Post #3299: To stay or go?

Last week, I discovered my WordPress subscriptions page, something I haven’t looked at in years. Apparently there was a time when I actively found new blogs on this platform and subscribed to them. According to my subs history, 2009, 2011, and 2015 were spates of adding a lot of new follows. But because the reader and writer environments here aren’t linked up very well (so much so that I forgot about my subscription page for years), I didn’t follow anyone all that rigorously even though I had gone to the effort of adding them to my feed. There were a few I read avidly, but I had those ones bookmarked for easy access.

When I clicked through the links to each of my subscriptions, I discovered that 95% of them were no longer functioning. Either the posts stopped somewhere around 2012, or the links took me to broken pages of php code. Of those frozen in time, it was apparent that many of these small-time blogs had tried to monetize using Google Ads shortly before they were abandoned completely. We all remember the era of famous bloggers such as Dooce (Heather Hamilton – recently deceased) who rose to fame in the early 2000s and at one point was reportedly making $40,000 per month on banner ads off her site alone, I’m sure. This kind of success reported in the blogosphere encouraged many (with few to no followers) to believe that somehow their blogs might become a source of passive income. Google Ads capitalized on this fact by partnering with WordPress to make it easy to do. Looking at some of those defunct properties now, it all seems a bit naiive, though there *were* some people who made big money through these channels, and we can all hope right?

My favourite blog-niche was “personal” blogs by non-moms (mom-blogging was similar, but focused on the antics of children and difficulties of parenting which I didn’t relate to). I can’t remember the specific names of any of them now, but there were several I read and commented on with regularity. I was not interested in aspirational content so much as I wanted to hear real stories and reflections from women close to the same age as me. I might be a little jealous of their particular life circumstance, or intrigued by choices they had made – but these were mostly women I might be friends with if we happened to live in the same geographical zone.

It was all very pre-social media, which explains why a lot of this type of blogging dropped off entirely by the 2010s with the rise of Facebook and then Instagram. These days, the blogosphere is dominated by sponsored content (sponcon) which seems mostly to be generated by Chat GPT. There are a handful of WordPress blogs I read on the regular, but these days I get my content and connection elsewhere on the Internet. Ditto social media like FB and Instagram – I drop in for brief periods, but I don’t spend much time there engaging (liking or commenting) with folks other than my friends, and I try to steer clear of anything that smacks of “influencer” content aside from a few people who make me laugh. I am a sucker for reels, unfortunately, which is why I can never go near TikTok as I find the whole format time-wasting to no real purpose.

More and more I find myself drawn to communities within Substack publications. Substack really is the natural evolution of something like WordPress, but better. As a creator, it’s way simpler to use, free, and allows direct monetization through subscription fees set by the creator. Substack makes it’s money through taking a 10% cut of all subscription fees. Though it does not penalize those of us who publish for free, the platform promotes monetized newsletters at a much higher rate than non-monetized ones (which makes sense from a business perspective). As it has grown from being the newsletter platform it started out as, SS has added a lot more features that support community engagement such as pod and video casting, community forums, notes, and recommendations (which looks a lot like the old blogrolls of the past). It’s really become the all-in-one blogging platform over the last couple of years – one that I log into daily for reading and writing projects.

This leaves me wondering what to do about this blog which serves an entirely different purpose than my Substack, Comfort for the Apocalypse which has a focused publishing schedule and categories of interest (recipes, textiles, the ongoing collapse of civilization!) Red-cedar has always published in the meandering and personal vein, something I do not want to give up – but I wonder if I’d be better served as an author to have content that is more discoverable, on an easier-to-use (and free) platform. I’ve often wanted to do an audio-segment to companion this blog, which SS facilitates seamlessly. I can port my twenty (!) years of content over, as well as my domain. What I would lose are the comments and likes, as well as the ability to really customize my blog interface (but from a usability perspective the minimalist interface of SS works way better for users, so I’m happy to abandon the templating system of WP which isn’t very good for people at the lowest level of the payment structure).

As I write all this out I realize that I’m going to at least experiment with porting my content over to see how it translates – I’ve talked myself into it as I’ve written this post (I rarely know what I think until I write it out – here is evidence). This might lead to some other aspects of this long-term project shifting, or it might not. But I’ll not be giving up on Red Cedar either way, as it has always been a blog in the truest sense – a log of my days and years, a journal, a place to share what I think whether it’s polished or not.