A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it’s funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.
Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton’s publication Platformer, Molly White’s newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.
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If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don’t have to do anything to continue paying you.
Yeah, Ghost is great. I’m not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think they’re slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. That’s why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didn’t prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.
They’re both great. I think it’s pretty likely that anyone who’s screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.
Really glad you brought the opposite perspective to the table here 🙏 thank you!