If you're anything like me then you take a keen interest in many things collapse – books, blogs, podcasts, etc. – and have probably listened to several episodes of Nate Hagens' excellent podcast The Great Simplification. Like me you may have also come across the Doomberg newsletter, a newsletter which I discovered early in its 2021 inception but then quickly soured on it as it appeared to have no recognition of biophysical economics nor any hint of a strong ecological take, it instead appearing to be little more than another run-of-the-mill financial publication with bear-ish aspects to it.
For those that haven’t heard, there’s a lot that’s gone on with Substack since this post has been published, absolutely none of it being due to this post but rather due to the work of Katz, Kabas, and a bunch of other Substackers (many of whom have left the “subscription network” for other platforms). Although I could drop another few thousand words about it all, and may very well one day, that’s not going to be happening any time soon. That being so, I recommend checking out Adam Tinworth’s write-up about much of what’s gone on.
One of the more prominent Substacks that’s left the platform is Casey Newton’s and Zoë Schiffer’s Platformer, their explanatory post about leaving Substack (for Ghost) offering a few words applicable to what I’d written.
Aren’t you going to have this exact same problem on Ghost, or wherever else you host your website?
As open-source software, Ghost is almost certainly used to publish a bunch of things we disagree with and find offensive. But it differs from Substack in some important respects.
One, its terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.
Two, Ghost tells us it has no plans to build the recommendation infrastructure Substack has. It does not seek to be a social network. Instead, it seeks only to build good, solid infrastructure for internet businesses. That means that even if Nazis were able to set up shop here, they would be denied access to the growth infrastructure that Substack provides them. Among other benefits, that means that there is nowhere on Ghost where their content will appear next to Platformer.