This blog is currently hosted on a site called WordPress.com. When I started the blog, I picked WordPress mostly just because it was easy and free. (Since then I started paying them money, both to remove ads and to get a custom domain, 4gravitons.com.)
Now, the blog is more popular, and you guys access it in a wide variety of ways. 333 of you are other users of WordPress.com: WordPress has a “Reader” tab that lets users follow other blogs through the site. (I use that tab to keep up with a few of the blogs in my Blogroll.) 258 of you instead get a weekly email: this is a service WordPress.com offers, letting people sign up by email to the blog. Others follow on social media: on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
(Are there other options? If someone’s figured out how to follow with an RSS feed, or wants me to change something so they can do that, let me know in the comments!)
Recently, I’ve gotten a bit annoyed with the emails WordPress sends out. The problem is that they don’t seem to handle images in a sensible way: I can scale an image to fit in a blog post, but in the email the image is always full-size, sometimes taking up the entire screen.
Last year, someone reached out to me from Substack.com, trying to recruit me to switch to their site. Substack is a (increasingly popular) blogging platform, focused on email newsletters. The whole site is built around the idea that posts are emailed to subscribers, with a simplified layout that makes that feasible and consistent. Like WordPress, they have a system where people can follow the blog through a Substack account, and the impression I get is that a lot of people use it, browsing topics they find interesting.
(Substack also has a system for paid subscribers. That isn’t mandatory, and partly due to recent events I’m not expecting to use it.)
Since Substack is built for emails, I’m guessing it would solve the issue I’ve been having with images. It would also let more people discover the blog via the Substack app. On the other hand, Substack allows a lot less customization. I wouldn’t be able to have the cute pull-down menus from the top of the blog, or the Feynman diagram background. I don’t think I could have the Tag cloud or the Categories filter.
Most importantly, though, I don’t want to lose long-term readers. I don’t know if some of you would have more trouble accessing Substack than WordPress, or if some really prefer to follow here.
One option is that I use both sites, at least for a bit. There are services built for cross-posting, that let a post on Substack automatically get posted on WordPress as well. I might do that temporarily (to make sure everyone has enough warning to transfer) or permanently (if there are people who really would never use Substack).
(I also might end up making an institutional web page with some of the useful educational guides, once I’ve got a permanent job. That could cover some features that Substack can’t.)
I wanted to do a couple polls, to get a feeling for your opinions. The first is a direct yes or no: do you prefer I stay at WordPress, prefer I switch to Substack, or don’t care either way. (For example, if you follow me via Facebook, you’ll get a link every week regardless.) The second poll asks about more detailed concerns, and you can pick as many entries as you want to give me a feeling for what matters to you. Please, if you read the blog at all regularly, fill out both polls: I want to know what you think!
4 gravitons 
I follow via RSS, but I also follow a substack via RSS, so it should be possible.
LikeLike
I’m reading using RSS via https://4gravitons.com/feed/ and would love to keep that option
LikeLike
Looks like it should be possible, see cDave’s comment above.
LikeLike
I also read via https://4gravitons.com/feed/ with an RSS reader; that said, Substack also has RSS feeds.
LikeLike
I’m also an RSS reader, but substack has that and so that’s not a problem. If RSS went away for some reason (either at substack or wordpress), I likely would stop following.
LikeLike
Substack is a pain in the ass. They have this annoying feature of requiring you to sign in to read, and yes you can skip, but it’s extra clicks.
I get the emails from you, but to be honest I prefer to come here and read the content. Better visual interface than a window within an email reader.
LikeLike
It looks like that isn’t true for Astral Codex Ten, so maybe it’s possible to turn off that “feature”. I’ll look into it! I definitely want to make the reading experience as smooth as possible in any case.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I follow you using an RSS reader (https://feeder.co/). I want to keep it that way.
BTW, congratulations for landing a position at the IPhT. I did a research internship there 15 years ago (with the current director). At the time, it was mostly surrounded by potato fields, I heard that changed quite a lot since.
