I read this a couple of times! Thanks for writing this.
I think this "cancelling you if you're on platform X" is a very Mastodon/far left position. A casual look at Substack Notes shows me that most people are delighted to be there and are having fun. I would say, pay these folks no mind. Most of us would be delighted to subscribe and follow you.
I feel your pain about getting heard and having feedback. I more or less set up my Substack for the very same reasons.
I also find the pursuit of the "purest" platform that is ideologically good a hopeless pursuit. We might as well give up using the Internet. I notice that this particular crowd is very reaction. Today it's Substack, tomorrow it's something else. It's like their hobby is to be mad at some topic/platform any given week.
It can be tiring to be part of this.
So I say we just rise about this and use these platforms while we still can to reach our readers - dispassionately and without bias.
Just posted this on Mastodon, and am really sad I didn't think of THIS when I originally wrote the post, because it makes the point much clearer:
The "bar" part of all this discourse is flawed, and can badly backfire on independent authors though.
Think housing, not bars.
Think renting a studio in a building whose other tenants and landlords you know nothing bad about,
because it's the only affordable place you can get,
only to discover 2 months later, when you had just finished unpacking your stuff,
that the landlord may be a nazi (ADDED 2023/04/20: and/or may be renting, or be willing to rent, other flats in the same building to nazis)
and, again, there is no other place you can afford. Should YOU judged badly because you cannot leave? Especially considering that there is NO guarantee at all that the same thing could happen in the next place you find?
I read this a couple of times! Thanks for writing this.
I think this "cancelling you if you're on platform X" is a very Mastodon/far left position. A casual look at Substack Notes shows me that most people are delighted to be there and are having fun. I would say, pay these folks no mind. Most of us would be delighted to subscribe and follow you.
I feel your pain about getting heard and having feedback. I more or less set up my Substack for the very same reasons.
I also find the pursuit of the "purest" platform that is ideologically good a hopeless pursuit. We might as well give up using the Internet. I notice that this particular crowd is very reaction. Today it's Substack, tomorrow it's something else. It's like their hobby is to be mad at some topic/platform any given week.
It can be tiring to be part of this.
So I say we just rise about this and use these platforms while we still can to reach our readers - dispassionately and without bias.
Just posted this on Mastodon, and am really sad I didn't think of THIS when I originally wrote the post, because it makes the point much clearer:
The "bar" part of all this discourse is flawed, and can badly backfire on independent authors though.
Think housing, not bars.
Think renting a studio in a building whose other tenants and landlords you know nothing bad about,
because it's the only affordable place you can get,
only to discover 2 months later, when you had just finished unpacking your stuff,
that the landlord may be a nazi (ADDED 2023/04/20: and/or may be renting, or be willing to rent, other flats in the same building to nazis)
and, again, there is no other place you can afford. Should YOU judged badly because you cannot leave? Especially considering that there is NO guarantee at all that the same thing could happen in the next place you find?