Strange Animals: Moving from Substack

This is not a regular edition of the newsletter – just a notice that I’m moving this list off Substack to Buttondown.

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There has been some degree of controversy about Substack’s practices recently, and while I’m still reading up exactly what’s happening and how I feel about it, I’m definitely uncomfortable with the lack of transparency as someone who uses their platform. Here’s Annalee Newitz writing about the issues, and here’s Anne Trubek about the wider transparency issue in publishing.

In the meantime, I’ve been looking at Buttondown. I made an account there a few years ago, because the idea of posting in Markdown has always been attractive – since that’s what I write in anyway – but the rest of the interface was a bit basic, and it had no way of importing an archive from my previous platform.

It has come a long way since then, as I realised when Kieron posted about his move to Buttondown. The platform is full-fledged now, with a very friendly interface, and the creator of Buttondown personally helped me move everything over (which he does for everyone who wants to move), and helped me link it with my professional email, and now I’m nearly all done. My web designer friend is currently adding a new sign-up sheet to my website (customisable, unlike Substack’s), and I’ll be good to go.

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You don’t need to do anything here. Your email has already been imported to the new platform. I will be sending one more message via this newsletter, once I make my first post on the new platform, just in case it is stuck in your spam filter, but, for the nonce, that’s it for me and Substack.

If you are reading this online and haven’t signed up yet, here’s where you can do it.