Hello! We're leaving Substack.
a wee behind-the-scenes update
This email is a mid-week behind-the-scenes note about some changes at edi.bike. Don't worry, you haven't lost four days down the back of the sofa!
It's has been a wee while in the making, but we're moving the newsletter away from Substack to an email service called Buttondown. In fact, you're receiving this from it right now!
If you got this by email, you'll continue to receive our weekly digest as normal - you don't need to do anything. But if you were 'following' us on Substack (not receiving the digest by email), you'll need to subscribe by email here.
The short version is:
🎙️ Substack have put freedom of speech above and beyond the need for online platforms to root out and ban hate speech and those who practice it;
🙈 The number of actual Nazis on the platform making real money from spreading fascist ideologies is too high to ignore, and by staying there we're complicit in this - so we're moving service, and you'll continue to receive the digest without any action on your part;
🙋🏻♂️ There's a new £1/month 'Supporters Club' subscription we're introducing to help cover our costs and promotional campaigns to grow the readership of edi.bike.
That's it, really. Below we'll get into the original vision for the newsletter, an opportunity to support what we do, and lastly a bit more context on the issues at Substack.
What is edi.bike?
A Support Opportunity
Leaving the 'Nazi Bar'
🚲 What is edi.bike?
For the record, as it's come up a number of times recently - edi is pronounced 'eddy', as in 'ed-in-buhr-ugh'!
Many people, through a diet of social media, forums, mailing lists and ad-hoc connections, have a sense of the 'cycling community' in Edinburgh - of what's happening, of newly available paths and infrastructure, of current consultations and future plans.
We want more people - especially those without these existing connections - to be able to use, and benefit from:
🛣️ New paths and routes as they are developed;
📋 Greater awareness of consultations to respond to and help shape our streets;
📅 Access to Events and training, to further their own journey and cycling in the city as a whole;
🤝 Opportunities to engage with active travel activists and groups;
🌄 A greater sense of the 'big picture' of cycling in Edinburgh, that only comes when you put all these things together.
The medium-term goals for edi.bike weekly are:
📰 Connect readers with everything that's happening without needing Twitter, Facebook or anything else;
📈 Grow to include as many utility cyclists in Edinburgh as possible, so that we direct more attention and awareness to the organisations, events and progress we feature and help effect change;
🌉 Provide a bridge between subscribers who have never connected with the 'cycling community' and the grassroots movements they might otherwise have never heard of or engaged with;
ℹ️ Reach as many folk who don't necessarily identify as a 'cyclist' as possible - to both inform and include them.
Longer term, there's all kinds of things we could get involved in. Fundraising, being an online publisher for community articles (rather than using corporate social media sites like Medium), hosting interviews... Nothing too lofty, but making our contribution as best we can. Connective tissue for the Edinburgh Cycling organism.
🫶🏼 A Support Opportunity
💜 Introducing the 'Supporters Club'
The weekly edi.bike digest will always be free (gratis) to read for anyone who subscribes, as well as remaining ad-free.
For £1/month, you can join our Supporters Club, and help with existing costs for our domain name, hosting, and promotional materials like posters and stickers. It would be great to do more of this, and so we're introducing this modest and entirely optional paid tier to support the work involved. If you don't want to - or can't - support us in this way for any reason at all, that's absolutely fine; we're glad you're reading anyway!
🎁 Club Perks
As well as supporting us, we're also planning the following perks for Supporters Club patrons:
A bi-monthly (~6 times a year) behind-the-scenes update sharing subscriber numbers / growth, promotional efforts, and other stuff about the running of edi.bike;
A shiny 'Supporters Club' sticker, once we get them printed up (subject to collection in person!).
These are intended to be low-key ways we can say thanks for your support. Over time, we might also consult Club patrons on strategic decisions and other matters.
Again - thanks for reading. We're having fun, and we're just getting started :)
🍻 Leaving the 'Nazi Bar'
We're not the first publication to abandon Substack because of its facilitation of fascists (though we could easily be the least significant!). Ultimately it's about the personal comfort of our team with what we support, and that's largely been the driver of this move.
The Verge has a great roundup of the story so far. As folks working in the tech sector ourselves, we're fairly used to seeing and hearing about these kinds of issues with online platforms - and one of the main ways we can make a difference is by making different choices where we can.
"We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse." — Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie
One of two things will be true. Either Substack genuinely believe this, in their 'marketplace of ideas', and that market forces will somehow put fascists back in their place; or, perhaps more plausibly, they're too small an organisation to properly moderate the volume of content that passes through their virtual printing presses, and are unwilling to draw a more distinct boundary of acceptability and put the work in to police it.
The problem, as per our bar metaphor (lifted from the mists of the internet), is that once you've let one Nazi sit and drink there, he and his pals are emboldened to do the same. Before long, nobody wants to drink in the same local as a bunch of fash, all you have left are the intolerants - and so by tolerating their intolerance, suddenly you've become the 'Nazi bar'. In this scenario, the Nazis are somehow also managing to monetise their hatred. The metaphor didn't quite extend to getting tipped for karaoke.
"...It’s clear that disinformation of all kinds is a huge market for Substack. In fact, it makes me think Substack might be primarily a disinformation ecosystem — with a bunch of credible writers bolted on, to be the acceptable public face of a company that exists mainly to monetize the internet’s limitless supply of garbage." — Josh Drummond, Writer, 'All the Garbage I Found on Substack in 1 hour'
This isn't some heroic act - it's pretty straightforward for us to manage, and to their credit Substack make export of both subscriber lists and existing posts extremely straightforward, which is commendable. We're also not trying to indict anyone else's use of Substack, as a reader or as a writer - we've just arrived at our own decision about where we publish.
For the record - we're not keen on Elon Musk's 'X', either, for similar reasons. We'd love to see Edinburgh's cycling community and political figures move to an equivalent like Mastodon, where there is much more effective content moderation and a completely different vibe... But we can't make as quick a move on that front as we can with changing our email platform, so we're starting here.
As ever, thanks for reading, and ride safe 🚲