This is an early edition of Fudge Sunday where we we take a look at moving a newsletter from Substack to Buttondown and from Twitter to Mastodon.
Music: Moby - “God Moving over the Face of the Waters” (1995)
Record scratch Freeze frame
Yup, that’s my newsletter arriving a full day early. You’re probably wondering how we ended up in this situation.
Subscriber asks: Why is this newsletter moving? Again?
Subscriber asks: Wait, Twitter? Didn’t you stop using it in 2017?
That’s right. To explain, I’m going to play back a recent thread from my new Mastodon account on my new self-hosted Mastodon single-user instance.
Last month I learned that my cutover from Revue to Substack came at a cost.1
Today I learned the default sharing link for Substack app does not use my cu$tom domain.😳
sunday.fudge.org swaps to open.substack.com/pub/fudge instead.🤔
This design choice is enough to make me reconsider my migration to Substack…. just 6 months after leaving Revue (Twitter).😂
Maybe I need to try and roll my own?🤷♂️
Or, do I test Buttondown first?🤷♂️
Thank you for attending my 500 char TED talk.🤓
Over several days I would find out Substack URL handling actually was going to involve more time to migrate away from than I understood 6 months ago. Eventually, I made a decision that involved consolidation and investment.2
I think I’m going to punt… on a couple fronts and simplify this.
Punt: Netlify blog (fudge.org)
Punt: Substack newsletter (sunday.fudge.org)
Plan: Move everything to Buttondown as the new simplified fudge.org
Migrate: My blog posts (mdx but mostly markdown)
Migrate: My newsletter posts to see how awful the export/import turns out to be getting off of Substack or prior archives from Revue, wget, curl, etc....
So, if you are reading this… the migration was a success.
To get my newsletter migrated and able to post this update I performed the following steps:
I’ve avoided active use of Twitter for at least 5 years. So, while my account(s) are still up there is no content associated with them.
As I’ve written previously3 on the topic of Twitter, this wasn’t like I was giving up anything to stop using Twitter. In fact, I missed what Twitter was back in 2007… a bit more civil and a bit less of that old Yogi Berra platitude due to the insufferable bot crowding.
Since I haven’t operated cuthrell.com
as an active web property, it seemed like the best vanity domain to host a single-user instance of Mastodon. Plus, I already had a Linode VPS that was available and up to the task.
To get on the Fediverse I performed the following steps:
.well_known
directory of files for Keybase proofs, etc… to the html root for nginx
And here we are with a few broken links, redirects to be done, and a lot of fun along the way! 🤓
What breaks next in my quest for a Markdown + Email + Blog + ActivityPub?
Until then… Place your bets!
As a reminder, I work at Taos, an IBM Company. If you’d like to learn more about Taos and how we help companies digitally transform, check out this educational video.
I am linking to my disclosure.
At the time I wasn’t planning to attempt this migration before the next issue of Fudge Sunday but here we are. ↩
Actually, Gatsby Cloud not Netlify, but I digress. ↩
But that’s for another post once I take down sunday.fudge.org
once and for all as a site that only performs HTTP 301 until I see traffic fall off completely. ↩