Ghosting Substack
Substack has helped people find each other. But it isn't built for the kind of futures our society needs. I started this blog using the Ghost platform because movement media needs infrastructure that aligns with our values, and enables us to keep building when corporations lock-in.
Where we publish our content influences what we can build. These days it seems like more people are creating newsletters to share news, resources and analysis than in recent years past. And a LOT of it currently lives on Substack. The reach it offers has mattered for building audience, community, and movement. But the structure of technology and capitalist incentives underneath Substack matters too. If you're publishing using a tool like Substack in service of movement goals, the underlying platform sets the terms for what’s possible.
The Left's Media Problem
The political left has more than just a messaging problem, it has an infrastructure one. Post-2024 election critiques point to leftist media’s inability to match the scale and breadth of right-wing networks. Liberal funders pour millions into legacy media and campaign-based social media. Meanwhile, grassroots and movement-aligned media remain underfunded, scattered, and reliant on centralized platforms offering freemium tools for publishing (as well as communication and collaboration). Even as Jacobin, Nieman Lab, and others call for decentralized, community-owned tools, many creators remain tied to extractive corporate platforms that aren't aligned with their interests or values.
Dependence by Design
Substack makes it easy to get started. It helps people find and subscribe to your content. Over time, it also makes it harder to leave. While your subscriber list is exportable like traditional newsletter software, they are increasingly adding features to keep us wrapped in the app. Our comments, feeds, chats, recommendations, streaming video, etc; they all serve to circumvent the historically open culture of mailing list software. That setup isn’t neutral. It pushes readers and publishers towards the same dependence we are all used to with most major social media platforms. And for anyone doing political work, or building something that needs to last, this creates risk we can't ignore. If Substack decides to change their rules, or if your values come into conflict with theirs (again), you’re left without options.
Publishing on Our Own Terms
Ghost is a publishing platform moving in a direction that matches what leftist movement work actually needs. It’s built by a non-profit using open source software development practices which means it's completely transparent and accountable to communities. Beyond offering traditional blogging and monetizatized mailing list publishing, Ghost is in the process of integrating with the emerging open social web that includes software like Mastodon, Bluesky, and many others. In doing so, Ghost is joining an ecosystem that isn’t owned, extracted from, or reshuffled at the whims of a single corporation or tech CEO.
This needs to be as much of a seismic shift in media strategy as it is a technical one. Where we build influences the futures we intend to make possible.
Moving forward, this is the kind of software that must be invested in if we want to build a media landscape that can withstand political and economic pressures. Ghost aligns with the needs of organizers, journalists, and movement strategists working under censorship, financial volatility, and unstable platforms, meanwhile the major platforms use “free speech” claims to justify hosting fascist and white supremacist content. The alignment Ghost represents becomes especially critical when we turn to the one channel that still reaches people directly: email.
Why Email Leads the Way
Email remains one of the most reliable ways to reach people directly. It doesn’t depend on engagement algorithms or third-party feeds, and it holds up when social platforms shift, fragment, or get taken over by tech fascists. These are primary reasons why content creators, small businesses, and independent journalists still rely on email to stay connected and make a living.
Subscription-based publishing has become a financial foundation for many creators, and Ghost supports that without taking a cut or locking anyone in. Its commitment to building new social web features in lockstep AND coordination with platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Wordpress reflects many of the same strengths that make email so durable: direct reach, interoperability, and freedom from platform control. Substack, by contrast, continues to build features designed to tighten dependency.
Financial autonomy and open protocols are building blocks for the kind of infrastructure movements can grow on. They offer qualities that rarely exist on corporate platforms: stability, portability, and control. If we want to grow our capacity for political education, organizing, and long-term coordination, we need to invest in non-corporate tools that address the structural risks we’ve come to accept. This will take technologists, funders, and infrastructure strategists willing to prioritize what movements actually need.
We Get to Build This
The next phase of movement media must not be controlled or handed down by corporate platforms. We need to shape it by choosing tools we can hold accountable and directly influence. The medium is the message, and platform choice is political action.
If you're thinking about the politics of tech infrastructure or building with these stakes in mind, leave a comment or reach out via Signal, Bluesky, or email. I’d love to be in conversation!
-Lyre Calliope