Hello friends! The Word Cloud has a new home here on Beehiiv. I brought over all my subscribers and archive posts from Substack, so if you were already subscribed, you don’t have to do anything.
Why, you may ask? Well, I’ve had some misgivings about Substack for awhile. Unfortunately, the site has been home to blogs from neo-Nazis and prominent transphobes, and Substack’s official reaction has ranged from “well, we don’t like them but we’re not going to take them off our platform” to active promotion and inclusion in profit-sharing.
A few months ago, I removed the paid option from my subscriptions since Substack takes a cut of those payments and I felt queasy about continuing to support them financially. At the time, though, I didn’t have the bandwidth to fully migrate everything and decided I felt okay with using it to host a free newsletter.
Late last night, however, the final straw was when Substack used a push alert to notify some mobile app users of content on a Nazi blog.
I don’t use the mobile app - I prefer writing on a laptop computer (yes, that may make me Old) - but I don’t know how many of my readers use the app. And I don’t want anyone, ever, to be force-fed Nazi content because they wanted to read my writing.
Fortunately, it’s summer and I’m working (and loving) an actual 9-5 instead of being stretched thin with classes, studying, part-time work, and activities, so I had some time tonight to look into alternatives and get everything set up. I liked that Beehiiv made it very easy to import subscribers and past posts from Substack and people generally gave it good reviews for ease of use and customization options. It took a half hour or so of fiddling around to get everything set up for now - I may make additions later, but I like a clean, minimalist layout.
That’s just about all for now. In a couple weeks, I’m going to come back to report on how the summer’s been going, and please let me know if you have any issues with the new site. For now, I’ll leave you with a topical clip from a classic movie (one even more relevant now that the Pope is Bob from Chicago):