For a little while I’ve been trying to work out what was the most efficient way to keep people updated with what’s going on.
There were two main issues as I saw it.
The first, the “community” was spread out over a variety of venues, reddit, discord, the site itself, even patreon.
The second, I like what I’m doing and like talking about it… a lot, as such I tend not to shut up so my style is somewhat… shall we say… verbose. (in other words I talk to much)
Fortunately, as far as the latter goes, after all these years I realise what I’m like and I know when to talk and when to shut up (most of the time). The main thing was, I didn’t want my rambling update diatribes to put people off reading about what they needed to know about the site. Which is why even after implementing articles/news on the site. I wanted to save that for simple, direct and succinct updates about the site, so people knew that if something was appearing there they should be reading it.
So, I knew I had to post stuff like this elsewhere, the question was where…
Discord is great for quick and simple updates or quick bits of feedback, but not suited for my more verbose style of rambling when it comes to proper updates.
I briefly considered Reddit, but to be honest I’m trying to move away from reddit rather than embracing it more, updates will still be provided on reddit but they’ll more than likely link to other sources.
The site itself wasn’t an option for the reasons stated above.
Patreon was certainly considered, and I even wrote a couple of drafts of various things on there, but for the most part whilst in some ways the idea of subtly promoting the patreon by directing folks there to read free stuff has appeal, it also felt a little.. I dunno, scammy, underhanded *SHRUG* something along those lines.
So I decided that a newsletter was the way to go and Substack was simple and quick to set up and also left a backdoor option open (supporting the site wise) if I had issues with Patreon, but in the longer term the idea is to transition over to a another newsletter platform that I can host myself (I’ve had the software for a while from an aborted project, but haven’t set it up yet).
This allows people who are interested to who want to know more to following along without subjecting EVERYONE to my excessive word vomit, if you choose to, you can read it in your email or on the web (or I think they even have an app) there are options going forward or as a backup/replacement for Patreon if required. And the subscriber data is freely available which means I can transition off at any time if I choose to do so.
So now it comes down to whether or not there’s anyone who cares to read it.
— Kosh