LikeLiked by 1 person
whatever the format, the texts you write are what interests me. Theoretical Physics with humans ‘in the loop’, that’s rare. I like it.
LikeLike
I use feedly to read all blog posts and new publications.
LikeLike
I am slowly but surely removing any vendor-locked-in services from my digital life. Substack is one such service. The way that twitter and reddit have devolved because of corporate greed is the type of downfall that will eventually happen to any platform with a similar business model, and I refuse to continue to support that.
WordPress is technologically flawed and outdated, but it licenses most of its open-source software through the GPL (software license), and has non-profit arms.
I understand if the frustration (or the aesthetics or feature set) of wordpress cause you to want switch to substack because the tradeoff just isn’t there for you (we don’t all place the same value on things!), but I urge you to consider other options (Ghost is a great one!).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ll take a look at Ghost, thanks! I think I’m less optimistic than you about WordPress.com (vs. .org) sticking to being sensible, but at least so far they’ve always made it possible to export the site and self-host.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I personally prefer to minimize logins, subscriptions, emails clogging my inbox, etc., therefore I read this blog the same way I read all sites I follow: I have a folder of bookmarked pages, and I actively check them about once a week for new posts/articles. As long as I can continue to access the blog that old-fashioned way, I don’t really care where it’s hosted – but more generally, I’ll echo the commenter above in disliking vendor-locked services. The moment a site starts to require subscriptions/sign-ins/etc., even if it’s simple & free, I tend to drop it.
LikeLike
I’m an RSS reader! In general, I prefer this to any other method, though I do follow Substack newsletters as well.
One option I would suggest looking at is self-hosting. Someone mentioned this above with Ghost, but you can also use Jekyll + GitHub Pages to host your own site. That’s what I do on my site (you can click my username to see), and I’d say it works pretty well. If you have questions about it, I am happy to help as I can.
Thanks as always for your generosity in writing each week.
LikeLike
Self-hosting may be an option long-term (or rather, institutional-hosting, since this blog is in some vague sense a “work thing”). That does seem like it would have the downside of lower “discoverability” though: people wouldn’t be able to find me via WordPress (which I think some people here did) or via Substack (if I switched there).
LikeLike
Yes, I think discoverability is something to consider. Right now though, you seem to have a good number of readers, so I would imagine discoverability is less of an issue. I think in fact I found your blog through Feedly’s recommendations when I subscribed to some other science blogs, which I think has nothing to do with WordPress.
One other small note: When I mentioned self-hosting, GitHub Pages is actually free to use (provided you don’t completely explode in popularity and have millions of people accessing your site).
LikeLike
For sites that have RSS feeds but don’t have the option to receive email post notices, I have junk “If this then that” (ifttt.com) accounts (using the convenient “email+alternatename@gmail.com” aliasing) which monitor RSS feeds and then send me emails. That doesn’t apply here but is still convenient to know, I think.
LikeLike
You should do whatever you feel is best (I support that first and foremost), but I won’t follow to Substack. I am in the minority of people that care about this at all, I’m sure, but Substack has a a bit of a growing reputation as a politically alt-right oriented/friendly/dominated site in some ways.
I respect your choices fully, but it is also my personal decision to distance myself from such associations and “vote with my wallet,” as they say.
LikeLike
I read through my RSS reader – NetNewsWire. I dunno I just pasted the url from your blog into the app and it just works. But I do the same for some Substack blogs and that works too, though not if they have paywalled it.
LikeLike
I’ll join the small crowd to say I don’t like substack very much and wouldn’t read anything requiring me to sign in. I found this from other blogs choosing to recommend you; several physics blogs like to list other physics blogs.
One possible upside to WordPress is that it is my understanding they are working on a Fediverse plugin, which means that users across the Fediverse (such as Mastodon) will be able to easily share your content if you should so choose to use the plugin. This could increase discovery a lot. I only check this like once a year but if I could subscribe from Mastodon I would probably read more often.
LikeLike
Good to know they’re working on a Mastodon plugin, I’ll keep an eye out for that!
LikeLike