Why I’m blogging with Ghost

The year is 2026 and it feels as though if you want to build an audience that avoids all major social platforms, there’s only one option which is Substack.

Substack is a great platform and obviously has everything that any creator of any media could want along with it's own growing network to sustain both sides of a marketplace.

I have many thoughts about what most platforms offer to both creators (a term I dislike) and consumers (a term I have no objection to) which I can attempt to articulate at a later time but one thought I keep coming back to is the need for independence from platforms no matter which side of that market you fall into.

If you’ve read Enshittification by Cory Doctorow or just been an alert user of the internet in the last 15 years then you know the playbook that platforms follow. They attract users and lock them in. Then attract businesses to advertise to those users and lock them in. Finally, they extract from both sides while constantly degrading the experience over time until you’re left with a slop filled ad board when you just wanted to keep contact with your friends.

Perhaps being a millennial who grew up on the internet and seeing the negative outcomes and incentives that platforms steer creators (eugh) and consumers towards has left a desire for something else that sits apart from them.

Avoiding platforms is why I didn’t want to write on Substack and set up this blog on Ghost. I pay a small fee to Digital Ocean for some server space and the software that runs Ghost is mine to do with as a please.

I’ve long admired bloggers like John Gruber, Matt Birchler, and many other independent tech writers who prioritise their own sites over anywhere else.

They’re real people on real websites. Not brands on a platform.