Category: TechnologyCategory: Technology

Cody Cook Parrot said in their recent Witnessing Practice workshop that you can make a thing and share it with a few people.

You don’t need to launch your new website with a big press announcement. You probably don’t need to post it on social media, either, because 95% of your followers won’t see it anyways.

This is why we need a few people we can send snippets via email, get on a Zoom call, meet in person, even get on the phone.

MrBeast says that when he was starting out, him and a few friends would be on Skype all day and night, working together just trying to figure out YouTube.

Imagine if you spent just an hour a week doing that with your creative friends?

I’ve seen so much fear in people’s eyes over picking the right email marketing platform (Substack, Kit, Flodesk, Buttondown, Mailchimp).

People’s voices start to shake when choosing the right online store (Shopify, BigCartel), the right website builder (SquareSpace, Cargo, Wix, WordPress).

You’re not getting married. You can break up with these tools at any time.

Instead of spending the next few weeks bouncing between platforms or watching 24 hours of “Beehiiv vs Substack” comparison videos, talk to other creative folks in your orbit.

I host weekly virtual co-working sessions with musicians, writers, and artists.

You can ask me direct via my Email Guidance offering and I’ll get your going in the right direction.

I also host paid-community Zoom calls, where we talk about zines, IRL events, and make fun of social media (it feels great). Get a 30 day trial for $10.

Alex runs BATCAVE, “a place to help one another dive deep into the stuff.”

Cody runs Landscapes, “a writing group for all genres.”

Jes is a musician and hosting a “hands-on session exploring the four most powerful and underused practice tools.

Kate Ellen is hosting a “Go Dumb Meet Up” which is “a zoom meet up to chat about how to temporarily or permanently break up with your smartphone.”

Mansi has The Ripple Circle, a place for “authentic sharing, gentle witnessing, and the longer echo of our practice together.”

It’s not just about deleting an app, it’s about finding new places to inhabit, daring to believe in a world without Musk or Zuckerberg being central to our ability to earn a living.

This is how we escape social media, and we’re getting better at it every week.

Be careful if you’re sending important information in the custom header or footer of your Substack newsletters. If you’re sending Zoom information or Luma invites or other special links to paid subscribers and they’re reading your newsletter in the Substack App, they won’t see it.

This is troubling, as Substack just recently said this:

We’re doubling down on the Substack app, which is designed to help audiences reclaim their attention and connect with the creators they care about.

Get everyone to subscribe to multiple publications, then users have messy inboxes. The cure? Just use the Substack App!

Then, when a publisher leaves Substack and sends a newsletter via a new service, the email will show up a users inbox again – this can be jarring!

“Wait, I thought I was getting all my newsletters in the Substack app?!?!”

So now it’s almost like people won’t be subscribed to a newsletter, they’ll be subscribed to a Substack.

This seems like a slippery slope.

On today’s Escape Pod Zoom Call we got talking about experiences with magazines when we were younger:

• One story was about a computer magazine with a program written by a young Bill Gates.
• Another was about buying magazines (plural) with a baggie full of change.

We don’t just talk about the XYZ’s of quitting social media, but about getting back to the core life experiences that made shit cool before techbro platforms flattened culture and gamified everything.

A question I got via my Email Guidance offering:

Q. I saw you’ve been posting casual stuff (on Substack Notes) and I’m curious how you… justify that against an anti-social media ethos? That sounds like an argumentative question but I mean it in earnest!

A. If I post on other social media platforms, I need to get people from those services over to Substack in order to subscribe to my newsletter. With the casual energy I expend on Substack Notes, I get maximum value in return – as in, it’s just one or two clicks from gaining an email subscribers.

Substack is a tool that I use for now. Someday that will change. But for now, today, I can swap my time and energy “engaging” there because I know I can replenish that energy by building my email list.

Am I playing the game? Absolutely. But I am guarding my energy. I don’t rely on Substack Notes to “get the word out.” I am writing the answer to this question on my own website first, before I put it on Substack Notes (if I even do at all).

I am playing the game on my terms.

“(Substack) is still another platform hosted elsewhere. It simplifies the process for writers, podcasters, video creators, and others to publish their work for money. But their stuff is still made available at the mercy of software they do not control — and I bet there will be a time when Substack decides to make a controversial platform-wide change some publishers will want to back away from. The pressure is already there.”

Substack was a great place to grow an audience, but I believe those days are coming to an end, and I think that’s okay. We don’t want to rely on any single platform or source to grow and build upon. We should use the tools available to us, yes, but when brands such as Substack become a bigger and bigger story, yes, like Nick Heer says above, the pressure is building and someday it will pop.