Happy Holidays and Site Migration Plans
Stay tuned but we're not gonna support Substack anymore
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
First of all, happy holidays to you and yours! It’s been a lot of fun for us to write Modern Medieval and to share both some of our work and a little of the great, interesting stuff that’s been going on in medieval studies. We are still learning so much about medieval Europe and you all, our readers, are proof positive that people are interested in learning more about that period.
That said, we’ll soon be leaving Substack, so this will likely be our last post here.
Substack’s values were always questionable, but we hoped they would improve over time. They have not. As you all may have seen, Substack has been enabling white supremacist hate - and sometimes literal Nazis posting literal swastikas - for some time, so a group of people asked the leadership of the site to help with content moderation. This was in large part led by reporting from Jonathan Katz (who called attention to the problem in The Atlantic) and Marisa Kabas.
Substackers Against Nazis
Hi Basketeers—Below is a letter to the Substack founders that I helped draft as part of a group of publishers seeking answers to questions about the platforming and monetizing of Naziss. We are all publishing the letter on our own individual Substacks today for visibility, and to make our readers aware of our asks and concerns…
Well, Substack finally responded and they were unequivocal: they said “Nazis buy sneakers too,” and Substack is all too happy to keep taking the Nazis’ $.
So, that’s enough for us. It’s a real problem that we (all of us, you too) keep building online communities only to have them ruined by Nazis, and it’s always worth fighting back, but when the CEO and their financial backers decide to explicitly support literal, unambiguous, Nazis… what else can we do?
And we’re not the only ones, of course. Here’s a fellow historian, but I think you’ll find many others, whoever you might read.
Campaign Trails
The Substack folks have shrugged off our concerns about the Nazis here, which means I’ll be looking for a new home in the near future. I’m with family for the holidays now, so I can’t write much more, but Ken White’s post speaks for me: There are a few sites that seem to let us migrate our subscription lists (and even payment plans) pretty easily. I und…
We’ll be migrating this newsletter to another platform (not sure which yet, we need to talk after the holidays). Almost all platforms have a migration tool so if you want to keep getting posts from us, no need to do anything.
Until then, follow Matt and David on Bluesky.
Have a great holiday season and we’ll leave you with a quote:
“no amount of historical research about the Holocaust and no amount of guilt about Germany’s past can serve as a substitute for marching in the streets against… skinheads today.”
M-R Trouillot, "Silencing the Past,” p. 151
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