👋 catloaf & coffee has left Substack!

catloaf & coffee has left Substack for its own website: the very one you’re on right now! I’ve spent the past month-and-a-half learning HTML, CSS and some other stuff to create this site—no website building tool here! It’s been a really fun learning process, and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be.

I’m quite happy with how the site turned out. Since I have full access to the site’s code, I have full control over its styling and format, and I can do custom styling for specific pages. Pop over to the about page, for example.

Why leave Substack?

This blog has never been interested in building an audience. If I cared to get a bunch of eyeballs on my writing, I wouldn’t write 5,000+ word posts or publish weird, sometimes experimental, obtuse poetry (that maybe isn’t even very good). Regardless, Substack is ultimately a social platform. Appended to each of my posts were like and comment counters, and every time I opened its dashboard to post my writing, I was greeted with graphs showing all sorts of social metrics. While ultimately I don’t care, seeing a graph of dwindling readership just doesn’t feel good. This new site does not have any of this. It is simply a place for my words to live, as I had originally intended this blog to be when I started it over a year ago. It will almost certainly mean significantly less readership than I had already, but I won’t know for sure. Out of sight, out of mind.

However, the main reason I moved my writing off Substack shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the happenings on that platform. Substack has a history of sympathizing with Nazis, and that’s putting it rather charitably. Just a few months ago, a notification was pushed to many of the Substack app’s users, that directed them to a blog adorned with swastikas. A system error? I’m not eager to lend Substack the benefit of the doubt, given its past handling of similar situations.

I’m Autistic and trans—have you heard?—and live in a world that is currently frothing at the mouth to do a genocide on people like me. From RFK Jr. making up the dumbest bullshit you’ve ever heard about Autism and vaccines, to the President’s nonstop attacks against trans rights—every time I open the news I’m greeted with a fresh wave of hate aimed directly at me. We are in a genuine crisis. The last thing I want is for my writing—what represents my most personal inner thoughts and feelings—put up alongside hate-filled rhetoric advocating for the eradication of my people. Full stop.

I considered moving to another platform, but I didn’t find anything that I was especially happy with. And who’s to say I wouldn’t run into the same issue with another platform down the line? We see more and more bending over to fascism every single day. Instead, I decided to just make my own website where I have full control over my writing, where it appears, and how it is presented.

Eventually, catloaf & coffee will be deleted entirely from Substack. If you chose to join me on this new site, welcome! There are no comments here, but you can find my email on every page of this site in the footer, if you ever want to say hello.

Stay safe. It’s pretty fucked up out there.

Sage 🌿