Moving from Substack to Ghost
Why I moved here from Substack.
Just a quick (well it was intended to be quick, I may have failed) note here that I will cease posting over on Substack and start posting here. "Here" now has a custom domain of blog.nromdotcom.cloud, so it's probably not quite so obvious or important but it's now hosted on Ghost.
The why's. I could write the world's longest post on the why's. But ultimately, let's just say that Substack weirded me out a bit.
I originally chose it as a quick way to get started writing to see if I still enjoyed it, with the intention of deciding on a more permanent home later - even if it were still Substack. Fortunately, I learned that I do still enjoy writing. Unfortunately, Substack turned out to not be the sort of place I wanted to be long-term.
Logging into my Substack account and seeing a weirdo Twitter clone full of "thoughtleaders" talking about things I don't care about...or at least don't care about when I'm in "writing about video games" mode turned me off. The constant pressure to "monetize my community" turned me off. Seeing all the modal dialogs and junk it popped up pressuring readers to subscribe turned me off. I was pleased to see they aren't doing automated recommendations at the bottom of my posts, but based on everything else I've seen I don't expect that to last.
And that's all aside from other, more complex concerns I have around the sorts of content allowed on Substack. The intersection of social media, user-generated content, and free speech is a more complex topic than I care to get into here (at least in this post), but let's just say there is certain content that I wouldn't like to see my post positioned next to.
So why Ghost? Well, partially because I've used Ghost before so it was an easy choice. I've used it both hosted for me - like this is - and self-hosted. For sure it has grown and changed a lot since I last used it, but it's still a relatively simple and unobtrusive editing experience. And it's got just enough customization such that things look roughly like I'd like without encouraging me to get lost in micro-optimizations.
While Ghost (the platform) has cross-promotion and discovery features like I mentioned above with Substack, it is not even close to as front-and-center as it is on Substack. And the open source, self-hostable nature of the software means that I could pull myself off of Ghost The Platform while still using Ghost The Software.
Well, anyway, I don't wanna go too crazy here with this post, so I'll stop here before I get too into it. But just know that if you subscribed to me over on Substack, you'll need to re-subscribe here to see future posts. And if you were curious about why things look slightly different and with a different URL suddenly...well that's why.
Otherwise, be on the look-out for another review soon. I've got a couple draft going on, but I expect that Toaplan Arcade 4 will be up next.