Leaflet stream

Calls for people to get off Substack pop up regularly on the open social web. People argue against writers using Substack predominantly based on three reasons:

• Substack does not do enough to moderate Nazi content.
• Substack creates lock-in for their writers, making it harder and harder to people to migrate to other platforms later.
• Substack is expensive.

Regarding Nazi content, Substack's co-founder Hamish McKenzie told The Verge that it will not remove or demonetise Nazi content, after which more and more people started calling the place a nazi bar. This viewpoint has fairly widespread on networks like Bluesky and the fediverse, even as many writers on these platforms still depend on Substack. This viewpoint got further entrenched when the Substack app recently send out a push alert to promote a Nazi blog.

A new post by the Beehiiv CEO (another newsletter platform) talks about how Substack is creating further lock-in on the platform. There are multiple aspects to this:

• Substack now allows you to 'follow' writers, which is different than subscribing to their email newsletter. This 'follow' social graph is owned by Substack, and will migrate with the writer if they move to a different platform.
• People who have a paid subscription with a Substack writer have a direct payment connection with that writer through Stripe. If that writer would move to a different platform, these paid subscribers would automatically move over as well. Substack is pushing of people now to subscribe via Apple Pay instead. If a writer moves to a different platform, these subscriptions will not move with them. This creates significant lock-in to Substack, as moving to a different platform now means lost revenue for writers.

All these arguments present a 'negative' reason for writers to move away from Substack: Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform because you think the platform is bad. The argument is mainly focused on people perceiving Substack to be bad, whether 'bad' here means ethical, financial or other reasons.

But there is another good reason to be very careful with depending on Substack: it is also hard to leave Substack when you think other platforms are good.

One of the main values that people see for using Substack is a combination of:

• getting started for free
• in-build discovery and promotion mechanisms for growth
• does all the basic things of a newsletter writing platform well

It is especially the second part that makes Substack appealing. Growing a new blogging platform is incredibly hard, and anything that helps with discoverability and marketing is valuable.

The open social web (which I'm defining here as a combination of the fediverse, atmosphere, nostr and farcaster) consists of multiple different attempts to build an open protocol for social networks. The first step that all these networks start with is with microblogging, since that is the easiest modality to bootstrap. However, the second modality that gets widely experimented with on all these networks is with longform writing and publishing.

• the fediverse has WriteFreely, WordPress and Ghost.
• the ATmosphere has Leaflet, WhiteWind (as well as emerging platforms in development such as Offprint).
• Nostr has Yakihonne, Habla and npub.pro.
• Farcaster has Paragraph.

All these writing platforms take a slighly different approach, but they do have one thing in common: the recognition that the social graph is valuable for distribution and promotion of your writing. That is why people try to integrate writing platforms on these open protocol. It gives new affordance to its users, as well as promising to connect to a wider network that can be used for distribution and promotion.

I think that none of these platforms have truly cracked the code yet on how to build a next-generation distribution system for long-form writing. The main barrier here is actually on the microblogging side, where nobody seems to have figured out a good UX yet to combine short microblogs together with longform writing into a single destination that users enjoy.

The open social web is effectively a bet made by people, saying that they can create the infrastructure layer on which a new social web can be build. If this bet pays off, it means that we will see a wide variety of social platforms that are able to replace the current social platforms.

This bet is by no means guaranteed to pay off. The future of the open social web is still uncertain. But if it does, it changes the dynamic around Substack as well.

It is realistic, though far from certain, to imagine a situation where a platform on the open social web has managed to:

• increase their userbase to over a 100 million MAU
• build a UX that integrates long-form writing much more closely with the feeds-based system of most other platforms, with accompanying discovery systems to boot.

In that context, the argument for Substack also changes: instead of people not wanting to be on Substack because they feel the platform is bad (for various ethical/financial reasons), people do not want to be on Substack because they think other platforms are better.

One takeaway from Musk, Twitter and people migrating away to other platforms is that only a limited amount of people will move to different platforms because they think the original platform is bad. Providing a platform that does something new that the previous platform could not do is a much more compelling motivation for people to switch.

I do not think we are at a phase yet where the blogging platforms on the open social web provide a radically better experience than Substack can. However, I do think that enough different people and companies are tackling this challenge in a way that makes it likely that at some point someone will crack the code, and build a publishing platform that does provide a major advantage over Substack.

And that becomes a risk for writers who are dependent on Substack. So far, Substack building their walled garden has had relatively minor impact writers building their business on Substack. But if all the people building alternative writing platforms on the open social web have anything to say about it, there might just become a time where being dependent on Substack has some significant opportunity costs.

Here's a sentence for you:

Bounce is a new cross-protocol social graph migration tool that uses a protocol bridging service to create an mirror account on the sending protocol, which simulates the effect of sending your social graph across protocols.

If you understand everything that's going on here, congratulations on also having open-social-web-brainworms.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that this is not everyone though.

The Bounce service launched in beta today, and I think there are multiple stories going on at the same time:

• What the hell is cross-protocol account migration, and how does it work
• The impact on 'credible exit', and how moving to a different protocol impacts this
• the shaping of language, and building towards a shared understanding of what 'protocol bridging' even is.

