The Great Platform Migration
If you’re getting this email, that’s because you’ve been a subscriber to Well Sourced by Kelly Jensen. Congratulations: you’ve been successfully ported over to my new newsletter host, Buttondown.
If you’re a paid subscriber–thank you!–you’ve been successfully ported over as well. Your subscription will remain as-is. It just won’t pay Substack for the honor of hosting my newsletter. Everything will go straight to me instead.
And finally, if you’ve been interested in being a paying subscriber simply because you like my work (I don’t have the capacity to do bonus content), you can! Those options are available here. Consider subscribing to this newsletter as your ability to tip for the work you find value in that I produce. There’s a monthly and an annual option.
I suspect a number of folks getting this email have received something like it from other creators. There’s a great migration of newsletter hosts, much like the great move from Twitter to BlueSky, and for that, we have several things to thank:
A better understanding of what services are out there. We lost robust RSS and thus, great options for blogging on our own platforms in about 2014. Imagine that: a problem that we solved for–how to read everything we want to read from across the web in one single place–the tech giants decided wasn’t actually that useful so it might as well be abandoned. I blogged for a decade+ and loved it, but it’s not an understatement to say that sharing that work and ensuring it hit the eyes of folks who wanted it became infinitely harder when RSS disappeared.
Not wanting to support “free speech” platforms supporting Nazis and Elon Musk but failing to protect people who need protecting, like trans folks. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about how bad Substack is. It’s good stuff. The challenge is that migration falls on the shoulders of the individuals who find themselves in the position of using their little free time to figure out how to migrate and which platform sucks least (and look, all platforms have flimsy terms of service that can allow things to get bad quick). I would rather use the hour of time I’m not working, parenting, volunteering, being a wife, cleaning the house, tackling some anti-fascist projects, freelancing, caring for my pets, and so on and so forth to actually write and not do the boring, uninteresting stuff of moving platforms. One means of resistance is, of course, writing material that flies in the face of what the owners of any platform believe. But between being tired of hearing from Substack owners of how great Substack is and how much they love “free speech,” and also hearing from folks about how much they’d wish people would get off Substack . . . it was time. And if anyone is reading this wanting to do the same, Buttondown did the migration FOR ME. Their customer service has been top tier.
Generally being more interested in the basics of writing a newsletter than having a billion other things we can do in the same space (no hate to creators who want to integrate a podcast and video, but for me, this is all about the writing itself).
I’ll be back to regular business in February, writing on topics related to censorship, libraries, and mental health.
In the mean time, I’ve finally broken through some mental blocks that have kept me from working on a manuscript that’s been in progress for over two years. That I’ve also no longer got to balance my own writing with school and/or freelance projects, all of which have been tremendously helpful for this manuscript, means that I’m getting several hours of solid work in a week.
See you soon.
