Intermission: Ghost

You're the Worst was a criminally underrated (dark) romantic comedy that aired on FX from 2014 to 2019 and gave us gems like this (fragment of a) song, New Phone, Who Dis?

That was the first thing that came to mind as I've swapped newsletter hosting providers from Substack to a self-hosted Ghost instance, as part of my being a "Digital Prepper" and I start to assemble my POSSE (Post [on] Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere). This was a process that started some time ago, but I've been accelerating as I expect large social media platforms, such as Substack and Facebook, to come come in conflict with the new Trump administration and end up enshittified into irrelevance.

Open source has come quite a ways and it's now possible to host things like Substack-style newsletters, your own federated Twitter clone, and more on infrastructure that you control. And the Ghost folks are working to make this software a part of that decentralized ecosystem emerging this decade.

If you didn't understand a word of that - no worries. The fact that you're reading this means that you've come along with me on the migration of this newsletter off of Substack and onto a server that I own and control. The only thing you may need to do is hit that Sign In link above, enter your e-mail address and wait for a message from the new server with a link to let you in. Comments didn't carry over from Substack, but there were not a lot of those, so I'm not worrying about those. You can resume commenting on the posts if you feel like it moving forward.

Commentary will resume shortly. I have a piece brewing in my head about the spoils system, and what that 19th century anachronism means for the 21st century. I'm also gathering the links and videos to do my annual review of British holiday ads.

So, as they say, stay tuned.

P.S. Here's the second thing that popped into my mind when thinking of moving over to Ghost: