On "What I learned in year four of Platformer"
Really cool to see Casey Newton's update on how things are going over at the Platformer newsletter after they left Substack. A lot of it resonates with my own experiences:
It also feels like more honest, durable growth than we saw in 2023. ...
First and foremost, we have an honest-to-goodness website now. One where we can easily modify the design, add new features, and grow our offering over time. One reason why I write so often about the decline of the web is that I love websites as products. And our new setup gives us almost unlimited flexibility as Platformer evolves. ...
Another key benefit of leaving: We’re much less vulnerable to platform shifts than we were before. I had long worried that Substack’s unprofitable business would eventually lead it to make decisions that were not in the best interest of our readers or our business. (Besides not removing literal 1930s Nazi content, I mean.) I still have that worry for my friends who choose to build their businesses on Substack anyway. But whatever happens, it will no longer affect Platformer, and that gives me me real peace of mind. ...
It’s a decision I’m proud of — because it’s a decision we made as a community. ... Having principles can be annoying and expensive. (And make you insufferable to talk to at parties.) But it beats the alternative.
It's also cool to hear that Platformer has enjoyed solid growth, which I know a lot of people worried about when leaving the promised network effects of the Substack ecosystem:
I’m proud to report that despite leaving Substack, revenue was up about 11 percent year over year.
Not many newsletters operate on the scale of Platformer (mine certainly included), so I'm sure their experience is unique in many ways, but it's great to have another success story from a newsletter choosing to go the even more independent route.
![At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted. But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024: People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased. In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/1d5eb382a3faf17a0c4d_Screenshot-2024-05-10-at-12.36.00---PM.png)