Why Did I Leave Substack, Anyway?

Last week, my friends at Scratch reached out to ask if I'd be interesting in answering questions about why I moved my newsletter off Substack. Of course I would! I've written some about it here, as you know, but I'm always game to talk more about this, especially with new audiences.

Well, in news that will surprise no one, I ended up writing nearly 3000 words in response to Maggie's wonderful questions. Her newsletter went out today, and you should go read it. She writes about why she has yet to leave Substack, and then includes responses from me and two other newsletter writers: Frankie de la Cretaz, who writes Out of Your League, and Minda Honey, who writes Writing For Fakers,

Since they obviously could not include all of my many words, I thought, well hey, why not share the director's cut here? I showed it to a friend of mine who said, "I mean this with love, but isn't it a lot of words?"

My response:

Yeah, it is. I should probably edit it down. My whole life and career, I've been told that I'm too verbose, I need to be more concise, I need to get to the point a lot faster. I've heard it in every single performance review, including the one in which I got the "meets most: rating. It's some of the feedback that has made me feel the shittiest over the years, because it's like... guys, I know I talk too much. I know I need to reel it in. Part of that is being a woman with ADHD and part of it is my personality, so it's like being told repeatedly that I have a major character flaw. In so many performance reviews I've wanted to say, well you know what? You should learn to fucking listen. Somehow I never have!

But this is why I started Meets Most right after I got laid off. That's what it's for. Yes it's for writing, for depth and nuance. But it's also a space to let shit rip, to be imperfect, sometimes to say too much. There are so many areas in life in which I we have to conform to someone else's expectations. Y'all don't have to pay for this*, why do I have to conform here too?

Hopefully this isn't too personal and weird. I had a bit of a work-related rejection that's got me in my feelings, and I'm feeling some kind of way about the tech industry (as usual) and about work in general. But since I can't write about that (yet), and assuming I haven't lost you already, I give you this: The unabridged interview all about this newsletter.

*You should, and if you do, I really love you.

What is the name of your newsletter, what’s it about, and which platform are you currently on?

Meets Most

It’s about technology but not in a “tech writer” kind of way (even though I keep getting described as a tech writer, which I dislike). It’s really about what’s wrong with the tech industry and how to save it—and ourselves—before it destroys us. 

My newsletter is on Ghost. 

How much does it cost you monthly to be on your platform?

I pay an annual fee of $480, or $40 a month, for Ghost. Should my subscriptions increase to over 2500, I’ll have to upgrade to the next level. 

My newsletter uses my own domain name, which I pay for, and I paid for a theme when I first started Ghost, but I’d like to hire someone to design a proper website for me soon. 

How long were you on Substack, and approximately how many subscribers did you have there? Have you been on any other newsletter platforms?

I joined Substack in 2023, after I got laid off from Instagram. That’s where the name of the newsletter came from: Meets Most is one of the performance review levels you could receive there, as in “meets most expectations.” When I started the newsletter, I brought over a few hundred subscribers from a defunct newsletter I’d started years before on TinyLetter, but I don’t know how many of those subscribers were ever really active once I started on Substack. 

My intention had been to publish regularly, but I fell off when I started working a contract job later that year. I honestly regret not developing a consistent publishing habit while I was still on Substack because it would have been much easier to grow a subscriber base there, especially in 2023. Maybe I’d missed the really powerful, early round of Substack activity but 2023 was still a good time to develop and grow an audience. 

At the start of 2025 I committed to publishing something every Wednesday, which I’ve kept up since. Then I left for Ghost in February of that year, with just over 1000 subscribers. 

If you’re comfortable sharing, roughly how much were you earning on Substack monthly?

It varied, but it wasn’t a lot. Some months $13, some $50 or a few hundred. I don’t paywall my work, which is maybe silly of me. It’s always free, so anyone who pays does so out of a desire to support (or perhaps pity and guilt). I don’t have ads, sponsors, or affiliate links. Lately I’ve been trying to rely more on pity and guilt tripping to get paid subscribers, and it works better than you’d think. (She’s got comedy!)

