January 8, 2024

Rusty Niall is Migrating from Substack to Buttondown

Why I have to leave this platform

Hello to my readers and subscribers. This post is a little heads up that I am moving Rusty Niall from its current home at Substack to a new home at Buttondown: https://buttondown.email/niall (It will look a bit sparse if you click on the link at the time of this post’s publication but should display the full Rusty Niall archive after the migration,)

(TLDR: I am moving from Substack to Buttondown because of Substack's willingness to platform and profit from Nazis as well as their lack of clarity about their finances and future. If you are a subscriber, you don't have to do anything. The emails will still find their way to you, they'll just come from the new home at Buttondown)

I have never felt entirely at ease with Substack. My first suspicions came from a lack of clarity from Substack’s leadership about their finances. This is important because, when a service is offering its users lots of free functionality that feels a little bit too good to be true, then that often turns out to be the case.

This is often due to the platform burning through venture capital in order to build a big user base. When that user base is big enough, the platform moves onto its next phase, which is about extracting value from those users and turning a profit. If you are familiar with my previous writing then you will probably recognise the opening phases of the process that Corey Docotorow defines as enshittification (which the American Dialect Society recognised as its word of the year for 2023).

Substack always felt to me like it was in that initial honeymoon period. There are things that I really love about Substack, the ease of use and free podcasting being top of the list. But I also know that all of this costs money and I want to see how this is all budgeted and factored in. I just can't trust this platform to keep serving me all the stuff I like about it with nothing expected in return. I would perhaps feel better about this if I trusted Substack's leadership. So, let's have a look at all the ways in which I distrust Substack's leadership!

In April 2023, The Verge's Nilay Patel interviewed Substack's Chris Best. It was the proverbial dumpster fire on many fronts. The first was in Best's noncommittal answers to questions on Substack's financial strategies, something that was already at the forefront of my misgivings about the platform. The second was about Best's approach to moderation. When explicitly asked by Patel, a man of South Asian heritage, about whether Substack would moderate content demanding that "brown people get kicked out of the country”. Best refused to give an answer, framing the question as some kind of moderation related gotcha.

Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best - The Verge

Substack Notes just dropped. Can the startup survive this foray into social media?

This set off enough alarm bells for me to start looking around for an alternative home for Rusty Niall. What followed was a deep dive into indieweb strategies and the launch of the Niall's Notes site, a little repository for my more ephemeral writings as well as a new home for my older blogs.

Self hosting was the furthest thing from the seamless interface that I was used to and Substack seemed to know this themselves when they posted an article about why lots of writers were returning to Substack after an indieweb detour on their writing journey. This was a really clever move by Substack and it wasn't long until I started using the platform again. But I still couldn't shake a lot of my unease about this site, its leaders and its benefactors.

Then Jonathan M. Katz published an article on The Atlantic entitled Substack has a Nazi problem and my unease escalated into full on disbelief. I knew that Substack hosted blogs by many nasty pieces of work but the revelations that substack were providing a platform for and profiting from full-on mask-off Nazis made the issues undeniable.

To be brutally honest, I should have already felt ill at ease with Substack being a platform for the likes of Gl*nn*r and chums but, to my shame, I was able to compartmentalise this unease from my writerly ambitions. However it was the collective response to the call for moderation from Substack's leaders that finally confirmed my suspicion that Substack was no longer a suitable home for Rusty Niall. Their response, this time from co-founder Hamish McKenzie, was that they didn't like Nazis but not as much as they don't like censorship.

I don't like censorship either but I don't think that demonetising or deplatforming are censorship. Similarly, this wouldn't have been an issue if Substack was simply a service rather than a platform. Most of us live with the fact that horrible people can sign up with an email service to send missives to other horrible people. But in having a recommendation algorithm as well as their own utterly redundant twitter-like Notes feature, Substack are way past the more ideologically neutral confines of a service. Once a service becomes a platform, then moderation is essential.

I won't spend a lot of time responding to the hair brained notion that deplatforming doesn't work in the fight against Nazis. Firstly, I would rather the platforms I used were safe spaces, it's not about defeating anybody. Secondly, demonetisation and deplatforming are useful tools against the spread of Nazism in how it makes it more difficult for the fash organise and fund themselves. Substack's approach is more akin to Neville Chamberlaine or the US before the Pearl Harbour attacks, choosing a live-and-let-live strategy until the moment that the other party's pursuit of the alternative arrives at their doorstep.

I guess my main feeling hasn't changed, there's no group that I trust my work with less than a bunch of libertarian techbro wankers that look like multiverse versions of that other wanker who wants to buy Brixton and fill it with rich people. This isn’t just an issue of ideological opposition — if Substack were run by a pragmatic conservative it really wouldn’t be as much of an issue for me.

I should also add that I won’t be affecting a holier than thou attitude with anybody that wants to stay on Substack, and if I’m following you, then I’m going to keep on following you. It’s better to be one of the people that tries to build an appealing alternative and says “Come on over!” rather than yelling and flipping the bird from the other side of the fence.

So this is the last Rusty Niall to be posted on Substack. Rusty Niall will be hosted on Buttondown moving forward. If you are a subscriber and wish to remain subscribed then you don't have to do anything, the essays will still arrive in your inbox. If they don't, it might be worth having a discrete word with your spam filters.

Incidentally, I did a bit of research before I decided on Buttondown. I looked at Beehiiv but it seemed to echo all of those venture capital related worries that I had about Substack. Whereas Buttondown seem to be very clear about their finances and aren't throwing a ton of redundant features at a wall to see what will stick. Buttondown really is a service that allows me to send out emails of my essays while also allowing people to read the essays on an online web page if they prefer. Not only that, but when I gave some feedback on the platform I got a lovely reply from the guy that runs it. I like stuff like that.

I should also add that I wouldn’t know about Buttondown if it wasn’t for hearing about it from Mic Wright, so thank you Mic.

This also means that I have to look for another home for the Rusty Niall podcast, which will remain on hiatus for the foreseeable. This will also allow me to do what I've been meaning to do for while and lean deeper into my writing.

A lot of what I've done over the years as an event host, live poet, lecturer and podcaster has involved me doing a lot of talking. I feel that I am a very good talker but the part of me that likes to talk also feels the compulsion to entertain. My innate people-pleaser seems to live within the depths of my gob.

Whereas the writer in me doesn't seem to display the same tendencies. My writing tends to come from a place where I seek to confront, extend and clarify my own thoughts and feel no obligation to please anybody apart from perhaps myself. It feels like it's time, if you forgive the macabre image, to unhinge my jaw and leave it by the side of my keyboard when I take a seat at my writing desk.

With all of that out of the way, my next essay will drop after the migration to Buttondown and will be about how the wrestler Orange Cassidy rescues romanticism from the jaws of the suffocating irony that has beset the spectacle since the much reported death of kayfabe.

Thanks so much for reading this, I sincerely hope to see you on the other side.

Niall