A post making that exact argument hit 478 points on Hacker News this month, and it’s one of those pieces that states something obvious once you’ve heard it and easy to ignore until you do. Substack is a distribution tool, not a home. Treating it as your home is a bet you don’t control, and the writer has a name for that bet: digital sharecropping. You’re not a homeowner, you’re a tenant, and the landlord can rewrite the lease whenever the boardroom needs a better quarter.
I already own jimchristian.net separately from wherever this newsletter happens to live, and I didn’t set it up because I predicted this argument. I set it up because platforms change their minds. The example the post reaches for is John Scalzi, who’s kept whatever.scalzi.com running for 28 years and put the case for it plainly: “if I post something about it here it constitutes an official record… the posts I ever placed on the former Twitter are now entirely lost to time. This site, however, endures.” Twenty-eight years is long enough to have outlasted several platforms that seemed permanent at the time.
The practical model the piece lands on is POSSE: publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere else. Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, wherever the readers currently are, all get a copy. The canonical version, the one that still exists after any of those platforms pivots, restructures its algorithm, or gets acquired by someone with different priorities, sits on infrastructure you actually control. The alternative, PESOS, publish everywhere and syndicate back to your own site later, is more common in practice because it’s less work up front, but it means your site is a backup instead of a source, which weakens the whole argument for having one.
None of this is an argument against Substack. It’s good at exactly one job: getting an email into an inbox reliably, on schedule, to people who asked for it. What it isn’t good at is being a record that outlives its own product decisions, and that’s a different job that a newsletter platform was never trying to do in the first place. The comments under the original post split about evenly between people who’d already made the move and people arguing the extra maintenance isn’t worth it for a hobby newsletter. Both are right, depending on how much you’d mind losing the archive if the platform stopped existing tomorrow.