Why This Isn't A Newsletter

Occasionally people will ask me why I have a blog instead of Substack (or a Buttondown, or whatever else is popular now). Ghost, the hosting service I use, is functionally designed to be an open-source version of Substack - I just disabled all the email functionality.

First, I don't actually like reading newsletters very much. Even though I have been making myself blog most days for the past few months I have very little desire to have someone else's writing in my inbox at a regular cadence. I like to be able to choose to visit a blog! I like browsing! I like the idea that people who are reading this have fully chosen to do so, and I'm not nonconsensually spamming someone's inbox. This attitude is maybe why I have never been very good at posting or "creating content" regularly, but I like the idea of everything I make being opt-in rather than opt-out.

Second: I am a strong believer in the importance of discoverability. The splintering of the social web has been a nightmare for this. So many things I want to read are paywalled. The forum discussions I used to browse have moved into Discords that I don't want to join. I can't even use fucking Google to find old tweets anymore. The things that I can find are so covered in ads they're functionally unusable. So this being a blog is a bit of a personal stand against the tide. I miss discoverability, and I think if everyone posted stuff on personal blogs or forums that aren't designed to make a profit the internet would be a better place. Obviously having a newsletter doesn't exclude being discoverable, but I think a lot of newsletter services treat their underlying blogs as second-class citizens since, I dunno, they don't drive paid subscriptions or something the same way emails do.

A corollary to discoverability is my fear of link rot: I've put plenty of work into things shared on platforms that no longer exist, and my blog is something I own and run. I'm reliant on a few external services, but I can back everything up and migrate easily - as long as I own my own domain and the internet exists, I can keep the stuff on my blog alive in a way that I can't with anything else. E-mail is maybe a good way of archiving if you, like me, never delete your emails, but I don't want to rely on it.

Perhaps most importantly, I don't want to turn my hobby into a hustle. At least for right now, my blogging is an exercise primarily for myself. I put stuff online rather than writing in a journal because it forces me to write and think more clearly for an imagined audience, but I don't promote it much, and I don't really have any desire for more than the hundred or so people who visit this site a month to read it. Especially when I'm writing every day there are gonna be some lemons and there's no reason to blast every little post into people's inboxes. If I start writing more seriously maybe I'll change my mind, but right now the idea of this being a newsletter is frankly mortifying. This is another position that I think would make the internet a better place. Not everything you make has to be "content" or promoted to death. I like that sometimes people find or link to things I've written, but the idea of trying to turn this into a form of passive income exhausts me. You can just make stuff and post it on your blog! It's nice to write things and have people read them. It really doesn't have to be more complicated than that.