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I'm writing on Substack now, because I really like the ecosystem at this point. But I'm also well aware that they could tank it like Medium did, or close up sho
by japhyr 4y ago
I'm writing on Substack now, because I really like the ecosystem at this point. But I'm also well aware that they could tank it like Medium did, or close up shop at any point. So I have a recurring task in my issue tracker to make a full backup. One of the reasons I'm willing to build on Substack at this point is because of the ability to dump the most meaningful data - subscribers and posts.
That said, the dumped data is not in a format that can be just uploaded to a different platform, or to my own site. That's not an issue for me, because I can write a little code that will transform the posts exactly how I need them for upload to a different platform, or my own site. When I end up needing to do this, I'll probably add custom styling that will look better than Substack's anyway, particularly in reference to code blocks.
I feel for nontechnical people. How do you decide where to invest your time? What do you do when the platform shifts in a bad direction, or closes entirely? AI tools will probably help a lot of people in this situation, if they were good about maintaining backups in the first place. I imagine "Can you convert my Substack archive to a format that will work on x_new_platform" would probably be a useful prompt.