When did you decide to leave Substack and why? Was there a specific trigger/incident/scandal?

A few reasons. I’ve written about it in various newsletters, this one in particular: Feeds and Fodder. Obviously, a major issue for me was Substack not only platforming fascists, Nazis, and now Andrew Tate, but also pushing and promoting their content. But just as important to me were three other issues: 

1. Substack is a walled garden. Walled gardens aren’t healthy for the internet or for those of us who want to use the internet. They’re fun at first, because they’re cozy and it’s easy to find stuff you like, but ultimately they stifle healthy growth and community. It’s literally a gated community for your content. 
2. Substack is also a gussied up social media platform, ostensibly oriented around long form writing. It may not be based on the social graph, like Instagram or X/Twitter, but it has similar network effects and algorithmic drivers as all of the other social media platforms. The plus side for users is, of course, that you can network and promote and hopefully get visibility and a bigger audience. The downside is everything we already hate about social media, which is harder to see because it’s still the earlier stages of platform growth, before it gets ugly. We keep diving in over and over to the same platforms built by the same industry, thinking they’ll change, and then once again the same ugly problems crop up.
3. The ethos and industry and VC money that built Substack built these other social media platforms that have made us all so miserable. They still have the same values and goals, and those are values and goals that are antithetical to what I care about, which is fostering real human connections, building and maintaining community, existing on a more human scale that you just can’t find when you have millions of people all yelling into the same space. Obviously some really powerful connections still happen on Substack as it does on other platforms, and I know there are real communities on Substack that foster real creativity. It’s not that it’s impossible to do all of that on Substack, it’s that it’s less and less likely to be a sustainable model. Over the longer term it’s mostly possible for bigger names, bigger creators, people who have Substack’s support and aren’t just doing everything themselves. 

To be honest, I’d wanted to get off Substack earlier than I did, so when I decided to fully commit to a regular publishing schedule of at least once a week, I knew I had to do it. 

How easy or difficult was the process of leaving? This includes migrating existing subscribers, moving their financial information over, any new backend tech issues you encountered, etc.

This part is so embarrassing, because I unfortunately have to share that I accidentally came off as a total lunatic to the team at Ghost. If any of them are reading this, please once again accept my deepest apologies. Yes I have emailed to say sorry, but I’m still mortified. 

The tl;dr is that it’s really easy. You sign up, set up your newsletter, buy a custom theme if you want, and then you push a bunch of buttons. It’s all pretty seamless.

The longer story is that when I signed up, the very nice support people at Ghost kept sending me the same link, which was on a page for devs (developers). It detailed a much more technical process. So I kept emailing saying, hey I paid for Pro and it comes with migration support, when will someone help me? They kept saying they were backed up, and here was information on how to do it myself, and it was always the same link. I didn’t realize there was a totally separate step-by-step guide in the non-dev FAQ that made the process incredibly easy and straightforward. I felt terrible for emailing them so many times in frustration, because it turns out even an idiot can do it (hello).

Did you lose subscribers or income in the move? Have you recouped those losses if so? Conversely, have you grown now that Substack isn’t taking 10% of your earnings? 

I didn’t lose subscribers in the move, although like any newsletter I’ve lost subscribers along the way, while gaining new ones. I haven’t done the math, but I think at first I actually made less by leaving Substack. Substack only takes a cut if you earn money from paid subscribers. Otherwise it’s free. Ghost is not free. I have to pay to use Ghost regardless of whether or not people buy subscriptions. I didn’t tell my readers this when I moved, because moving was my decision, and because I moved for ethical reasons. So I am almost certain I took a loss for the first few months. 

How are your new subscribers finding you now that you’re off of Substack? 

I wish I knew! I have some web analytics, so I can sort of see where people come from, but a lot of the time I don’t know. Sometimes Bluesky, although I find Bluesky is not great for generating traffic unless a bigger account with a more active following reshares a post. To be honest, this has been one of the biggest downsides and frustrations for me about leaving Substack. It’s lonely having a non-Substack newsletter. 

