Changing to Pika

Let's switch it up.

Hello. How is everyone?

TL;DR: I’m moving this newsletter from Substack to Pika. If for some reason that doesn’t vibe with you, feel free and even blessed to unsubscribe. We can’t all be reading everything all the time.

When I started this newsletter almost six years ago it was in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I rage quit Facebook (I don’t even know why I was still on Facebook) and invited people I knew who wanted to stay in touch to an up-and-coming platform called Substack.

I mostly did this to maintain the loose network of digitial connections I’d made in 25 years of being online. And it worked! More than a website this Substack became a kind of digital front door. Last year I had the somewhat surreal experience of meeting someone who only knew me through reading this newsletter; they had absolutely no other context for me other than these words. Hi that person!

But then people looked around the Substack neighborhood and discovered some less than appealing neighbors. With Facebook my decision was easy—I rarely checked it, it was doing mad weird stuff, and the “pivot to video” made-up metrics cost a lot of friends and basically an entire industry their jobs. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, and thank god for that, around 2014 Facebook claimed that video content did heaps and loads better than boring old photos and text, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon to make videos and… Facebook lied. Like they admitted it, all “Ah oops our bad those numbers were fake”. That was twelve years ago.)

Somehow I’ve managed to avoid the worst parts of Substack, although I will say the design is getting bonkers bad. Like “make the worst volume control” bad. That said, I’m pretty sure I don’t want my front door associated with platforming Nazis. To quote a friend, “I can’t just be mad at the internet.”

Which is why after this post the next edition of this newsletter will come from Pika. Pika is a blogging platform made by Good Enough, a small software company with a big heart, that also lets you send out newsletters. Pika is where I’m writing my (now daily) blog. I post a weather report and anything notable that’s happened or I’ve found online. That’s not what the newsletter will be, but I find the daily practice really meditative. I’ve tried a version of this on Wordpress and even a GitHub repo, and this is the only one that’s managed to stick (so far).

I’m going to move the subscriber list from here over to Pika, so if you’ve been considering unsubscribing now’s the time to do it. You can also unsubscribe after the move but this is your chance to do it on the sly. Kidding. Pika doesn’t show your subscriber list by default so you don’t stress. That’s just one of the tiny ways Pika is good.

Ok, that’s all. Thanks for reading.