New Beginnings - On to Ghost
The migration is complete, ongoing tweaks will be needed, but for now, this is the new home of Sweaty's Corner
As I have been chronicling, Substack over the last 3-4 months has been doing their best to step on us smaller and non-paid newsletters. The analytics tell the tale, and it is not a good story.
At first, I assumed it was just a fluke, but then it began to look like a coordinated throttling of us.
Many theories. Us free-riders were consuming a lot of resources. The Notes (their social media channel) was beginning to get some algorithmic tweaks. The views from new eyes were going down. The posts were getting consistently less views (in over two months I couldn’t get a post over one thousand views.
Then they closed their C series funding (after being open for two full years) and it became clear that their (the founder’s) goal was to pivot to growth.
Full bore enshittification.
I will have some more thoughts at the end of this post, but it became clear that us small fries were gonna get squeezed.
The Answer - A migration
In early 2024, there was a kerfuffle around the not insignificant number of white nationalist and out-and-out nazi Substacks, and that caused an outflow of several Substacks I followed. At the time, the prime destination was Ghost, but also two other safe spots appeared, Beehive and Buttondown (I flirted with Buttondown).
I moved my professional newsletter/blog to Ghost (their “pro” hosted solution), but I left my fun site on Substack.
Now, it is clear that it was time to make my escape, and take my audience with me.
This time though, I wanted to return to my techie roots, and self host. That is buy a VM on a cloud service, install Ghost, move the posts and the subscribers, and to ultimately remove the Sweatyspice blog/newsletter completely from the Substack platform.
The migration is complete
At about 2:00 PM on Friday, July 25, 2025, all the movement of data and subscribers are complete.
I have spent a few hours cleaning up some detritus. Substack left some HTML funk behind that the migration tool couldn’t handle. As time goes on, I will work on fixing that. In fact, if you find something that looks lousy, drop a comment and I will address it.
I hope you chose to continue this journey with me.
