Should this blog move to Substack? Here are some reasons to do it:
- Substack is where things are happening these days (see here, here, here, and here). Some of the most popular blogs and newsletters are increasingly found there, and traditional media increasingly focus and rely on them. Substack’s growth has been relatively unrelenting.
- Substack provides multiple options for building one’s readership and support base that other venues (like the university-based WordPress one that this blog is built on) do not. Most of these include interlinking with other blogs, which creates a more coherent network of readership and conversation — exactly the kind of thing that attracted me to blogging in the first place (back in 2009), but which has faded everywhere except in Substack. It seems to be the only remaining place where the old, highly interactive “blogosphere” is not just surviving, but visibly thriving.
- (A third reason might be that Substack is easily monetizable, but as long as I’m on a reasonable university salary, that’s not a consideration for me. My university keeps me busy enough. That said, if things were to go extremely well here, I could retire earlier and devote even more energy to writing. ;-))
And here are two good reasons not to do it:
- In a rapidly changing digital world, “these days” never last. This blog has been here, located on a university server using a highly flexible form of traditional WordPress architecture, for 16 years. That university, a public land-grant university that’s been around for 234 years, isn’t going anywhere. As a medium-sized and medium-profile university, it’s not likely to suffer any dramatic reorganization under the currently governing federal regime. (And my non-salaried emeritus status with it is guaranteed, so I am not going anywhere either.) Substack, on the other hand, is a private company working in a competitive corporate environment. It’s a “walled garden,” and there’s nothing to guarantee that it won’t turn out to be a temporary “bubble.”
- More importantly: everything about Immanence is here, including a long history of posts organized according to categories, cross-references, etc. None of that would move to Substack. “Moving” would mean starting from scratch, encouraging old readers to move with me, and linking back to this site for historical references.
For a bit more context, we should consider Immanence’s goals: it’s an unusual blog that caters to a fairly specific readership, one that’s interested both in the culture and politics of the environment and in philosophical and theoretical issues connected to those things. (See more on the “About” page.) Readership and engagement are not as great as they were back in the early 2010s (arguably the heyday of the blogosphere), and while Immanence still gets a few thousand views a month, it’s down siginificantly from a few years ago and has not substantially grown its readership in some time. There are no guarantees, but Substack should predictably improve that and enable new connections with readers of other newsletters.
I welcome your thoughts on this, here or by e-mail. (For more on Substack, click on the links within this post and find many more at Wikipedia.)