Up From Substack

towards a Federated Substack alternative

People have been having problems with Substack censoring content and shadow banning for some time. Notes in particular is notoriously unpredictable and uses different algorithms for each user. I documented an example from my own experience here.

In addition to that, Substack doesn’t offer the ability to search comments on your own or other stacks, even comments you made yourself. The search for content on other stacks does not allow for multiple word search or other advanced searches and is not very useful. No API, or Application Programming Interface is available so that third parties can’t improve on these capabilities.

Worst of all, there is no easy way to move your content, your posts and all your comments and their context to other social media that does have the above features. Its also seems unlikely that if you delete your content yourself that it will be forgotten.

The result is a platform built to corral dissent, and prevent organization.

We should be looking for better alternatives. On the plus side, probably the thing that keeps many on Substack is the great content, the relatively polite level of discourse, and the relatively reduced, but not eliminated, level of censorship.

Substack works on a centralized model, everyone’s stack and comments are kept centrally on servers, and the ultimate control of those stacks and comments lies with the Substack organization and whoever controls it, whether it’s private capital, Wall Street, Big Brother or whoever.

Those with substacks should be thinking about decentralizing that model. Ideally each substacker would keep their own posts and substack together with the comments they’ve made on their own or other stacks, all on their own device or on a server they control. This is what is known as a federated model or architecture. The Fediverse is a collection of mostly open source projects that use this model, which relies heavily on the ActivityPub protocol for communication between federated servers.

The W3C, which oversees the development of Activitypub, is a “public-private partnership”, and so is far from an ideal patron of such an effort, but those of us in opposition to the “Great Reset” and all its manifestations must make use of tools available as we find them if they are fit for purpose. I think Activitypub is such a tool.

Establishing a federated model for a Substack alternative would put the burden of security and inappropriate content filtering on individual servers and devices, but this can be mitigated with software modules made for that purpose, and is preferable to having all one’s content being owned by Substack and whoever is behind it. The effort to make a Substack alternative could also include adding the features noted above that Substack is currently missing.

Hopefully Substackers will recognize the need to own their own content and support inevitable open source efforts to Federate a Substack alternative.