People are no longer in the older habit of visiting blogs to read and comment, or keeping track via RSS feed or whatever. We don’t go visit our friends online but instead go to a central location (usually a walled garden platform) where content is delivered to us in an easier, more manageable form. So all the infrastructure and habitual behavior is gone, plus you don’t have the built-in networking effects that Substack makes so easy. Like on Substack, I can comment on a bunch of newsletters and write notes and do whatever, and people can just click on my name and see my posts right there, subscribe and comment without having to log in to a new site or download another app. 

Plus, because it’s a newsletter, a lot of people read it in their email. They don’t even come to the newsletter. Many people didn’t even know there were comments! It’s quiet and it feels like so much more work. So growth is hard. It kind of sucks, especially if, like me, you do not excel at self-promotion. But there is a plus side: Anyone who reads your newsletter does so with a lot more intention. It’s not there inside the app being hand delivered to them. They have to willingly open and then read an email, which is honestly a big deal in 2026. I have a small subscriber base but a pretty high average open rate, which means I have readers who really want to hear what I have to say and engage with it. That feels better than shouting into the void or getting a lot of drive-by commentary from people who don’t get it.

Broadly, how does being on a non-Substack platform impact your writing life? 

It hasn’t really impacted my writing life at all. Well, no, I take that back. I don’t know if it’s causal, but I do think writing away from a social media-like environment has improved my writing and my life, and thus my writing life. Substack felt more like a popularity contest at times, or like another version of “who will command the most attention by inserting themselves into the conversation and spotlight.” On Ghost it’s just me and my lil newsletter, and without some of the distractions it’s served the same purpose as any regular practice: It’s been a workshop for my ideas, for my writing, for my work in a larger sense, whether book writing or consulting. I know my readers are there because they want to be, and that gives me the confidence to play around more, to write ideas into existence that I want to see more of in the world, without worrying so much if they’re perfect, or even if the writing itself is perfect. I catch so many typos after I hit send, and I’m constantly tweaking bits after publication, but it’s been great to carve out a space where I can do this and where I have slowly gotten more feedback from people whose perspectives I really value. 

Because that’s also something cool that’s happened: I’ve been able to slowly cultivate a small community of sorts, people commenting and sharing ideas which I incorporate and noodle on in subsequent newsletters. Yeah, on Substack that’s easy, everyone’s right there. But it’s not on Ghost, and it makes my little crew feel that much more special and intentional. 

Did you have any hesitations about leaving Substack? Or warnings against it?

No hesitations or warnings. Just that it would be harder to grow, but I was willing to accept that. I write about all of this stuff—about how we have to be willing to step back from these big buzzy spaces, be ok with smaller numbers, and get back to cultivating smaller and more human-scaled spaces. What would it have looked like if I wrote that but didn’t walk the walk?

How much of your income does your newsletter make up? 

My newsletter makes up very little of my income. It’s a few hundred a month at best. I’d love for it to make up more, so please do feel free to pay for my writing!

Is there anything you miss about Substack, and what services or community-building elements do you think platforms like Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, and ButtonDown should strongly consider implementing ASAP?

One thing I don’t love about Ghost (and that I think might be a structural issue – as in, it might be how the system was built, so I don’t know if there’s an easy technical solution) is that you can’t respond to comments from the dashboard. If you want to respond to someone’s comment, you need to be logged in to your site, like anyone else who has a subscription/membership. 

You didn’t used to be able to do anything comment-related from the admin dashboard, and they have made some changes there. Now you can manage the comments and commenters, even if you yourself cannot comment from there (or maybe you can, and I’m still bad at using the FAQ??). So maybe more functionality is on the way! 

