A lot of deplatformed content creators have been flocking to Substack of late.

I can see why: It's an easy-to-use blogging platform that allows for simple monetization of your content. It even comes with mailing list functionality. That's a big deal to those on the "fringe" - it's tough for wrongthinkers to make a living on the New Normal Internet.

Bad boys and girls lose access to their Patreon, after all. The particularly naughty ones might not even be allowed on mailing list software, let alone Twitter or YouTube.

Substack solves a lot of problems for these people.

Because while Substack doesn't market itself as a "free speech" platform, they've been incredibly amenable to blogs and ideas verboten on Big Tech platforms that require unilateral support for the current thing.

I'm glad Substack exists. It's good to see the serially demonetized making some coin again and be able to reliably stay in touch with their audience, at least for the time being.

I also think every creator currently relying on Substack to host some <p> tags and JPGs should take prudent measures and back up all their content. All good things inevitably end, and they typically end faster if they're provided by a Silicon Valley startup.

Thankfully, backing up your Substack is notoriously simple and requires no technical knowledge:

1. Navigate to your Substack's RSS feed page - just append /feed after your blog link so it looks something like https://myclotshotblog.substack.com/feed
2. Download your feed file
3. Do this every time you release new content
4. Bonus: If you host podcasts on Substack, save your audio files with a podcatcher

That's it. Easy, right? Now you have a simple XML file with all your posts and can re-create your blog anywhere else on the Internet in case of a deplatforming emergency.

The only catch is that you'll lose any images you might have uploaded - Substack hosts those (along with the rest of your content) with Daddy Bezos over at AWS, so there's no expectation that they'd be fetchable after your account is deleted. However, saving the "meat" of your content is better than nothing.

Some may say I'm paranoid for calling on the importance of distrusting Substack at the height of its popularity, but we've seen this story before.

Conflict is the air we breathe

Back in 1999, there was a company called Pyra Labs. They made a name for themselves developing an all-in-one blogging platform called Blogger. Eventually, they caught the eye of Google, who acquired them in 2003.

Google took Blogger to the next level. They offered blog hosting for "free," a suite of nice looking themes to spruce up your site, and a normie-accessible HTML editor. This free blog hosting service was incredibly popular - you've probably been on one of these sites, readily identifiable by the subdomain URL scheme somerandomblog.blogspot.com.

Is this story sounding familiar yet?

While Blogger has certainly waned in popularity, it's still home to a lot of high-profile content creators. One such creator was Vox Day, host of the infamous Darkstream and creator of Arkhaven Comics. His blog lived at voxday.blogspot.com. If you go there now, however, you'll be greeted with the following:

Thankfully, Vox Day is no dummy. He is, in fact, an ideal example for how you, dear Substack creator, should deal with reliance on centralized "rent-a-platform" services. In true Sigma fashion, Vox had his blog completely mirrored and back up at voxday.net mere hours after his cancellation, saving 19 years worth of blog entries in the process. He also offered this warning:

As you’ve almost certainly noticed if you’re here, Google has decided to roll the dice and take its chances with the Legal Legion of Evil. As with YouTube, Blogger hasn’t entirely deplatformed the account, but instead elected to block access to the blog while publicly issuing false and defamatory statements about it.

This is not a surprise. This day has been a long time in coming, and we have been prepared for it on every front. You may wish to note that this post was made barely an hour after Google took action. Special thanks to the dev team, who were ready for instant action and whose rapid response time allowed such an easy and seamless transformation.

Remember, conflict is the air we breathe. It is the water in which we swim.

-Vox Day

Vox is, of course, correct. Any content host you do not have reasonable control over should always be viewed as a potential adversary. Substack is an admirable platform at present, but what happens to their character when it's time for Series A financing, or worse, outright acquisition?

Nothing good.

Self-host your shit already

So what does a denizen of the blogosphere do with an archived RSS feed after being deplatformed?

Become un-deplatformable by self-hosting, of course!

There's really no sense in not having your own website at this point. It's incredibly simple and can be done for less than $5 a month. I'm not saying you should delete your Substack account - I sincrely hope my warnings are incorrect and that Substack remains a viable platform of independent thought for years to come. The history of managed blog hosting just says otherwise.

I recently authored a tutorial on creating a static site with Pelican. It turns out Pelican offers a very simple method of importing your blog via RSS feed. If hosting your own HTML files directly seems too daunting, I'm sure WordPress has a comparable RSS feed importer plugin. While Vox Day's example above credits a "dev team" in restoring his blog (and having one certainly doesn't hurt), I assure you that you don't need one in order to keep your content online.

Some level of reliance on centralized services for video hosting and live streaming is understandable. That's a bandwidth and disk space intensive game, which is why Big Tech retains such a staunch monopoly in that arena. But there's simply no excuse not to host your own text and image files.

As for monetization, the Stripe API is very thorough if you have the technical chops to roll your own paid platform. There's probably a WordPress plugin for paywalls and recurring subscriptions as well. And while cryptocurrency has proven to be an abject failure in terms of use as actual money for goods and services, maybe it'll get there someday.

With regard to mailing list software, try your best not to rely on it. There are perfectly good protocols like RSS out there to push your content directly to your subscribers without middlemen like email list providers. Software like Raven Reader makes this incredibly easy and it's no mystery why Google hates decentralized content distribution protocols like RSS.

The important thing is that you keep moving forward.

-FF