Hey youâre here. So glad to see another familiar face
Thank you! Iâm glad to be here! I had no idea this place has been running for over 10 years.
Thank you!
TBF I have been on here for years now and I still feel that way about the people who invited me.
AFAIK (and I definitely am not sure) this place was built around the idea of filtering in a few people as needed, mainly when times seemed trying at the other place.
In retrospect more consistent invitations and polling when times were ok on bb probably would have spared some pain.
Well, we couldnât know that theyâd rip the rug out from us literally a week before a pivotal election⌠
I guess we could have figured things were going to change, but not so suddenly and so quickly.
Hi, Iâve just arrived; Dog Butler invited me. I had no idea this place was here, although I had a feeling there was a secret clubhouse for the cool kids.
Yeah I always thought theyâd shake us if they felt it was needed and yet also didnât actually think theyâd do it too. Or rather thought thereâd be some kind of warning maybe? IDK how naive or narcissistic that is to think like that!? A little childish at least⌠If a decision is financial, for instance, I wouldnât have any insight and they arenât going to publish that either!
Again, itâs weird to me when I reflect on it because I kept convincing myself I was âoverreactingâ and âbeing irrationalâ when in reality I was correctly assessing the situation and forming appropriate plans.
But⌠even I didnât believe me either!
I saw! Welcome!
I donât know if weâre the âcool kidsâ⌠more like the weird, geeky kids! 
Thatâs my problem with it (well, that and going with substack - which I do understand why, given what @orenwolf said about the decision and lack of other options above - but stillâŚ). I wish that weâd been given MORE time to let it settle in - maybe to the end of the year. It was quick and sudden (even if the discussion around it wasnât) and the fact that it was literally right before the election did not help.
Yeah, things only look clear in hindsight, unfortunately. Iâm with you on that feeling though. I figured that they were going to make a move to deal with the ongoing issues of ads and such like, but it felt very quickly implemented. I wish theyâd at least held off on the change to the end of the year, even if theyâd announced it when they did.
I donât knowâŚ
Regarding your list of names, one of them left me a DM, or maybe a request for a DM, on SuS a few days ago. I didnât answer at the time, and when I went back today I couldnât find it.
BB on SuS is a maze, and I havenât figured it out. It seems that the BB home page is mostly invitations to subscribe to other SuS pages.
It wouldnât be so bad if the ss platform interactions werenât, like, actually hostile. That site is like the digital equivalent of those benches with spikes on them.
We have time to try⌠I guess?
Substack is just another walled garden susceptible to enshittificationâŚ
Agreed. I donât think the goal is community engagement, so much as it is top-down engagement with the person running the newsletter⌠which is fine, but itâs not what is needed online right now. We need more places that run on actual community engagement.
The more time passes, and the more i think about it, the less charitable i feel towards the PTB about the whole thing. The community aspect was always an irritation they resented while we really valued it, but ultimately they didnât care about trashing a community that had been built for, what, two decades? Maybe SS can be built to resemble something similar but the waters have already been tainted. To me, this whole sorry mess just epitomises enshittification.
I think it was said at one point that the move was, in part, a reaction to the election. Itâs going to be very tough for independent media going forward, and the alliance between BB and SuS might provide an extra layer of safety for both the publishers and the users.
But I agree, I wish weâd had more warning, more time to prepare ourselves for the shift. Maybe there wasnât time, but it felt rushed to me. It was never going to feel good to see our collective haven go away, so maybe itâs silly of me to think more time to adjust wouldâve helped.
Adding to my previous comment, I see I have an email saying that person is following me on SuS and inviting me to follow back.
This is strange because I have never had a follower on BB before, I have never interacted with them to my knowledge, and I have never posted on SuS.
I donât know if thatâs universal for all the authors there, though. I think some did value us, but not everyone. But having a vibrant, active community does open up all sorts of possible issues (lawsuits over things posted in the comments, for example). But thatâs all looking at it from a business perspective primarily rather than from a community perspective. If itâs a business decision, the community is always gonna come second.
Thatâs dependent on a lot of factors, though, and SS has already shown they are okay with extremist voices on their platform. We all know the parable of the nazi bar, though⌠just look at twitterâŚ
That was the worst part for me. Okay, they felt they needed to make a business decision, fine. But it just felt like they pulled the rug out without much warningâŚ
I donât think so, no.
I think the goal is to get people commenting to eventually their OWN newsletters with followers, and then mine that for new writers they can use to pull in even more readers⌠the logic is capitalist growth logic.
Iâve held this back for a while, because itâs fairly provocative⌠but eff it, Iâm saying it.
I distinctly remember how we got told, over and over again, that TPTB didnât want a two-tiered system, with some voices having more privilege than others, and thatâs why we lost our Lounges during the Regularpocalypse.
Yet how is the pay-to-play system in place now not a two-tier system??? Anybody can read, sure, but only those with the change to spare get the privilege to speak up. 
Please note: I know Ken tried to take as many of us with him as he could with the free memberships, so I canât and donât blame or fault him at all. He did his best for us, and Iâm still grateful for it. But the inherent inequality of the situation grinds my gears, as well as the way it goes against the previously stated intentions of the Management.
I know, I know, BB is trapped by the limitations of capitalism as much if not more than the rest of us, so I really should be kinder to people and mad at the systems⌠but damn, itâs hard to do in this case. 
No, i wouldnât include all authors either and certainly not someone like Ken who was just trying to do the best they could behind the scenes. I guess my annoyance can be applied to most online spaces now that once started as communities with no real intention of profiting from them but over time itâs become so corporate and now not many communities can really survive without turning a profit or being beholden to a few giant tech companies where theyâre all serfs inside their walled gardens.
Oh yeah⌠totally agree with you⌠and it ties in nicely to what @Nightflyer just said⌠there are systems working to profitize all the things, and those of us who donât see that as a way to be fully human⌠but the ideology is strong, and alternatives need funding to get alongâŚ
I donât knowâŚ
