I read a few Substack newsletters by email – from people I like, whose work happens to live there. Which is how I sometimes find myself on the Substack website, delivering applause, leaving comments etc.
The other day when I was there Substack recommended I follow Maria Popova.
I clicked.
Her profile said, Helloooo (I paraphrase), I am not on Substack, my newsletter has lived at themarginalian.org for over a decade, you can subscribe there.
I thought that was rather good. A polite signpost left on a platform she has chosen not to inhabit, for the benefit of anyone who came looking. Not a complaint about the platform. Not a verdict on anyone who uses it. Just a small bit of helpfulness, with her own name on the door.
I had been meaning to tidy up my own Substack presence for a while, since I don’t post there either – I write at flintoff.org and have done for nearly 25 years. So I borrowed the idea and did my own version. Mine says Hello Dear Person, points people back here, and mentions that you can subscribe by email or follow via RSS. Thank you.
It struck me afterwards that this is probably a small genre. People who keep a quiet flag on a platform they have left, or never really joined, because the platform is where some of their readers still are, and a polite forwarding note is kinder than silence.
I did something similar with Twitter for a long time. I had stopped going there (too many maniacs) but kept the account, partly because I wasn’t quite ready to disappear from it entirely, partly because I wasn’t sure what closing it down would actually involve (lots of work?). Eventually I deleted the whole thing, which felt fine – blissful, actually.
The interim – present but not really – is its own state.
I imagine there are signposts like this all over the place – on Medium (I should tidy up there too), on Facebook pages that haven’t been updated in years, on LinkedIn profiles that quietly mention “I write elsewhere.” If you’ve come across any good ones, I’d be curious to hear.
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