A Newsletter Writer Reflects On Leaving Substack

Many of you may be familiar with the brilliant writer A.R. Moxon, writer of the excellent “The Reframe” newsletter. Last year, he moved The Reframe from Substack to Ghost, and has now written about that experience. It’s an interesting read that we thought many here might enjoy as well, and Moxon was kind enough to allow us to republish it. If you don’t already, you should subscribe to The Reframe.

I am thinking today about the move of The Reframe off of Substack.

Yyyyyyitsbeen … 1 year since I moved off of Substack. The short of it is that it came out that Substack was (and still are) monetizing Nazi accounts, and the intellectually flabby and totally bad-faith response by Substack’s founder to the creator reaction to this news indicated to me that a) their constant platforming of anti-trans bigots was (as I should have known) not just an error in judgment but part of an overall ideological agenda to platform and promote bigotry; and b) Substack’s leaders were in no way trustworthy partners in any endeavor, business or otherwise. For more details you can read here.

I left. Since January 2024, I have posted first and foremost on the new site (a week or so after posting I put essays on Substack for readers who still use their app to read), and since March 2024 all emails and monetization have gone through the new site and all links have gone to it. It was a bit of a pain in the ass and pretty scary. You can read about all that here.

I have a few thoughts now that I’ve got a year under my belt, and the idea of having to deal with Nazis in public spaces is even more in the forefront of the minds of ethical people of good heart everywhere, now that we have what is for all purposes and certainly all intents a Nazi party in control of so much of our federal and state governments.

First, moving my monetization off of Substack wasn’t as big of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be. After doing my due diligence I landed on Ghost as my new newsletter host, but there were other very good alternatives, and all of them were offering something close to the same experience. Ghost was and is great, I have to say. They offered a concierge service that did almost all the work, porting over content and holding my hand through moving my subscriptions, and even navigating some hiccups that occurred because of the weird way I’ve set up coupons so that people can pay what they want. The team was extremely responsive and diligent and when (rare) issues have come up they have provided quick and useful advice. Additionally, they charge a flat rate rather than taking 10% of my action, as Substack did. My readership list and subscriptions have grown at the same rate as before and engagement is roughly the same. This isn’t a paid advertisement for Ghost and I’m not even going to bother putting up a referral link. This is simply my word to any other creator who is thinking about jumping off of Substack as that platform’s owners continue time and again to prove they’re a real bullshit bunch of bunkos: Moving is easier than you think and costs less.

Second, it was scarier than I thought it would be. What we’ve built here is very important to me, and that makes me very hesitant to mess with any part of the formula. Look, real talk: A huge part of the relief that all of you give to me is simply by being readers, paid or otherwise—even if the money went away completely, I’d keep writing—but the money matters. It’s changed my life and those of my loved ones in measurable positive ways, and if it had gone away because of a discretionary platform move, it would have been a really hard thing to absorb. This worst-case scenario didn’t happen, but when I moved there weren’t guarantees. It was a sweat. For this reason I’m not a hardline leaver. There are still a lot of anti-supremacy people who are posting on Substack, and many of them need the money much more than me, and are even in the exact groups most targeted for harm by the bigots and fascists that Substack finds it so important to platform. But I could afford more risk than many, and I took that risk, and I’m very glad I did. This leads me to my closing thought.

I think the Substack matter underscores the fact that questions of privilege matters to moral calculations of how to be anti-supremacist. As I was reading back on my words from about a year ago, this passage stood out:

As previously alluded, this whole country is getting pretty damn Nazi-normalizing these days …. it seems like Nazi adjacency just might not be optional anymore no matter where you are.

And that’s what Nazis want: to be everywhere, so that you can’t go anywhere.

This most of all: making everybody else leave whatever spaces they enter is exactly what Nazis demand and expect, and they have a clear pattern of going to any platform where people of good intent congregate, in order to chase them out, to splinter communities, to position good intent as fringe and themselves as mainstream—which allows them to move out the margins of permission on the violence they intend.

I would encourage you to keep encouraging people to leave Substack, for very good reasons. But I’d also encourage applying a level of clarity to the effort. The Nazi bar metaphor is a useful one, but it’s time to recognize that if you’re in the U.S., the lesson of the story was ignored, and now the country has become a Nazi bar. People targeted by Nazis are going to stay alive any way they can. I think of queer creators and Black creators and creators whose entire income is based on their newsletter: they’re making calculations with different math than I used. I still think they can safely move, and I think it would be better if they did, and I hope they will, but nevertheless I support them as they try to keep their heads above water.

I also don’t give myself too much credit for my move, or fall into the trap that my move has inoculated me against complicity with American supremacy. My belief is that it’s people privileged by our supremacist culture who need to pay the highest costs of resisting supremacy, precisely because it’s privileged people who are asked to pay the lowest costs by supremacy, and are even offered discounts by it. It was necessary for me to move from Substack in a way that it might not be for everyone.

I had the capacity for the risk, because I belong to almost every class that our supremacist culture defends. Given that my health is still relatively good and I am still employable, I belong to only one class that our supremacists target, and that is people who believe in human society and ethics and common decency, and speak out against their destruction. Perhaps someday I’ll be on the list for persecution by our current crop of American Nazis (as grandiose as that sounds), but I’m way down the list. More to the point, at present I think I am the sort of creator that pro-supremacy technocrats like Substack’s founders most value, and my presence within Substack would lend their pro-supremacy project a tacit credibility to people who value white male etcetera voices more than all others, which other creators, perhaps, do not.

I migrated a year ago because I thought it was best for my budding career as a writer. I also did it because I thought it was my moral duty—but my moral duty specifically, and it is upon myself I find it most appropriate to impose moral duties.

However for all creators or potential creators, I will say again: leaving Substack behind is probably a better idea than staying no matter your circumstance, and it is easier than I thought it would be, and it costs less than I feared it would. It was scarier than I thought it would be, but it was easier than I thought it would be, and I’m very glad I did it. There are probably lessons to be had here about doing scary things that you believe to be right. Anyone who wants to come over, hit me up and I’ll happily give whatever modest help I can provide.

Come on in. The water’s fine.

A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He’s doing the things a particle can. A version of this post first appeared in his newsletter The Reframe, which you should subscribe to.