If you received this by email, you are now being called a Member of Exist Otherwise. Here's what that means. If you're only seeing this on the website, this is a nudge to become a Member.

Attracting eyeballs for a tiny journal is difficult. Twitter used to the our best tool for discovery in both ways (us finding you, you finding us), but it's a nazi bar now, so buh-bye. More we will be said about this in the coming days.

When we decided to move away from Wordpress, we debated (with myself) long and hard about whether to choose Ghost or Substack. Substack was the clear winner in terms of features, especially including discoverability. The software is excellent. It's simple, easy to use, has lots of options for community interaction, and it is used by many, many people, from amateur bloggers to highly regarded journalists and authors. Substack also has a nazi problem.

Ghost isn't perfect for us. One minor gripe is that it's designed in such a way as to allow monetization of content, which is not something we want to do. But Ghost is a company we feel very good about being associated with and supporting.

Ghost frames user subscriptions as 'memberships,' which we fear may turn some people away. It's actually more accurate for what we're trying to do, but there's a difference between sematic and popular usage. Despite 'subscriptions' origins in 'paid for' content (newsletters and magazines), it is now used ubiquitously for all kinds of free content, especially newsletters. 'Membership' may have connotations of a deeper relationship than simply, "I want to read your stuff."

Ghost (like Substack) emphasizes content delivery (access) through Memberships, and it enables the creation of tiers of access, which typically look something like this:

  • occasional public content [Free]
  • most of our content [Paid]
  • exclusive/bonus content [Pay More]

In this model, the tiers determine what visitors will see no matter how they access it (email or online). Our usage of Ghost is almost the opposite of this.

Anyone visiting our journal will have full access and enjoyment of all content without having to subscribe or join.

This is how we'll be using Ghost:

  • access to all journal content online [Free]
  • access to all news/announcments online [Free]
  • get news/announcements by email [Members, Free]

Finally, there's another reason to become a Member, rather than just read us online. Members can comment on any/all content. This feature is even more important to us than being able to send you email announcements.

The launch of E.O. on this new platform is part of a move to increase engagement. The loss of Twitter didn't only lose us some visibility. Many of our contributors and readers were also on Twitter, so we could engage with you there. We miss those interactions, and we hope we'll be able to recreate some of that here. The social media landscape is in a state of disruption and change. We hope that the community building features of Ghost will make up for some of the connections we lost by leaving Twitter.