In my lifetime, I have gone through many migrations in different senses of the word.
In the most literal sense, I migrated from Canada to Mauritius only as an infant. In young adulthood, I migrated back to Canada to study. Soon after graduating, I found myself migrating again, this time further west to California. And now I am migrating again, out of California. Migration is full of unknowns, but unknown possibilities often outweigh known impossibilities.
Another type of migration has been that of my digital life. You’ve probably gone through such migrations too, changing emails, social media platforms and the like.
The first blog I ever had was on a site called Mauritius Interactive. It was by and for Mauritians. You basically had your home page which you could customize with HTML, could embed a background song in, and post whatever you like. What was cool was that you kind of knew everyone IRL and their digital footprint only augmented your understanding of who they are. Those were the days.
Fun fact: did you know that “blog” is short for “weblog”?
Simultaneously, I had MSN Messenger, ICQ, mIRC (a Mauritian IRC) and soon after Hi5 and MySpace. In the early ’00s, all of those either became defunct or deserted for the likes of Facebook. After much prodding from friends, I joined Facebook. Facebook Notes became another place for my long form posts.
Soon after, I came across Blogger, and started a blog there, which I would update sporadically throughout my university years. I did fool around with Tumblr for a bit but it never stuck. Ultimately though, no platform stuck as much as Facebook. Soon it was embedded so deeply into my social life that I am still, years later, trying to extricate myself from its grip.
I’m not sure why I didn’t get into Wordpress sooner, but I eventually did around 2017. By then, blogs were already starting to feel a bit passé but when you love writing, those things aren’t going to stop you. That said, something about Wordpress feels very old school in all the worst ways. While it does allow for a lot of customization, it’s not my favorite. I use it for my podcast still, but decided to move away from it for my music website.
Then I discovered Medium. I liked the clean look. During 2020, I found a lot of great writing on here, and I learned so much. My inbox was full of thoughtful pieces written by people who were at the forefront of social movements. Spending time here excited me because I was surrounded by great writing. So I migrated again. A few of my pieces written here have had my largest audience to date. However, the engagement was relatively low. It’s hard to tell how many people actually are resonating with what I write since so few interact even though the posts were shared a bunch. I also found the way publications worked rather clumsy. Soon though, the publications I was subscribed to here closed up shop. I found little incentive to spend much time here as more and more of my time was spent making the podcast and fewer of the updates coming to my inbox interested me. Medium had become full of really bland corporate productivity hack posts.
Then, since 2022, I started seeing great think pieces again, this time on Substack. I really did hesitate for a long time. Do I really want to join another blogging platform? Yet, everyone I knew whose work I admired was slowly cropping up there. It was reaching critical mass. People were subscribing and paying the authors they like. It seemed like the first blogging platform to make paid subscriptions mainstream for writers, much like Patreon did for musicians. One of the attractive features was that it had the equivalent of a blog roll, which seemed like a good way to grow organically with your friends. What’s a writer to do? I created my Substack last year after encouragement from some marketing friends and am still trying to find my footing there.
When you’re a creator, there’s a constant push and pull between doing what you want and meeting your audience where they’re at — or rather, going where the audience is. I still don’t have the answers. But I do know that I need to focus on one platform at a time, so for now, that place will be Substack. It is free to subscribe, and there’s an option to upgrade to a paid subscription if you wish — totally optional though. If you’ve enjoyed my writing here, I hope you will join me for the next leg of the adventure as well.
Sala kahle (Stay well).
