Systems Approach Has a New Home
As people who have written a lot about the risks of centralized platforms, we always had a degree of uneasiness about using Substack to host our newsletter. Knowing that we could take our content and subscribers elsewhere was a feature we liked, and now we are availing ourselves of this. You will not receive any more newsletters from us at Substack, and our latest newsletter (hosted on Wordpress) should now be in your inbox. However, there are some challenges in sending thousands of emails out to a mailing list in our current world of agressive spam-filtering, so there is a solid chance that your newsletter is sitting in Spam–please take a look if you don’t already have it.
If you’d like to undertand why we moved, aside from our belief in the benefits of decentralized architectures, you won’t find a better summary of the problems at Substack than this post by first amendment expert Ken White:
Hopefully this all goes smoothly and your subscription will be uninterrupted, but you can always cancel here and sign up again at our new site if necessary.
As a pleasant side effect, our main website and newsletter now live in the same place, so we actually dropped another centralized hosting provider out of our system as part of this process. And we know that by choosing Wordpress we are not in any way locked into any one hosting provider. Now that the basics are under control, we will start playing around with the Fediverse integration that Automattic is developing.