The Realists is moving

Here's to new beginnings... away from Substack

photo by Kadarius Seegars on Unsplash

Update (January 16, 2024)

Here is our new home: https://newsletter.therealists.org (powered by Ghost.org)

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Dear Realists,

I hope that you had a lovely holiday season and that the new year is off to a great start for you.

I must confess that I wasn’t able to fully relax during the Christmas break – my chief preoccupation over the past three weeks has been the search for a new home for The Realists. What platform to move to and which new technology to adopt? I’ve been jotting down pros and cons on a daily basis: Ghost vs Buttondown vs ConvertKit vs Beehiiv. What to choose? Until this morning that is. After watching yet another YouTube testimonial, I finally made my decision: Ghost.org.

Why is that? Following numerous morally repulsive and boneheaded decisions by Substack management over the course of the last month, just reading the word “Substack” gives me the ick. In the same way that X / formally known as Twitter or Gab or 8chan make me shudder.

For those out of the loop regarding Substack's turmoil and the ensuing writer exodus, I recommend Will Oremus and Taylor Lorenz’s insightful Washington Post article: “Substack wanted to be neutral. Its tolerance of Nazis proved divisive.” 

Even though there are many things I used to love about Substack, I simply cannot stand to be on it anymore. This will be my final post on the platform and I intend to move subscriber and post data over to Ghost.org early next week. I cannot, in good conscience, use a platform that refuses to moderate hate speech and Nazi content. And that not only does not moderate it, but it profits from it! I am out.

As Molly White brilliantly explained in her newsletter:

Substack decided to respond to the open letter and growing chorus of Substackers calling for them to remove blatant Nazi^a content by saying "no thanks, we'll keep them" in a disingenuous and frankly rather insulting Substack note. In it, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote that Substack has decided they will host Nazis because that allows their hateful ideas to be "subject[ed] to open discourse", as though Nazi ideologies only remain to this day because people simply haven't argued enough about them.

Scores of popular newsletters hosted by Substack have already moved or are planning to migrate by the end of January: from Casey Newton’s Platformer (which has over 170,000 subscribers!), to Molly White’s aforementioned Citation Needed (its new incarnation is already powered by Ghost.org) to Paris Marx’s The Disconnect and Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day. Broderick wrote another must read post on the issue, encapsulating many of the reasons why I also decided to leave: “It's time to leave Substack”.

In addition to moving away, I am also planning to delete my old posts by the end of the month. I am fortunate in the sense that I used to maintain a mirror blog on The Realists’ official website - which to this day gets a lot of organic traffic from Google. So no old posts will be lost. 

If you are equally disgusted by Substack and plan on deleting your account or unsubscribing from newsletters, I simply ask you for a bit of patience as I get organized for this digital move to another platform.

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Update (January 16, 2024)

Here is our new home: https://newsletter.therealists.org (powered by Ghost.org)

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As for the Realists roadmap for 2024, I plan on conducting interviews with technology thought leaders and experts of digital minimalism and digital literacy. Plus, I look forward to running guides about how to increase one’s own privacy online, how to reduce our digital footprint, how to spend less time in front of screens, and also how to harness the power of technology to improve our lives.

In short, there’s a lot in the works and I look forward to sharing more essays and tutorials with you and hearing your thoughts.

If I had to choose one word for the goal of The Realists in 2024, well it’s “community” – as in, creating a community around the goals of the project, so that we will mutually motivate each other to conduct digitally mindful lives.

Thanks for your support and see you soon in our new home,

Elena

P.S.: you can also find me on Mastodon