Leaving Substack (and moving to Wordpress)

There and Back Again: I'm not a hobbit, but I'd love to live inside a hole in the ground. Not a nasty, dirty, hole like Substack has become; but a cozy, self-hosted one like a blog.

TL;DR: I’m moving away from Substack for ethical reasons. If you were subscribed to ScicommOps before the 6th of June 2024, you don’t have to do anything to keep receiving the newsletter. If you have subscribed after that date… please go to scicommops.agata.agency and subscribe there. You won’t regret it :)

And now, for the long(ish) version.

I know, it’s been too much time since the last issue. But for good reasons. Reasons I wish I’d known sooner, but well… you can’t keep up with every issue on the Internet. Trust me, I tried. Basically, Substack has become very much a Nazi bar. It has been one for a long time. But I didn’t realise it, because… well, I don’t use Substack that much. I created the newsletter on this platform because it was easy to set it up, and I didn’t give it too much thought. And that’s always a mistake.

I could go on and on about the issues with Substack, but smarter people than me have written better and longer essays about it. Suffice to say, leaving Substack was on my mind since the last issue. So I went looking for solutions —and luckily @Maltita had laid the path to follow. She has written a full post on alternatives to Substack and why leaving this platform is the better move. It’s in Spanish, but online translators work wonders nowadays, so go ahead and read her. I’ll be waiting here.

Already done? Perfect! So, what have I done? I’ve built my own theme park with blackjack website with Wordpress. We are already paying for our own hosting in Agata Communications, so it seemed natural to move it there. I had some previous experience in setting a Wordpress website from scratch and Wordpress has made it ridiculously easy to export everything from Substack into Wordpress. Besides, there’s a plugin literally named “The Newsletter plugin” that makes it really easy to handle newsletter. So I set up the hosting, took care of exporting everything, commissioned a logo for the newsletter (yay!) and tada! scicommops.agata.agency is born.

I’m keeping it really simple, as you can see.

There are a few loose ends to resolve, but I’ll take care of those in the upcoming days. So the next issue from ScicommOps will be sent from its new home 😊