substack is heaven
Substack's a very high population multimedia server that brims with variety, interactivity, and serendipity. Its sheer abundance of people, ideas, and exchanges showcases many flourishing pockets of commonality which overlap my interests. Surfing those waves has been a refreshing change of pace to the commonplace meta discourse of lower population servers. I'd say it has even broadened my horizons as to the kind of material that I read and interface with in the first place.
Succumbing to the social gravity of serious, long-game hypertext players I hold dear has been nice. A wiser version of me would have probably experimented living near my virtual role models much earlier than now. It's not like they were or are incentivized to join more niche virtual spaces. I'm surprised at how that, combined with my repeated calls for a diverse online presence, didn't persuade me to branch out sooner. It strikes me as odd that I let this be my sole digital home for so long.
I'm sure privacy-conscious people have a litany of reasons for why they nor others should use big social media platforms like it. Look, Substack natively offers free newsletters, myriad communication methods, and an entire Twitter clone. If I'm taking writing so seriously here, I might as well try out for the big league. I'm thankful for all of the emails I get from bloggers like you and would love more exchanges. For how enriching Twitter has been to online figures I respect, them maining Substack makes me think that following suit is worth the trade-offs.
Despite Substack's benefits, it comes with oppressive subscription pressure and sorely lacks Markdown. The latter bothers me much more than the former, but I think I'm just going to have to get over that.
I have also been very slow to ship units of exposure and luck through Substack. Ultimately, that's my skill issue to overcome.