Ben Werdmuller: Leaving the Nazi Bar

If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.

If the last few years have shown me anything, it’s that places like Twitter and Substack are far less essential than I once thought. I moved my newsletter from Substack to Ghost a couple years ago (when Sunstack was going through their, “actually, we’re happy to serve and make money on anti-LGPTQ bigotry” phase) and I more than doubled my subscribers over the following year. Then in 2022 I ditched Twitter, a site I’d built up an audience over a decade, and moved to Mastodon where I have more followers and more/better engagement than I ever had before.

In both cases I moved to places that better aligned with my ideals and I’m much better off for it.