Why I'm Leaving Substack

Because My Writing Should Be More Than A Digital Journal

Do you ever feel the crushing limitations of the tools you've been given? Or even worse, the tools you selected yourself?

I haven't been writing as much as I intended to, and I think that is largely due to frustration with the tools and functionality available on Substack. In order to add links and create a network between your posts, you need to manually go back into each post, click 'Edit', find the location for the link, update the text if required, and paste the Substack URL of the post you'd like to link manually, then save and republish the post.

Unfortunately, even after doing all that, there is no record in the target post that it now has links pointing to it. In fact, there is no way in Substack to get any information about what connections are made between posts, so in order to maintain complete and consistent linking, it falls to the writer to manage an external system to document their links and try to keep it up to date with the Substack posts themselves.

I want my articles to be highly connected and easy to navigate — a garden of information within which the reader can make their own path.

How can I do that, if it takes me 5 minutes to create every link, and I can easily forget to click publish, leaving my updated post forever in the limbo of draft status? The headache of second-guessing whether a typo may have created a broken link will cause me more pain and hesitation than I'm comfortable committing to for the long haul.

For these reasons and more, I've decided to self host a blog using a combination of open-source tools, which gives me much more creative control and freedom to write and link ideas organically. I plan to write more about exactly how I did that for any of you who are writers as well and want to copy my new paradigm, but for now, I just wanted to let you know what to expect from my new writing paradigm.

My writing style will be changing somewhat with this transition, as the seamless linking capability gives me the freedom to write more focused, single-topic articles with links to expanded discussion and related topics, rather than try to fit all the related ideas into one. I'll be editing some of my old posts to fit this paradigm as well.

I expect to be writing and publishing more often, but having articles that are closer to one to two thousand words, rather than the roughly four thousand range that some of my earlier posts hit.

I also don't want to overwhelm you with email notifications, so I will be continuing my once a week newsletter pattern by including an email with links to each of my new articles for the week. These newsletters give me the ability to talk about other things that have inspired the writing, or to draw connections highlighting overarching themes that pull the shorter articles together.

As always, everything is an experiment in intentionality. I've established my new tools and techniques, but I'm still willing to adjust if I find that these don't work as expected.