Technology – Page 2 – HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

LEAVING MORE OF SUBSTACK BEHIND

When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.

When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.

I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.

I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?

I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.

Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.

“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”

True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”

This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.

In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.

DELETING MORE APPS

Thought provoking piece from Joan Westenberg:

I deleted everything.

Every note in Obsidian. Every carefully crafted “second brain.”

Every Apple Note.

Every to do list.

Every article on my “read later” list.

Every productivity system I’d built over years. Gone in seconds.

And I felt zero panic. Just an overwhelming sense of relief.

Got talking about this on Alex’s ‘BAT WRITE’ co-writing hang out recently, and he made a good point of actually saving the thing, to have it as reference for later. I like doing that with this blog, and I also have a running note in my Bear app, too.

But again, here we are – I’ve added this to my blog. I can see this a week from now, or five years from now, and I love that.

SOUNDCLOUD AND AI

New SoundCloud terms of service just dropped:

We will not use your content to train generative AI models that aim to replicate or synthesize your voice, music, or likeness without your explicit consent, which must be affirmatively provided through an opt-in mechanism.

What a wild time is for music right now.

EMPIRES ARE STUMBLING

This bit from Jon Gruber who writes Daring Fireball:

“Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.”

Apple might not like how critical Gruber has been in recent months, but I also don’t like how Siri will let me keep adding “bananas” to my Groceries List, and never once tell me that it’s already on the list. In 2025.

And did you know that when you say, “Siri, turn on my 6am alarm” it will just keep adding 6am alarms, over and over again? I had like 50 of them last time I looked.

I hope Apple execs will be staying back at the office fixing that, delivering their “Apple Intelligence” offerings that they promised months ago, and maybe stop fighting with independent app makers and charing them 30% of every god damn sale for eternity.

‘Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution‘

Another how-to on untangling ourselves from the tech giants, but yowza, this one is a bit above my head!

THE “FINALLY ORGANIZING YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS” ZOOM HANG OUT CALL

This started by me posting on Substack Notes, a screen shot of a bunch of folders filled with my digital photos dating back to 2002. I explained how I got all those photos extracted from Apple Photos (formerly iPhoto), and into their own folders. Then how I backed them all up via Backblaze.

This got some traction, so I wondererd if people would be interested in hopping on a Zoom call and talking about it. I set up a landing page using Tally, and got over 30 replies.

From there I set up an event in Luma, and emailed those folks, and as of writing this I got 29 people signed up to attend.

It’s on Thursday, March 20 from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT. If you wanna come, register here.

- This is definitely not for the hardcore photographer crowd.

- This is for the casual iPhone / photographer who just happens to have a jillion photos scattered everywhere and you’re looking for a temporary support group to figure things out together.

I figured out an okay system to get all my iPhone photos off my device and stored on an external HD, again, all backed up via Backblaze (which backs up two external HDs and my laptop for $9/mo).

Because of this, I was able to cancel my yearly Google subscription for more photo storage (I was using it to back up my iPhone photos), and cut my iCloud to the .99 cents per month plan.

Thursday, March 20 from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT. Register here.

UPDATING WEBSITES

It’s been so amazing to see people updating their websites. This from Zach Sprowls:

“The idea of a website HQ is not original to me. I got it from Seth Werkheiser over at SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB. His ideas, encouragement, and the community he’s building over there have been invaluable. Thank you, Seth!”

And then this from Menka Sanghvi:

“Totally echo Zach’s words. I have built my new website HQ too, and it even has a “microblog” where I go to first, whenever I get that strong impulse to share on social media! Thanks Seth.”

Just look at their incredible micro-blog set up!

I mean it – we’ve dumped years of text and photos and video onto these social media platforms. It’s no wonder no one visits our websites – we’re not updating them!

Filling out websites with everything we’ve been giving away for free to social media is a great start. Set up your own Twitter-like feed on your own site. Make it easy to publish new things on a platform you control!

SUBSTACK PODCASTS ARE MORE PLATFORM LOCK IN

So I had a handful of video interviews on Substack. They were sent out as newsletters, but they were also posts that I wrote. Not just show notes, but like… full posts.

Well, I didn’t like the way Substack handles podcasts… I mean, no individual episode art? The organization was a wreck, too. I just didn’t like how it felt.

I signed up a free trial of Transistor – for $19/mo you get unlimited podcasts. And they’re all just, like, in their own sandbox. Like, if I just delete one, nothing else is touched.

I learned the hard way that this is not the case with Substack. I uploaded all the audio from these videos to Transistor, and it worked great. Seriously. What a solid system. Everything just laid out in a way that makes sense, unlike how Substack sort of blurs together a post and a podcast episode.