Same Cari, New Box
So...I did it. I tucked you all into a box and carried it over from Tiny Letter to Substack.
I’d been going back and forth on the decision for months now. I liked the coziness of Tiny Letter, and I liked the email replies I would get from many of you. I also didn’t love the idea of moving over to the megacorp feel of Substack. But! I’m here because I want to talk with you, and even after all these years, I still miss the community of the blog days. Tiny Letter was getting a bit unreliable on the back end, and I’ve heard the letters are going to spam more often than not, so that was a downside. And the thing that made blogs feel like such a community back in the day weren’t private replies via emails, it was the comment section. Substack allows you to leave comments. Yes, comment sections can get tricky, but we’re among friends here. What I found in my blogging days and what I’ve found overwhelmingly on social media is that the people who choose to follow me, who want to hear what I have to say, are almost entirely well-intentioned, thoughtful people. It’s when the folks looking to stir up shit find me (my tweets) from the outside that things have gotten dicey. So I think comments will be a good thing. You can talk to each other! It’ll be like a dinner party, but without like...leaving the house and sharing germs and all that.
I’d been on the fence about this switch for some time, but it’s the potential (likely?) collapse of Twitter that’s pushed me to finally do it. I have mostly loved being on Twitter for fourteen years. I know and interact with many of you over there, and if (when?) Twitter goes away, I want an outlet where we can keep talking. This feels like the right place to do that. That said, I’ll be on Twitter until it goes dark. Yes, I’ve weathered the occasional fascist pile-ons there over the years when I’ve had political tweets go viral, but for the most part it’s been a place to share my thoughts both big and small, and read your thoughts both big and small. A place to organize and learn. A place for book recommendations and bitching about the weather and cooing over each other’s pets. Newsletters won’t replace that community, it’s true, but we can build something else with them.
Those of you who I know from the knitting blog ring of the early aughts know what I mean. Yes, I said knitting blog ring. I was, it’s true, a knitting blogger back in the day. I was, dare I say, a somewhat high-profile knitting blogger. All of the early knit bloggers linked to each other in the sidebar of our blogs, and folks would click from one to the next. We would read, and we would leave comments for the blogger and for each other. We created a wonderful community. It got big and then a site called Ravelry started and things...changed. Things always change. That’s fine. Here we are at a new moment of change. That’s another reason for this move to Substack. There are a lot of us on here. I wonder how we might form a community, how these newsletter blog thingies (what ARE we calling them?) can be in conversation with each other.
I have no intention of ever charging for this, by the way. Many folks do, and that’s cool, but it’s not what I’m looking to do here.
Onward, then. Thank you for making the leap with me.