My initial experiences with Buttondown
I was recently suggested by people on Firefish to check out Buttondown after Substack has had some controversial stuff take place lately.
So I did exactly that.
I thought that it was likely that I would have to start fresh and I would not be able to transfer my existing articles, but it turns out that I can port my stuff directly from Substack. Having the ability to port stuff is a life-saver imo.
Also, as soon as I joined, I received a friendly email from the team at Buttondown asking me whether I needed any help. I have never really had that from a site before, and I just wanted to say I appreciate it.
One thing that could potentially be a bit annoying is the fact that you have to type in HTML or Markdown (I'll probably end up using Markdown only, like for my old GitHub Pages stuff and for the Splatoon Unofficial Mastodon account). It was quite easy in Substack just to do whatever the hell you wanted. It also sucks that it looks like I can't upload things like images directly (I am likely going to have to rely on the cloud feature in Firefish) to Buttondown, but it probably won't be too much of a big deal.
A bit of a negative note to end on, but I see that Buttondown offers subscription plans. I totally get that this is probably their main way of monetising, but it does suck that things like using CSS customisation requires a premium plan.
I might do an update in the future, since I'm not sure whether this is fully for me yet (it's the best alternative I've seen so far though). Anyways, please take care.