March 17, 2025 is Wordloaf’s fifth birthday. And while I’m too busy right now working on my book to mark the milestone in any significant way, this birthday is a little bittersweet, because after today, Wordloaf will no longer be hosted on Substack, the platform it was launched on, and will be moving over to Ghost in the next week or so. (The URL—newsletter.wordloaf.org—will remain the same. If you want to subscribe to the newsletter after 3/6/26, be sure to do it there, or you won’t receive anything!!)
Despite the move, Wordloaf will be the same as it ever was, and you won’t have to do anything to remain a part of it. Your subscriptions—paid or otherwise—will transfer over seamlessly once the migration is complete, and all of the content will move with it (aside from the comments, alas). Sometime in the next week or so, you’ll receive the first Ghost post, and it will carry on just as it has up until now.
When Wordloaf began, I was a big fan of Substack—it was simple and intuitive to use, had a clean look, and worked exactly as an email newsletter should. And just a few months after I sent out my first post here, I was selected as a Substack Fellow, which provided me a $25k advance on future earnings, without which I would never have risked quitting my day-job to pursue a full-time gig as a solo breadhead. I’ll be forever grateful for that (I can’t imagine I’d have landed a book deal without it either). I’ve had only excellent interactions with the Substack team over the last five years, and bear no ill-will to any of them. But it’s time for Wordloaf to move on, for a host of reasons.
For starters, I don’t care to remain within the confines of the “walled garden” that Substack is bent on creating, where “Substack” subsumes categories that already exist in the world at large—newsletter, podcast, post, live video, etc. As Anil Dash puts it in his post “Don’t Call It a Substack”:
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Wordloaf is just an email newsletter about bread, not a “Substack.”
Moreover, Substack’s “Nazi Problem”—something I and many others wrote about more than two years ago—has not gone away. Many of the same bad actors continue peddling dangerous and hateful information—and making a decent living doing it—here, and I don’t really want to have my own work associated with that, even just a little. I know that no platform is perfect, and that there are fashy, vile people using Ghost, Beehiiv, or any other newsletter host, but here’s what’s different about Substack: they prop up and promote some of these voices, whether because they agree with them, or simply because they make them lots and lots of money.
For example:
By the by, that’s the same Richard Hanania who recently argued on Bari Weiss’ Free Press that the Nazi salutes made by Musk, Bannon, and others on national platforms are nothing more than childish trolling, not “sincere Nazism”:
That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.
Speaking of which, this is how Substack feels about the publication that featured that piece:
We view The Free Press as an ideal partner for this initiative because of its longstanding presence on Substack, which extends back to its founding in early 2021, and because of its commitment to pursuing high-integrity journalism. The Free Press is old school in the best way, with meticulous editorial standards that it upholds through in-depth reporting, fact-checking, editing, original photography, and more. The Free Press, like Substack, is also dedicated to a business model based on subscriptions.
Like I said, I don’t really want Wordloaf associated with that sort of “high-integrity journalism.”
But what ultimately forced me to make this move now is that I realized that I’ve spent far too much time over the past two years thinking about leaving here—wondering when and if things were improving or getting worse, or whether moving would be a good decision or not. I don’t really know the answer to the latter question, but I know that I’m ready to not have to dwell on it anymore.
Substack is unique among newsletter platforms—it does not charge a fee for writers, no matter how large or small their audiences. It only takes a 10% cut of any revenue they might generate, which makes it “free” to use. Most other newsletter hosts charge a monthly fee instead, based upon subscriber count. I’m in a fortunate position: I have a solid base of paying subscribers, so I can easily cover those fees (and in truth, I stand to save money, because at Ghost they work out to a quarter of Substack’s 10% tithe).
I recognize this puts those with audiences but not (m)any paying subscribers between a rock and a hard place: Stay on Substack and contribute to all that it is, good and bad, or leave and lose money setting up shop elsewhere. It’s an impossible situation, and I wish more of Substacks’ competitors understood this and offered inexpensive solutions for those who are only beginning to build their audiences.
If you are a writer I follow who cannot afford to—or does not want to, for any reason—leave Substack, I will continue to read, subscribe to, and share your work, wholeheartedly and without reservation, just like before. (I plan to stay on Notes, at least for the time being, and will ping you there if and when I link to your work.) And I will follow you elsewhere should you decide to make the move yourself. I hope you’ll continue to do the same with mine.
As Marisa Kabas, one of the founders of the ‘Substackers Against Nazis’ campaign, put it recently:
There is no such thing as a perfect place on the internet. But it’s possible to avoid the ones that aren’t even pretending to try to be better. The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now.
—Andrew
Further reading:
Casey Newton: Why Platformer is leaving Substack
Ryan Broderick: It's time to leave Substack
Marisa Kabas: Substack is at it again
John Gruber: Regarding—and, Well, Against—Substack
Shane Burley: How Deep Does Substack’s Far-Right Problem Run, Really?
Ed Zitron: A Continual Christmas
Andrew, thank you so much for moving platforms. Thank you *more* for laying out such clear reasoning and evidence, and for your compassion to fellow authors who can't move. This is a masterpiece of advocacy.
Thank you for migrating! I hate having to use this platform.