Similar to Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdom by Chris Zukowski, Elizabeth Tai in Substack writers, you need a website! makes a very good point about why you should keep have your own website as the primary source for your things and use platforms like Substack to reach new audiences.
However, this is the truth that has not changed since the dawn of the Internet: When you build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform, you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper.
Whenever you’re publishing primarily on platforms controlled by others, you’re not building your audience because if the platform goes down, kicks you out or moves their focus, you lose your audience. If instead, you direct the people from all these platforms (both social media and blogging platforms) to your website (and provide an RSS feed or email signups) that you control, you are truly building an audience.
That’s an audience you can reach directly: not dictated by third party algorithms and ever-changing decisions of what gets promoted.
The antidote to this exhaustion isn’t moving to the next shiny new app. It’s anchoring your work on an independent website with open distribution channels like RSS. It also means ruthlessly using platforms as distribution channels. When one collapses or you prefer to just move, it’s easy to just change strategies because your digital home remains unchanged.