I see many friends start Substacks. And I don’t fault them for it at all. Substack has good tools, especially for subscriptions, and honestly, setting up a blog can be complicated. If someone wants to start writing and sharing with an audience and they don’t want to wrestle with WordPress, I completely understand the appeal.

But it’s not for me. And I’ve been thinking about why.

Charlotte Duckworth, a writer and designer, put it well in a post called Why Substack is not a substitute for your author website. You technically own your content on Substack. But you don’t own the platform. Your audience lives in their database. Your brand lives on their subdomain. And if they change their terms, shift their business model, or go under, you’re exposed in ways that are hard to undo.

That’s the trade. Ease of setup in exchange for a kind of dependency you might not notice until it matters.

My blog isn’t separate from my website. It’s part of it. Many of my posts are specifically about things I make and create, and that makes it easy to link my home page gallery to the blog posts behind the work. Someone sees a piece and can click into the story of how it came to be. That kind of connection is hard to build when your writing lives on someone else’s platform.

I’m sure there could be even more interesting ways to do this. Probably with audio and video. The point is that the possibilities are there when you own your own space.

There is also a distinction that feels important to me. Substack is built for a blogger who wants subscribers. I’m an artist who blogs. That difference explains a lot.

My voice isn’t just the artworks I create. It’s an ongoing conversation in my head. About what I’m making, what I’m thinking about, what I’m noticing in the world. My hope is that there are at least a few people who find that interesting. Not because I’m trying to build an audience for its own sake, but because those are the people I want to connect with (maybe that’s you?).

Here’s something worth saying out loud: in a moment when the internet is being flooded with AI-generated content, a blog that is clearly one person’s voice and a record of how someone actually thinks, that is more valuable and distinctive than ever. I think readers can feel the difference. There’s something about writing that comes from a real place and is connected to real work.

Substack is optimized for writers who already have an audience and want to monetize it. That’s essentially a journalism model. And it works well for journalists (I subscribe to a few!).

But for an artist who blogs (me!), what matters most isn’t subscriptions or revenue. It’s the combination of the work and the words. It’s having a space that is genuinely mine, that fuses my art with my thoughts, and that could grow into something even more interesting over time.

That’s what I’m building. Slowly, and in my own way.