I’m not one to rain on another’s parade. I’m not the type to tell someone their favorite band is, in fact, not very good or the sort who’d suggest a chef add one more shake of pepper into their chowder. All the same, I’ve got just a *little* bit of a chip on my shoulder about how many people have moved from social media to Substack… and I’m not sure why. To be clear, I have no problem with the move from social media. When Twitter was bought out and people began migrating to Mastodon, Hive, Threads, and Bluesky—and none were seeming to stick—I had a secret hope that the end result of all these false starts would be a return to blogging. The Substack format is, more or less, blogging and the Substack site is, more or less, an RSS aggregator. But I just can’t seem to get into it.
I have, for the last… let’s say ten years… lamented the death of blogging. I remember so fondly the early part of the 00s, how my time was spent online. I would surf from site to site and hope any one of my favorite writers or artists would have uploaded some new essay, photo, sketch or, best of all, an interesting link. In that case, you would surf over to this new undiscovered part of the internet and lose yourself in some new information or experience. It was the best! It was also (not so unlike modern social media) a huge time suck but there was an active participation that was very different from having an algorithm spoon feed you content.
Okay, so here we are, more than a few first steps into a post micro-blogging world and guess what, Substack is taking off! Artists and writers are posting fairly regularly over there and my reaction… a mild indifference! What the heck?! I’ve been granted what I wanted and I’m still holding out for something else.
This is clearly a me problem. I *think* what it is is that I haven’t yet grieved the old internet, I haven’t yet shed my frustrations at the engagement driven social media apps, and I haven’t yet accepted that the world spins ever forward. We can’t go back to blogging as it was, so maybe Substack *does* make sense—there is, actually, a lot of good kidlit stuff on there, illustrator Alina Chau has collected it into one big list.
Anyway, I feel like a bit of a Rotten Ralph. There is no reason for me to be salty at a platform that is giving writers and artists a place to share their work. All the same, I’m going to keep blogging. It works for me. I have zero means of tracking engagement, but I like that. It’s kind of like my private YouTube livestreams where I am simultaneously speaking to everyone and to no one. A bizarre exercise, but I like it.
Until next time, everybody and nobody.