free subscriber and would consider supporting the newsletter, this is now possible at a minimum of 1e per month. None of your money will go towards Substack anymore. Same steps as described above.

This is all entirely optional and for now, I am not planning to use any paywall or create any extra content for subscribers.

ICYMI

• In June, I wrote about travelling through the Mid-Atlantic ridge, NYC, Portland, L.A., San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver and Detroit.

• In July, I wrote about accidentally falling in love with NA’s dance music scene, taking a lot of trains and accidentally ending up in Cuba.

• In September, I wrote about the AMOC, the middle passage and Drexcyian mythology.

Finally, THANK YOU SO MUCH for your support and soulful participation in my work so far.

xx

nono