If you are a Substack creator, please go to your dashboard and look under the overview heading.

On the left, you see all subscribers and on the right, you see all followers.

I’m leaving Substack because I keep getting more and more and more followers.

Yeah, you heard that right.

I guess this is something you wouldn’t expect from someone like me.

But if you understand the difference, I think you agree with me.

So let’s talk about that.

The first newsletter I ever used was MailChimp, but I eventually switched to another service.

I can’t remember the name anymore.

I switched because of a better deal.

When you pay for a newsletter, there’s this irony, if I can call it that.

The more you grow, the more you pay.

You pay per subscribers.

There are some tiers, but anyway, the more you grow, the more you pay.

And that’s why I was constantly looking for better deals.

And that’s how I ended up switching to a newsletter.

I don’t know how to pronounce it.

I guess it’s Reveal that was eventually purchased by Twitter and they made it free.

And that’s a great deal, right?

My newsletter was always free and it is still free.

By the way, if you want to subscribe, just go to vlagcampos.com slash newsletter.

All I do is send a list of the previous month publications, blog posts, YouTube videos, because I know how algorithm works.

So many people don’t see all everything I publish and it’s just a list.

You can go through the list and maybe you missed something and you want to read that or watch that video.

So it was always free and I was constantly looking for better deals.

But my happiness with Reveal didn’t last long because when Twitter itself was purchased, they eventually discontinued the newsletter.

And that’s how I ended up on Substack.

Moving from one service to another was never a problem.

I think that’s the point of having a newsletter.

You can control the distribution.

You have the email addresses.

You know what’s going to happen if you send.

You can send them whenever you want, as many as you want.

Anyway, you got the point.

You have control.

And moving from one service to another, it’s always easy.

It’s a matter of exporting the emails in one of the services and importing them into the next service.

That’s it.

That’s how easy it is.

And that’s why I could move from one service to another without disrupting the service.

If we go back to Substack’s dashboard and look at the box at the left, that’s the email.

Those are the emails.

That’s the email list.

That’s what you have control over.

That’s what you can export.

When you look at the box at the right, there’s…

I don’t want to use this word, but it feels like that naming is misleading.

Followers is your email addresses plus people that are following you on Substack, following your profile.

And following is not a newsletter.

Following is a social media, a centralized social media.

You cannot export that.

You cannot bring them with you if you move to a different service.

It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen in the future.

That’s why I moved from one service to another.

The price increased or I found better options.

You don’t know if that free tier will exist forever on Substack.

You don’t know if they will let you export their emails forever.

This is a small change now, but what is the end goal here?

Become a social media?

Become a centralized social media?

There are enough social medias out there.

What I’m looking for is a newsletter platform.

And the big problem with social media is that you cannot control what’s happening.

In fact, you don’t have control at all.

There is an algorithm.

There is the policy.

There is a bunch of rules.

You never know.

You work for the social media.

You work for the algorithm.

Unless we are talking about a decentralized social media like Mastodon or any other social media or service for that matter that uses the ActivityPub protocol.

And ironically, while Substack is moving to this super centralized service, Ghost just announced that they are adopting the ActivityPub protocol next year.

If you’re not following my content about the Fediverse and ActivityPub, this means that anyone with an ActivityPub service, an ActivityPub handle will be able to follow Ghost’s publication.

And it means that people, creators on Ghost would be able to easily move to it.

I don’t know the specifics of their plan.

There is an entire description, but it’s not.

There are not a lot of technical details.

But if it is an ActivityPub service, I believe that they will let us bring the subscribers with us.

I just did this the last weekend.

I moved from one ActivityPub service to another and I moved all the subscribers, the followers from one service to the other.

This is something that you can do on decentralized social media.

And this is what Ghost is becoming and what Substack is distancing itself from.

However, Ghost was just an example.

I’m not moving to Ghost.

I’m switching to micro.blog, which is the service that I use for my blog.

My blog, which is an ActivityPub compatible blog, meaning that if you follow my ActivityPub handle from any Fediverse service, if you follow at VladCampos, at VladCampos.com.

Yeah, I know this is weird, but that’s it.

If you follow that, you will see all my short posts, you see my blog posts, you see the podcast, everything.

And it doesn’t matter.

Again, it doesn’t matter which service you are using.

So I’m moving the newsletter to micro.blog.

And you may argue that I’m putting all my eggs into the same basket.

And I know that, but that’s okay, because I have my own domain name.

There’s an article about this.

You find the link in the description.

It doesn’t really matter if micro.blog doesn’t exist anymore tomorrow, because I can import all my posts into a different service and use my domain name.

You wouldn’t even notice that something happened.

And as a matter of fact, I’ve been doing this.

I switched from different platforms, blog platforms, since forever, just like I did with the newsletter.

I moved from one blogging platform to another.

And you’re all not following, but you can reach my posts.

You know where to find my website.

It’s there.

To you, it’s the same thing.

Okay, because some of you are asking me, are replying to my posts about this decision, I think it’s also a good idea to talk a little bit about how the micro.blog newsletter works.

It’s perfect for me because it’s what I already do, but it might not be a good option for everyone.

I’d say it’s more of an automation.

If you receive or use the Medium newsletter, which sends people an email when someone posts something, it’s more like that.

You can set it to send emails for each post, each blog post, or I guess weekly.

There are some settings that you can use, and there’s also monthly, which is the one I’ll be using.

Furthermore, you have to have some HTML and CXS knowledge to personalize the looks of the newsletter.

It’s not something that you can sit down and write a text and program it to be sent in a week or two.

It’s more like an automation to notify your subscribers of your blog posts or whatever you have, whatever you publish on your blog.

Like I said, the podcast and everything, the short posts, everything can be…

it’s a summary of your publications.

Hi, this is future me here, the editor.

I just realized I forgot to explain this transition I’m going through.

You don’t have to wait.

You can still subscribe to my newsletter on Substack because I’m still figuring out the settings.

I want to make this right before moving.

And if you subscribe, not follow me on Substack, your email will be moved to the next newsletter provider I’ll be using.

Okay, back to the past.

If you are new here, this is my podcast.

You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it in whatever platform you prefer.

And talking about that, do you remember what Spotify tried to do with podcasting?

Yeah, I think that made a lot of people angry.

Podcasts are better free of platforms like they are, which brings me to social media.

Maybe, I hope so at least, that someday social media will become more like podcasting, if more and more platforms adopt the activity pub protocol.

You can find more about this podcast by going to vladcampos.com slash podcast.

Thanks for watching or listening.

Maybe I can create a new word here, watchening.

Anyway, see you or talk to you soon.