And Here I am, in a Nazi bar....

Several year ago the writer Michael B Tager told a tale on Twitter. Since leaving there it has been reposted by him on BlueSky.

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."

And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them." And I was like, oh ok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too."

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people." And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

SubStack is that Nazi bar. It was a friendly, quiet place filled with good people until the Nazis arrived, one by one, and started turning it into a nasty place. As was the case with Twitter, the bosses at Substack refused to kick out the Nazis, and of late even let them promote their hate-filled propaganda to innocent Substack users.

Substack has elected to become a Nazi bar. It was a choice.

A year or two back, when the Nazis started arriving, a lot of good people, smart people, started moving their projects off of Substack. They understood that if you spend time in the Nazi bar, you’ll be associated with them, and it will hurt your reputation.

Nazis aside, the success of SubStack is rooted in three things:

1. It’s really easy to set up and use.
2. It’s really easy to build up a subscriber base.
3. It’s really easy to develop a group of paying subscribers.

The reality of freelance writers - and a large part of Substack’s user base is writers - is that although a few people make tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from freelance writing, most people make a few thousand a year. It’s a side hustle; something that adds to pension income or a day job.

For those people, Substack (like Medium, Patreon, and some similar sites) adds a few hundred dollars extra each year. Nothing big, but a nice little extra for some off-the-cuff writing that you likely would have been doing anyhow.

.That’s where I fit into the writing universe.

Still, the argument for leaving Substack is a good one, so this week I set out to do that. If you Google “Leaving Substack” or anything similar you’ll get lists of ten or fifteen “Substack alternatives.”

This post is a record of what I found when I dived down that rabbit-hole.

Before trying to make the jump off of SubStack, you need to understand that they give you three distinct things:

1. A Front-End - the web page that list your posts, and lets people read them and search them.
2. A Back-End - a data base with your posts, any images, and most importantly your list of subscribers. The back-end of course is also where you write and edit your posts.
3. A Payment system - if you have paying subscribers Substack keeps track of them, and manages their payments using your Stripe account.

And they make all of this really easy.

The tech gurus who moved out early can all list what they did: the most common names that pop up are Buttondown and Ghost.

Day one of my journey was to discover - and really, this is not at all obvious - that Buttondown in not a Substack replacement, it is a replacement for the back-end of Substack. If you want a web face, a public page that people can visit and search, you’ll need to do that yourself. Buttondown will happily send out your e-mail postings to subscribers, and handle billing, but that’s it.

(Like Ghost they also have a really friendly concierge service to walk through the transition from Substack.)

Moving to Buttondown would have been affordable, but being forced to create a front-end was more hassle than I am prepared to deal with right now.

Ghost is an honest to god replacement for Substack. It does everything that Substack does, but without the Nazis. And again, the transition would be easy, but the monthly bills for their services would be much more than I bring in a subscription revenues.

(You can also self-host Ghost, but again that was another rabbit-hole i wanted to avoid.)

There are all manner of variants on the Ghost and Buttondown models, but really they’re all roughly the same.

Finally I considered moving this blog over to WordPress. A ridiculous proportion of the Internet actually runs off of Wordpress. It has strengths and weaknesses, but it is also flexible and reliable. My business web site runs on it, and is largely ignored.

Lo and behold: the Internet tells me that yes, I can move my blog, and my subscriber base, and my payment system at Stripe, all over to WordPress.

The reality, of course is quite different.

Wordpress exists in two different and competing universes. My site is hosted by my ISP Easy DNS. I control every aspect of it, and all of my data stays in my own databases. My e-mail also lives there, and away from the eyes of Gmail and other Internet giants. I’ve been on-line since 1993, and have learned that these corporations can’t be trusted. I prefer to keep my information and my public persona under my own control.

The challenge is that although you can install your own copy of WordPress on your own server, that’s not what Wordpress wants. They want you to set up your site at Wordpress.com instead. And to sign up with JetPack.com for added features.

And, aside from handing control of your data and profile to an outside company, they will of course charge you for the privilege.

In my case it seems that the promised ease of moving my blog from Substack to WordPress only works if it happens at Wordpress.com - not if it’s hosted at my ISP.

So now I am looking at a handful of options:

1. Build my paid subscriber base large enough to justify the prices of Ghost or something similar.
2. Abandon paid subscribers and move to a free level of Ghost.
3. Hold my nose and stay put at SubStack.

And that, to the Internet critics, is why thousands of people are still using SubStack: at this point there really isn’t an equivalent option for the little guys.