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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!

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How do we convince reputable journalists and politicians to get off of X? They are the ones that help legitimize X with each post. X generates sexual abuse and still, these people use X. I don’t get it.

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.

A note on Ghost as an alternative. I've used Ghost for my newsletter for years now and their customer service has always been super responsive whenever I've needed something. I was trying to figure out, a ways back, how to format a poetry post and they helped me with it, across several emails.

it's really upsetting the number of progressives who feel that they can't afford to leave substack bc they'd lose their huge audiences. I get that it's daunting, but braving the loss of a platform is the LEAST you can do. And eventually your huge audience will dwindle anyway bc *they* all left.

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.

I try not to share direct links to people's Substacks because I don't like sending people to a platform that might push them to read right wing bullshit fascists.

Please note that this isn't primarily about ethical purity. This is about protecting your actual effectiveness and reach. The platforms I'm warning you about are either already killing the reach of progressives or very liable to. If you're not a fascist, you need to find alternatives.

X in particular is irredeemable also because it's deeply unsafe. It serves as a harassment vector. Get off.

i'm heartened each time i see a new blog and it's on Ghost or some other platform that's not Substack. Ghost exists, they have steps to move off Substack if anyone wants to take that step!

Not to defend Substack—I have a low circulation, very occasional travel thing there—but I never found it pushes readers past the particular author you sought out. I think of it as a tool, not a platform. I wish they had kept it that way instead of adding clunky social media gimmicks.