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Owned by right wing billionaire fascist supporters and/or welcoming to fascists: X Instagram Facebook Threads WhatsApp TikTok Substack Plan your exit strategies if you haven't already.

Some alternatives: Bluesky (Blacksky and its other servers if you don't trust Bluesky's moderation) Mastodon (yes, I know, but still) Buttondown, Ghost, Beehiiv Signal Your own blog/website!

IMO, the biggest points of vulnerability here are X, Instagram, and Substack. X because it's the most egregious and evil of them all. No one should be posting there. IG because so many progressive groups rely on it, sometimes exclusively, and it's gonna bury them all soon. Gotta build here, y'all!

And Substack because it has a history of platforming Nazis and promoting horrible right wing creeps, and yet a huge number of progressives rely on it.

Substack is the exact thing I want all the way down as a product, but yeah on the promotion of folks I can't support. And thus, no newsletter. (I'm too irregular about it to take on a subscription. lol)

Buttondown and Beehiv really are good alternative platforms. unless you anticipate gaining tens of thousands of readers rapidly, then they both offer most features you'd need, and I believe you can also have different subthemes, so different newsletters under your newsletter.

They’re both far less expensive than Substack and have many features it doesn’t have, too!

The Buttondown guy is super responsive, too, if you ever have questions!

I mean, absurd example, but… bsky.app/profile/anil...

Yeah, I was ASTOUNDED to get incredibly fast responses when I emailed them about a few things. But that's pretty amazing, Anil!

I think they benefit so much by being human scale and not having raised VC.

it reminds me of the halcyon days of Pinboard when Maciej was actively listening to and building out features for new subscribers, before he burnt out and went TERF or whatever the hell 😭