Substack

2024-12-29
I have something new and exciting to show you!
Well, I’m not sure if you’ll find it exciting, but I’m thrilled about it.
Over the past few weeks, I have invested a lot of time into revamping my website so that I can share with you all my Blog posts and Knowledge Base in one place. Perhaps we can call it a Knowledge Base Blog. Hum, it looks like KBB would be a good acronym. Anyway, here’s what I’ve done so far.
Oh, by the way, you may be asking yourself why I’m also using Substack to share this post. This may or may not be temporary; however, due to the migration of my website to a different platform, I have lost the newsletter feature that I previously had. Anyway, back to my KBB

Let’s start with the left-side menu. Except for Books, the first group of items—from About me to Ethics Statement—are the same topics (pages) I already had on the other site.
Toolbox and Maker are where I’m exploring ways to share my Knowledge Base with you. As you can see in the image below, there are many topics, and each one of them contains explanations, how-tos, and other types of resources and information to help you learn more about those areas of interest.

However, the cool part, at least for me, is how I’m connecting all that with the blog posts. Think of all the information as widgets I can add to any post. As a matter of fact, embedding them is part of what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks.
Let’s look at the Books section. For now, there are only three books there, but the idea is to keep adding them. The book Algorithms to Live By, for example, is a page with some of my thoughts about it. Anyone who wants to know what I think about the book can go to that page. But there’s another path to that same information. In fact, many paths.
You may be reading a post, like this one, with that same information embedded. In other words, every time I mention that book in a post, I can include that “widget”. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are several integrations like this all over the new website.
But there’s more. If you take a look at the bottom of the book’s page, you’ll see the Links to this page list. That’s an automatic compilation of all the pages mentioning that book. And if we go back to the Toolbox, each topic also has (will have) a page like that. For example, vladcampos.com/evernote, vladcampos.com/supernote, and vladcampos.com/voicenotes are automatic compilations of posts about those topics.

Don’t leave yet. There’s more. In many pages on the website, you’ll find words that start with hashtags. Those are tags, and clicking on them will open a list of other pages with that tag.

I am still working on many things, and the structure may change in the coming days or weeks, but the main goal is to keep connecting new content to this web of knowledge.
Back to Substack…
As you can imagine, this intricate structure is only possible on my website, and that’s why I have no idea how to “translate” it to a newsletter. But that is a problem I am leaving to my future self to deal with. For now, I invite you to explore my KBB.
I wish you a wonderful 2025 🎉



2024-09-25
Building a community online—a personal experience.
Let’s talk about building a community online, not just selling products. Blogs, newsletters, and social media can be used to connect with like-minded people. I’m interested in an authentic and fulfilling way to build an online presence. What about you?
From time to time, I see people complaining on social media about how they miss the old days when blogs were so prevalent. I never reply, but I do have this answer ready to fire.
—Blogs still exist. There are plenty of them being updated every day.
And the second part of the answer would be: —Start one!
I mentioned the above because this blog post you are currently reading was inspired by another blog post from Molly White, which was inspired by a Platformer post. And it was a post on Mastodon that made me aware of all this.
What I’m trying to say is that blogs and social media can and should coexist and help each other. Let’s also add newsletters to that mix as I try to connect all my thoughts to write this post.
A few days ago, I finally left Substack, and Casey’s post on Platformer also discusses his decision to leave. Of course, his newsletter is much larger than mine, but some of his reasons line up with my decision.
Substack was never my first choice, but I needed a place to go after Revue was discontinued by Twitter, and Substack had this seamless import feature. I’m not going into details again because I have already explained it here and here, but like Casey, I love my blog and website, and I use a newsletter to make people aware of my new posts. 
All I’m looking for is a gradual, but real, growth. That’s it. In other words, a community, not numbers. Here’s how he puts it:
“Let’s get into some specifics. As I write this, Platformer now has 190,196 subscribers — up about 35,000 from last year. That’s a much slower growth rate than year three, when in the midst of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, our audience doubled. But it also feels like more honest, durable growth than we saw in 2023. Unplugged from the dark pattern of Substack’s growth hacks, we still managed to grow significantly.”
That honest and durable growth is also the same feeling I have about my social media presence, especially the Fediverse. And Casey also talks about this in his recent post. Ghost, where his newsletter is hosted now, has this incredible plan to convert itself into a fully integrated ActivityPub service, which I’m following step by step. I feel like I’m stocking them in a frequent search for any piece of new news about their progress.
If they can accomplish the vision the CEO shared on an episode of the Dot Social podcast, not only will we be able to comment using an ActivityPub compatible account, but also subscribe to any newsletter. Imagine adding your username to a subscription box and seeing the new issues of the newsletter on your Fediverse app of choice. That’s mind-blowing!
Another thing Casey says is: 
“We also stopped posting to X. It felt bad contributing to a site that had actively dismantled its own content moderation operation and predictably soon filled up with hate speech of all sorts.”
I agree with him, and leaving has also been on my list of goals for a while now, even though I’m only cross-posting to Twitter. Anyway, the Fediverse seems to be the solution again.
Like he pointed out, more and more people are switching to Threads. I would prefer them to be choosing Mastodon, but since Threads is gradually implementing ActivityPub features to the platform, I guess it’s going to be okay. All I have to do is keep following people from Mastodon, like I’m already doing.
If you haven’t, please start educating yourself on the Fediverse. It’s such a great project. And go find some blogs to read. There are many of them out there, publishing top-quality content.



