I switched from a self-hosted blog to Substack for two reasons:
Self-hosting is a lot of work and expensive.
Substack seems to let authors write without censoring.
I was impressed with Substack when two of the best journalists in the world, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, switched to Substack after getting cancelled everywhere else. Glenn and Matt continue to crank out amazing, honest journalism here, and I recommend you subscribe to their blogs, too.
I liked the control of running my own backend, but it took a lot of time. And Hennessy’s View has so much historical content, the hosting costs were getting insane.
If you subscribe to email alerts, don’t worry: I am going to give all my subscribers a free email subscription in thanks for your loyalty. And I’m going to keep things free for a while, but I might introduce subscriber-only content in the future.
Finally, I’ve been wanting to do more podcasting, but it was a too much work on my self-hosted blog. Substack has podcasting built in. That means I can spout off whenever I want without having to do a bunch of backend work. Expect to see a podcast soon.
Thanks for reading. Please spread the word.