For an explanation of what this is, Sarah Perez at TechCrunch as a good article which makes explains it as follows:

A New Social explains Bounce in more detail here:

Bluesky advertises itself with the idea of 'credible exit', the idea that you can meaningfully leave the service and take your social graph and data with you. Bluesky has mainly meant that in the context of ATProto:

• you can transfer your account to another data storage provider
• you can use other client/app on ATProto that is not the Bluesky app, if you disagree with Bluesky's ToS for example.

Bounce adds an additional layer to this all:

• you can now transfer your account to another protocol altogether.

In this way, the ability to use Bounce to migrate your social graph from Bluesky to Mastodon actually is a benefit to Bluesky: it further cements their claim of providing a credible exit. This lowers the barriers for people who are unsure about trying out Bluesky, there is now a way back.

One challenge for Bounce, as well as Bridgy Fed, is the lack of shared references to help explain what this all actually is. Understanding why bridging software like Bridgy Fed matters, requires knowledge of how the open social web protocols work.

It creates new kinds of artefacts, such as 'mirrored' accounts on the bridge, which are a new concept that people are largely not familiar with. Furthermore, this type of account does not even have a good name to define what it actually is.

• When you have an account on either the fediverse or atproto, and want to interact with people from the other network, you can do this with a bridging service like Bridgy Fed. When you do this, people often describe this as having a bridged account.
• Services like Bridgy Fed (and Bounce) work by creating an additional account on the Bridgy Fed platform, that passes messages between the networks. When people on the other network want to follow your account, they do not actually follow your account natively: they follow this additional account on the Bridgy Fed service.
• It is unclear what this additional account is actually called. TechCrunch also calls this 'a bridged account', but there is no clearly defined term for it. The A New Social Team prefers not to use 'bridged account' here (due to that term already used for the other meaning), but there is no clear alternative. Mirror account maybe?
• Without clear definitions and names, it becomes even harder to explain a process that is already hard enough to explain what it is. I'm not sure if people who would be interested in using a tool like Bounce understand that this means that this depends on another 'mirror' account that is operated by another organisation. Clearer naming might help here.

Recently I wrote about how decentralised networks lead to fragmentation and decentralisation in the underlying protocols that power them. People might see bridging as a temporary solution to a problem caused by developers with a Not Invented Here Syndrome. Instead, I see this fragmentation and protocols that are only partially compatible with each other as a logical result of giving people freedom to build and hack whatever they want. Sure, it leads to interoperability issues and it can be annoying, but it is also an unavoidable result from the social dynamics that are part of truly open networks.

That means that bridging services and other software that focuses on making incompatible software compatible with each other will be part of the open social web for a while longer. And that means that there is also a lot of work to be done regarding language and explanations of what these tools actually do, and how they impact regular users.

Bluesky is banning access to its app for people from Mississippi following a new drastic age verification law:

Some thoughts:

• Bluesky PBC is fully onboard now with viewing clients as access points to the network, and as the point where regulation happens. See also their new ToS, which also makes it clear that this is only for their client
• The messaging from PBC is quite different on this case versus how they handled OSA. Their communication on OSA did not mention at all at their gating system could be bypassed. For Mississippi regulation they explicitly explain it however:"This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice."
• Having alternate clients that can access the network only matters when people actually use other clients. So far, PBC has given users very little reason to use other clients, as the main client is very well developed by professionals, making it hard for single volunteer devs to keep up. Unclear if or how that dynamic will change moving forward.
• The fediverse keeps willfully misunderstanding how atproto works, nor does it show any curiosity or interest in learning about it.
• Mastodon is particularly vulnerable, with a ceo who is not interested in complying with regulation. There is this assumption that the fediverse is so decentralised that regulators will somehow ignore fediverse servers.
• My main concern is for mastodon. ceo eugen rochko is pretty explicit that he does not care, but he seems not to realise he is actually vulnerable on two points:

The new Substack for "centerleft" (lol) writers decided to open their launch with a passionate argument of why its totally fine to stay on Twitter.

There is a fuck-ton wrong with that article, but its always pretty nice when people are willing to write down in detail that they don't know how social media works in 2025.

The obvious issue is that surrounding yourself with hatred changes yourself, something that gets zero attention in the article. The second issue is that social media functions as sense-making tools, and it thus also impacts your perception of how you think other people view the world. Doing that in a nazi environment thus makes you think that nazi thoughts are more acceptable and mainstream than they are IRL.

But what really stands out to me is the total lack of a theory of power. It says:

But leaving Twitter in 2025 is not deplatforming Nazis, it is deplatforming yourself. The Nazis have already taken over the bar. The question is who will come to take it back"

It is a good question: how do you actually take power back from nazis? Which makes it very funny that the article does not even attempt to answer their own question they raise. Like seriously, its really weird how the article has nothing to say about this. It continues to talk about the possibility of persuading the normies that are still on X. Which might or might not happen, but thats an answer to a different question altogether.

It says: "We do not control the bar, we are not the proprietor or the landlord. We have no power to deplatform anybody. We are a small group of patrons, hoping we don’t get kicked out of the bar before we get the chance to grab the aux cord again."

Which is a pretty good observation! It also answers the question raised earlier by in the same article, namely that you cannot really take back power from a nazi owner of X. Which is kind of a big problem!

So to summarise, the article is both morally wrong, completely misunderstands how social media works, and does not even bother to make an attempt at answering the core question of the article. Its the final thing that really grinds my gears: I can deal with intellectual or moral disagreements. Its the lazy writing of not answering the core question of your article that really bothers me.

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