2024-09-22
I'm often surprised by how simplifying things can end up being a daunting task
Several months ago, I got stuck trying to code a complicated set of rules to try to automate the process of building my newsletter, while also making it more intuitive for readers to understand. That turned out to be a huge task because I’m not a developer, and I went back to the laborious manual process.  
However, for some unknown reason, my brain refuses to let go of some projects and continues to secretly work on them. After a few days, years, or hours, when I’m lucky, these bursts of insight begin to emerge in no particular order or interval. For example, In June, I was here doing something completely unrelated, and my brain asked me this:
🧠 “—Why don’t you just send an email for each article you post?”
It was indeed a good idea. It’s not only much easier technically speaking, but Substack, the platform I was already using, had that feature. So, it was just a matter of copying the post from my blog and pasting it on Substack. In hindsight, I don’t even remember why I decided to send a monthly compilation of posts.
Of course, the new plan came with its own set of problems. Because that made things so much easier, at some point I decided to post the articles across more platforms, which led me back to a time-consuming task. Not to mention that I’m unsure if it’s worth the effort.
Little did I know, my brain had been secretly plotting to automate the process I gave up many months ago, and today it came up with another brilliant insight:
🧠 “—Compared to what you attempted to do in the past, I’m pretty sure it is much easier to create an automation on your blog platform to send a single article instead of that compilation.”
That’s a great idea, I thought. And here we are. This is a test article to make sure posts like this get sent automatically. If everything goes as planned, I will be able to centralize all the processes of posting and sending the newsletter in a single place. And it will all be done on its own. Finally! 
Update: It worked!
It is amazing that, while trying to simplify a situation, we often end up making things even more complicated. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, sometimes it’s just a matter of turning things around a little to see how simple a solution can be.



2024-09-22
I finally said goodbye to Substack
It took me much longer than I anticipated, but today I finally said goodbye to Substack. As previously mentioned, what initially began as a newsletter platform has evolved into a social media platform. Since then, the number of people who follow me instead of subscribing via email has been increasing every day.
This position is contrary to many of my beliefs regarding a free and open web and federated social media.
As you read this, I have already moved all the emails to the new system hosted by my website provider. If everything goes well, the next time I write an article, the email will be sent from the new system, and you’ll be able to read it here on my cherished website.



2024-04-26
Time to say goodbye to Substack.
The whole point of having a newsletter is to control the distribution of content.
I don’t know when this started, but I’m almost certain it wasn’t possible to just follow people on Substack before. I also don’t know if they are promoting or stimulating the “follow” option, but the number of people following me without subscribing to my newsletter is increasing every day.
Below is the difference, clipped from Substacks Help Center:
Follower: They’ll see your notes and some reading activity such as post likes. When someone follows you, you won’t receive their email, so they won’t get posts in their inbox.
Free subscriber: They’ll subscribe to your Substack and receive free posts via email and/or the Substack app. They’ll automatically follow you and see your notes in their feed.
In other words, if someone is following you, there is no email address, and if you want to switch services, you won’t be able to take the followers with you. That’s not a newsletter. It’s social media.
In a world where more and more services are embracing to the Fediverse, Substack’s move to a closed system is mind-boggling to me. But just leaving the service wasn’t enough. I had to share this information with you. So, if you have a newsletter on Substack, maybe it’s time to start to reevaluate your strategy.
I’m not sure when I’ll be leaving, but it’s likely to happen sooner than later. For now, if you want to make sure to follow me to my next newsletter chapter and keep getting my monthly emails, please don’t follow me. Subscribe.



2023-01-02
Maybe indirect revenue is not a thing
Like most of us, I don’t know much about Twitter’s current situation, but I would like to share my thoughts on the recent shutdown of Revue, a newsletter service the company bought in January 2021.
I understand that sometimes ending services that are not profitable is the only option, but what about the indirect revenue these services might be making? Furthermore, Revue was actually earning some money since there were paid newsletters hosted there.
Like many people, I moved to Mastodon several months ago, but since I was using Revue as my newsletter provider, I knew that I would not be able to completely disconnect from Twitter. In other words, I would still see and click on some ads and maybe even become a Blue subscriber. Anyway, all that is in the past now. Switching to Substack was effortless.
My point is that I was already going to the site less and less, and the only reason I don’t plan to delete my account is because I’ve already been impersonated on YouTube once and don’t want to take any chances on other social media.