"You're cannibalising yourself"

For 23 years, I’ve run my own website. But for 17 of those years I’ve been placing much of my work elsewhere, on other people’s platforms.

You might think I mean Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn – and I do mean those too. But for the purposes of this essay I’m going to focus only on something narrower: newsletters.

Over a decade and a half, I’ve used several newsletter platforms, including Mailchimp, Buttondown, Substack and Kit (formerly ConvertKit). I’ve typed emails directly into their interface, with or without pictures.

That is, I’ve built archives on someone else’s infrastructure instead of my own website. Which is bonkers, like a farmer walking out of his own fields to throw seeds around a neighbour’s land.

Slowly, very slowly, I’ve come to see how crazy that is – and why I built my own site in the first place.

Here’s how I finally saw it.

How I stumbled into newsletters

When I published my book Sew Your Own, in 2009, I needed to tell people about it. So I sent out lots of emails – ordinary emails. Normal emails.

I quickly discovered that if you send lots of similar emails on the same day they’ll be marked as spam and your account will be closed down.

It was a nightmare. I learned the hard way that what I needed was a mass email sender. I did a little research and settled on one called Mailchimp. If you don’t use it yourself you have probably received many emails from shops, theatres, non-profits and other organisations that do.

For a few years, I used Mailchimp to publish emails about my events, and occasionally I used it to share other things that seemed interesting.

I was stumbling towards building what others (as I subsequently discovered) called an email newsletter.

The stupid mistake I kept repeating

Which is fine, but I made a stupid mistake. I typed my emails directly into the Mailchimp interface. In other words, although I had my own website, I was not using it to build my archive.

I got sick of Mailchimp, as I’ve written here, and looked for an alternative that was less focused on selling. I found Buttondown, which specifically calls itself a Newsletter (as opposed to a marketing platform). I loved Buttondown, and the personal support I received from the founder Justin Duke, who seemed to run it by himself, entirely alone (not any more).

I typed many newsletters within the Buttondown interface and pressed send – building yet another archive that is not on my own website.

But one thing I wanted to build was automations – emails that can go out in a series, automatically. And at that time (though no longer) Buttondown didn’t provide that feature, so I switched to ConvertKit, now called Kit.

Again, I typed inside the Kit interface and pressed send, building a whole new archive not on my website.

Like Mailchimp, Kit is also emphatically a selling platform and sometimes that makes me feel a bit sick. It’s always telling me how I could do THIS if I want more people to open my emails¹, or do THAT to make people buy something. Ugh.

Meanwhile I kept hearing about a new-ish thing called Substack. And so – gah! – I also set up a newsletter on Substack.

I liked the idea that you could write something as a Substack post, and either send it out to your email subscribers or just leave it as a post.

The appeal of Substack was obvious, and heavily promoted by its marketing: write posts, build an archive, send them as newsletters. Simple. Integrated.

But I had all this already! What I could have done, for all these years, is post something on my website, flintoff.org, and use RSS feeds to send the post directly to an email service provider – (perhaps) any of them! Links inside those emails would send people directly back to my own website.

Why didn’t I realise? Because it’s not spelled out by the platforms, which (apart from Buttondown) would prefer to lock me in by having me build an archive on their land, as it were.

And gradually, steadily, on Substack it became impossible not to feel that I was being locked in.

Too late to save what I’ve lost

Seriously, the thought of all that material I’ve created elsewhere for 17 years (seventeen!) makes me desperate. I can’t get it all back: to go into the various platforms and open every archived email and copy it to my site would take weeks. It’s basically impossible – too late for me to save what I’ve lost.

So I’m writing this as much as anything for you, dear reader, in hope that you will avoid the same mistake.

How did I finally come to see what I was doing? I think the moment it started to sink in was when we went for dinner with my friend Kamin, who uses Substack. We were in the kitchen, helping to prep, and Kamin said something that caused me to reply that I have several different newsletter platforms.

“You’re cannibalising yourself,” she said.

Ouch. She was right. But at that time (maybe two years ago) I thought the only problem to solve was this: decide which newsletter platform to use as I typed into its interface. Just make a firm decision.

• quit Kit and Buttondown and go all in on Substack
• quit Buttondown and Substack and go all in on Kit
• or – well, you get the idea.

Sounds simple, but I was paralysed. Which should I choose?

What still hadn’t occurred to me was the most important thing of all:

make my website the centre of everything.

If I could only work out how to use RSS, I could post to my website (as described above) and send out email newsletters using Kit, Buttondown, Substack or even Mailchimp – any ONE of them.

The open web vs. platform silos

Both Kit and Substack encourage cross-referrals between writers on their platforms. There’s a network effect: recommend someone, get recommended back. Clearly, this helps to build an audience. But I don’t want to build an audience only within Kit, or Substack. I’d like to be connecting to people all over the internet.

I want to link to writers wherever they publish: Substack, WordPress, Micro.blog, Textpattern, Bluesky, anywhere. The conversational web I’m interested in doesn’t live inside any single platform’s walls. It lives in the links between platforms, in RSS feeds, in blogs that talk to each other across different systems.

Platform lock-in that masquerades as community isn’t a network. It’s a silo with better marketing.

Why people don’t know they can own their space

One of the last bits of the puzzle, for me, involved helping someone set up a website last year. I wanted something simple enough to recommend as a first step toward ownership. She had no interest in learning to operate Textpattern, the free, open-source CMS I use and know best. So I experimented with Blot.im, a wonderfully simple CMS that allows you to create a website using text files saved in (say) Google Drive or iCloud.

Blot.im is great. When you build the website it automatically generates an RSS feed that you can use to send posts out by email (if you wish).

The problem isn’t technical complexity. The tools exist. They’re often quite simple. The problem is conceptual: people don’t realise it’s possible, or they don’t realise it’s necessary. They don’t know they can own their own space on the web, or they’ve been convinced they don’t need to.

20 years to remember what I already knew

What strikes me now is how long this took. I’ve spent so many years slowly rediscovering why I built my own site in the first place. Independence. Ownership. The ability to link outward without asking permission. The freedom to build something that outlasts any particular platform’s business model.

I’ve started the slow work of bringing (some of) my stuff back – my “content”. You can see here what I’m recovering from LinkedIn, and I’ll post something similar relating to Instagram soon.

The web I want to participate in, the one a healthy democracy needs, is made of personal platforms that can speak to each other. Not corporate silos that keep us inside their walls.

I already knew this once. I’m finally remembering.

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In summary, what I hope you take from this is a sense of agency, in these areas:

• Where your work lives
• Who can see it
• How long it lasts
• What you can learn from it

¹ Open my emails. The dashboard inside Kit tells me that such-and-such a number of people “haven’t engaged with your content in 90 days” or whatever. I find this very depressing. What I really aspire to is a relationship with newsletter readers that I had when I was writing all the time for newspapers. I love hearing back from people, I’m an easy man to find, but I don’t want to be snooping on your engagement with my “content”. Eurgh. Whoever thought that was a good idea?

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