The Last Post

 A short note to let you now that ‘The Town Crier’ on Ghost has migrated to Substack where we are going under the name ‘Burning Platforms’.

As you would have noticed Town Crier has been dormant for the past 12 months but I am recommitting to creating regular updates and would love for you to make the journey across.

 You will have been subscribed up in the last few hours but of course have the option to opt out.

 Here’s a brief overview of the next phase of the project.

What’s the Plan?

Over the next few months I am going to begin to populate the site with Burning Platform updates, new posts and relevant pieces from my archive, which users are welcome to critique and comment on.

I’ve been writing about these issues regularly for Guardian Australia and with their permission will be reproducing some of these.

In this period I will also start testing the other tolls that Substack offers, including their newsletter, notes function and comments as well.

With luck the site should begin to take form around July.

How you can help

If you are here in the first few months it probably means you are doing me a favour. Thank you!

Some of you will have been part of my Civility ‘closed community’ experiment last year, my failed attempt at a digital utopia in the finest traditions of William Lane.

Others may have been subscribers to ‘the Town Crier’ which lost its rythym about 12 months ago or others maybe have followed the links through form my Guardian columns.

The first thing we ask is simple –start using Notes. Notes is Substack’s version of a social feed - short posts, reactions, conversation. Setting up a profile means you’re part of the community, not just a reader.

A free subscription means new posts come to you - you don’t have to remember to check back. If you find something worth sharing, send it to your friends and family, personal referrals are by far the best way of building community.

We won’t ask you for money for a while, but when and if we do, it will be because we’ve built something worth paying for.

A few notes on Substack

Choosing somewhere to platform your work is not an easy decision. I’ve thought long and hard about the appropriate and ethical place for Burning Platforms to base itself.

Right now it’s slender pickings: X is a bonfire, BlueSky is too complicated, Ghost (where I hosted The Town Crier) is a description of the ecosystem.

Looking at how creators are using Substack I think it offers the best chance of finding a community of interest to help build political literacy and support movements for change.

I make this call conscious of the criticisms of Substack; that it platforms Nazis, that it is doing content deals with prediction markets and that it is generally on the path to en-shitification.

But mitigating this is the network effect here is real and being deployed by many thoughtful and ethical writers, including those who report tech critically.

For now, Substack is a platform not a long-term home; but the one thing that it offers is a direct relationship with subscribers and full portability of data.