I don’t want them to make these platforms more social media-like. Ghost is already connected to the federated social web/Fediverse (sorry everyone but I really do not like the name Fediverse, it’s too fedora-adjacent for me), and I need to start being more active there. But – and this is related to the commenting issue – I sometimes wish it felt a little more like a hub or a one-stop-shop, at least as a content creator. It is nice on Substack to be able to manage your posts/newsletter and respond to comments. Everything is interconnected, and everything feels more cohesive there. I would love for these platforms to find new ways to facilitate a more cohesive experience without giving in to the more negative network effects like virality, etc.  

How often do you publish, and how much time do you spend on newsletter production each week? What else are you working on? What are your other income streams?

I publish once a week, on Wednesdays. I’m also working on a book proposal, do freelance editing, and am working on branching out into contract work for smaller (tech) companies. After years of working in tech I was able to self-fund a sabbatical of sorts, but I can’t do that forever so I definitely need to up my income streams this year. 

Do you think the newsletter model is a sustainable one long-term? 

No. It’s absurd to ask everyone to pay $50 or $80 per year in perpetuity for all the different newsletters they want to support, especially in an ever-diminishing job market. And even if people are willing to pay that, in order to make it lucrative you need to have a substantial subscriber base who will pay. You have to paywall everything, and it’s harder to do that when you’re small, trying to grow your audience, or don’t have the confidence that your writing is worth X dollars per month. Smaller newsletters will have to stay in it for the love of the game. 

Lots of newsletters use affiliate links and sponsors, a topic about which I have many opinions. But even if we all wanted to get in on that game, it’s not a path available to all. Many newsletters aren’t about product recommendations, and not all creators are out to sell you something. For better or worse (often for worse, the ad takeovers on many blogs was/is intolerable for the user experience), blogs had/have ads. Personally, I would love more spaces online in which someone is not trying to sell me something, but we all know that historically we still end up paying in those spaces, usually with our data, our content, etc. 

Another problem with the newsletter model is that journalism needs better and bigger infrastructure to thrive. I’m not a journalist, but it’s still important to me, because we desperately need good journalism. But you can’t do that if it’s just a bunch of plucky writers without any kind of institutional support or larger distribution model. 

Ultimately, it comes back again to the platform issue. People don’t want to have to stay on top of a million emails, even if those emails are newsletters from writers they like. They don’t want to have to go to different websites every time they read. Users have gotten used to a more centralized model, a one-stop shop where you can catch up on whatever content you’re consuming, whether newsletters or videos or tweets. Walled-garden products capitalize on this behavior shift, sucking us into these spaces by providing polished user interfaces, ease of discovery, lots and lots of content (they call it inventory), and an active social network. It’s great at first, and then it’s not so great, and we fall for it every time. Big tech companies control so much of the infrastructure of our lives, and they maximize that by relying on the fact that we will gravitate toward whatever is easiest and fastest, whatever provides the “better” experience, even if that better but immediate experience is worse for us as a society in the long run.

Do you plan to stay on your platform? 

Yes, Ghost is wonderful. It’s mostly good for my needs, even if it is harder to attract a larger and (this is especially important for me) non-tech audience. The only other platform that could maybe help me do that is Substack, and it would be awfully weird of me to go back. So I need to figure out how to grow without the support of a platform. 

Any advice, pro or against, for writers who are considering leaving Substack?

Do it, but be prepared for it to feel lonely. Be prepared to feel like you’ve left a bustling planned community with loads of infrastructure for an ad hoc frontier where you have to do a lot of (most of?) the work yourself. Or even better, let’s work together and come up with solutions that benefit those of us whose growth won’t be powered by algorithms we don’t have input into. Let’s figure out how to boost each other and foster smaller, more sustainable communities at a more reasonable scale. We need to think about online life the way we think about our physical, in-person communities. This technology isn’t going away, and it can be really wonderful and beneficial to us, so let’s reimagine our digital spaces the way we try to reimagine our civic spaces.

Anything else you want to share? 

Many things! But I will share them on my newsletter, so I hope you’ll join me there. 

Until next Wednesday.

Lx