The only thought I’m left with after deactivating my Twitter account is about all of those readers that I may have lost. I built up a small but engaged readership there and whilst a lot of have come over to Mastodon or follow my site via RSS I do wonder how many are missing out on my posts. Building an audience on someone else’s platform is tricky. They enable ways for people to find you but hold the power to completely destroy what you have built up for years.
It’s now got me thinking about my newsletter over on Substack and what would happen if some obnoxious man child billionaire bought them too. I’ve built up a nice engaged readership there and if that went away I’d be really disappointed. But if I built the newsletter via my blog I doubt I’d have even a quarter of the audience I have on Substack.
It’s something that I don’t know the answer to but am aware it could go away tomorrow if Substack decided to sell or make rules I disagree with.
How do you feel about this?