Bye, Substack.
I quit Instagram in October 2025.
It’s been a weird and winding road getting here (and honestly the last six months have been weird to begin with, a story for another day), but I finally feel like I’ve found a virtual home.
When I quit Insta and Booksta, I had the best intentions. The plan was to go all in on my Ghost site, tell my friends on Instagram that I’d be writing my book reviews over there and they can get them right in their email inbox. It was great.
Until it wasn’t.
It was quite lonely, actually. Ghost didn’t have great discoverability, though I know they’re working on it. Me and my 8 subscribers against the world.
In November, money got tight. So paying for Ghost was unfortunately out of the question. I began looking for alternatives, not really sure what I was looking for (except that it had to be free, because every penny counted).
Seeing how easy discoverability was on Substack, I was sold. I announced that I was moving, pulled my little list over to Substack, and started building what I thought would be my new home there.
There’s something… addictive about Substack, though. I was spending a lot of time on the app, but I wasn’t writing. I was scrolling Notes, subscribing and following tons of new people (who I eventually had to unsubscribe from, because the number of emails I was getting was ridiculous). I was getting the same dopamine hits that I was trying to escape from on Instagram.
I was also inundated with messaging that encouraged me to “monetize”, to scale, to grow my newsletter. There are so many great writers over there and the pressure to write something AMAZING that also got you paid subscribers and picked up on Notes was just… a lot. I often didn’t write at all because it didn’t feel like I had anything important to contribute. Nothing important enough to get someone to pay me. Imposter syndrome followed me like a shadow.
It was around January or February 2026 when I found Bear.
And it feels like coming up for air, honestly. I’m aging myself here, but I remember early internet days fiddling with html and css on chat forums like InvisionFree, MyBB, Myspace and Neopets. 20+ years ago, the internet was like the wild west. And that’s the vibe I get from Bear and the blogs around here. Little virtual playgrounds where you can just do what you want and really make it your own. I’m hearing a ton about Indie Web lately and I’m ready to fully step into it.
So, here I am. I pulled over a few of my favorite pieces of recent writing and now I’m on to new stuff.
Bye, Substack. Hello, Bear. Thanks for giving me a place to land.