Now on SubStack

I don’t know if this will be considered drifting over to the dark side or not. I have started adding a few of my posts to SubStack. I have no intention of requiring a subscription to view anything I cross-post to that source. The material that follows explains my motives. 

If you are a SubStack user, I have an account at https://markgrabe.substack.com

The online world is littered with my tried and abandoned accounts. That makes me an online litterer. Here is how I know. Maybe you have had this experience and recognize the problem. You learn of some new service and decide to give it a try. You apply for an account and are told your proposed username is already in use. You have been there before. You make the effort to recover your password and sure enough. You were there. Maybe there remains evidence of the last time you explored the service and maybe not. 

I maintain multiple blogs and use Facebook and Instagram. I have the Mastodon accounts and even TruthSocial. I have two photo accounts and three social bookmarking accounts. I use Notion, Obsidian, and Mem.ai. I have a paid Open.AI allocation so I can apply ChatGPT APIs. Etc.

I originally justified my exploration because I worked as an educational psychologist spending the last twenty years or so of my employment in the field researching and teaching the classroom applications of technology. This work included the generation with my wife of two textbooks. Some of what I wrote was intended to extend the content of the textbooks for adopters. Some my accounts were applied to engage with my own students. Since retirement, I can no longer use my work as an excuse. I have to admit that I just enjoy learning and creating.

Establishing an account on SubStack is very recent. In a way, missing this service for so long may seem strange. While I pay for quite a few services I use on a regular basis, but I came late to Mastodon and SubStack. I explain this avoidance for this reason. I have had at least one blog since 2002. I initially operated a blog on my own server I operated from University office. When I recognized that using University resources to host content (free) associated with our textbooks (not free) that might be seen as a conflict of interest, I began renting server space. With a personal investment in thousands of blog posts on servers I have maintained, I have been unable to write blog content through an intermediary. I see value in keeping my 20+ year investment in one location.

I recognize that I can cross post articles to both Medium and SubStack and I will probably do so. My intention is to use free posts to these services to encourage user exploration of my main collection of material. As I have tracked what brings readers to my content, I have seen a switch from RSS to search. Instead of recent posts being read at a much higher level than more dated content, readers seem more and more to arrive looking for something specific. Perhaps the communities that follow these more community oriented services may find something I write of interest and use the link to my server associated with these community accounts to read some of the other things I have written.