Own your own distro, I guess

I don’t want to write much about Twitter’s new owner banning a host of journalists’ accounts right now. I’ll save that for the place that pays me and the morning.

It appears, in the wake of ban-fest, that Twitter, after weathering so much over the years, is finally in danger of falling apart as a community. That means it could quickly lose its status as the place where so many interesting people hang out to discuss what’s going on in real-time.

This is personally worrying as I’ve built too much of my audience on Twitter. As a journalist specifically and writer more generally it was perhaps a reasonable bet over the years. Now it doesn’t seem to be.

We need to own our own channels, as we can’t really trust anyone else to own them for us. I am not sure if Substack passes that test. But so long as Substack allows me to take my subscriber list and leave, it seems safe enough. Hence this short blog.

A request. If you read my work and like it, and want to read more of it in the future, drop your email here:

Currently I don’t use this little personal blog for much. That may change in the future. I don’t know. But I will sleep easier knowing that at least some of the folks who do take the time to read my words will be able to keep doing so.

Now, off to play video games and wait for Liza to go into labor. — Alex