I'm moving away from Substack to Wordpress. This shouldn't affect most people as I've just moved your emails over and everything should happen automatically. But…
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If you didn't receive the full proper newsletter titled “2024's Project is 10 Games From The First 10 Years”, please also go here and resubscribe.
The rest of this section is just an explanation for why. Please feel free to skip this email and just read the other email you got!
This was a complicated decision. I wanted to leave Substack but at first, there were no easy options. My newsletter goes out to 5000+ people and most places would charge between 35-90$ per month for that - and the price would only go up as I got more subscribers. I just couldn't afford a growing monthly bill like that. Also, Substack was responsible for at least 30% of my subscribers and moving away would probably mean fewer new readers going forward. It's also clear that to me there are no "good" companies and every social space on the internet more nazis than I would like (ideally, zero).
But I decided to move away from Substack anyway.
Geoffrey Golden told me that Wordpress doesn't charge per number of subscribers and that solved my financial problem. But the thing that clinched it was that I got quite a few messages from people. There were some weird ones, of course. It’s the internet. But most of the messages I got from my regular readers were genuinely trying to be helpful - sharing potential solutions, voicing concern and solidarity. And that is basically what convinced me. People like receiving this email. I want opening this email every week to remain a simple pleasure. And not being on Substack will keep it that way for some people - which is a great reason to do it.
WordPress is opensource. It's old. I made my first WordPress blog more than 17 years ago. It's not "one of the good ones" or anything like that. It's just not actively being the worst right now. It’s too bad I might not go grow as fast before but it’s fine.
If you'd like to move from Substack, I've written up all my research into other options as well as a guide to moving to WordPress in this post here.
I’ll resend this email next week just to catch folks who didn’t open this one. Sorry for two weeks of double-emailing!
The ideal number of nazis is zero. See ya at WordPress.
Glad I could help! I got your first WordPress newsletter and it looks good. I’ll be there soon.
Maybe we can figure out a way to continue growing on WP. I agree it’s not the most important thing, but I bet we can replicate a bit of Substack’s functionality there.