Surprise—we're moving!

In the interest of protecting your privacy and mine, I’ve decided to move the newsletter from Substack to Ghost.

I try to be completely transparent about the tools I use and the tradeoffs they come with, so in the interest of keeping with that tradition, here’s why I’m moving us.

TL;DR: It’s great!

Ghost is built and maintained by the Ghost Foundation, a nonprofit. Substack is a venture-backed startup, which means it has investors who expect growth and revenue. That doesn’t automatically make Substack bad, but it does mean the incentives are different. Over time, that difference tends to show up in product decisions, platform priorities, and how much the business model depends on growth, engagement, and scale. I am more comfortable building this project on infrastructure that is not optimized around those pressures.

Ghost’s software is open source. That means the underlying infrastructure is transparent and can be self-hosted, audited, and used independently of Ghost’s own hosted service. This means if Ghost the company ever disappeared, I could take the entire site and host it myself on any server in the world. We aren't locked in. Even though I am using Ghost(Pro) for convenience, I like knowing this isn’t a closed black box that only one company controls.

This newsletter now lives at womensprivacyproject.org, not inside a closed platform that benefits from mapping relationships between readers, writers, and engagement patterns. While Ghost(Pro) hosts and processes subscriber data in order to send the newsletter, your email and reading activity are not folded into a larger social network or used to power platform-wide recommendations and growth experiments. Your information is here for one purpose: to send you the newsletter you asked for. Less cross-platform profiling, fewer incentives to track behavior, and a more direct relationship between you and this project.

The hosted version of Ghost I am using stores data in the EU and is built to comply with GDPR. That does not magically make the internet safe, but it does mean stronger default privacy protections for how subscriber data is handled compared to many US-centric platforms. Given what this project is about, that baseline matters to me.

Ghost is not algorithm-driven, and it is not trying to turn newsletters into a content feed optimized for engagement. That’s the vibe. I want this to stay a direct relationship between me and you, not something mediated by recommendation engines, trending tabs, or growth hacks.

Ghost has started integrating with the Fediverse (the open, decentralized social web). This direction is significant and pushes forward the move towards an open web, where you’re not locked into a single platform and content can be created, shared, and interacted with freely across platforms. The idea that publishing can live on the open web—rather than inside a handful of corporate platforms—is very much aligned with my values on privacy, ownership, and digital autonomy.

Ghost(Pro) explicitly forbids content that promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment, abuse, or harm against individuals or groups. That baseline matters to me for where I choose to host this work.

Remember kids: If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. This move to a privacy-first, open source, nonprofit platform means newsletter maintenance now runs approximately $200/yr for the hosting and the domain, but it’s a small price to pay to protect all of our data and remove ourselves from corporate interests. If you enjoy the newsletter and want to help support this move, you know what to do!

Honestly, not much. This is the last post that you’ll receive via Substack from me and the last post that will live on Substack. All future posts will be delivered (via email) from Ghost and will live permanently on womensprivacyproject.org.

If you were already subscribed, you’re still subscribed.
I migrated the existing subscriber list, and all past posts now live at womensprivacyproject.org, so the full archive is still available. If at any point you want out, the unsubscribe link will be at the bottom of every email.

The main visible change is that these emails will come from a new address:
womens-privacy-project@ghost.io

To make sure these posts don't get lost in your spam or promotions folder, please add womens-privacy-project@ghost.io to your contacts!

Welcome! I hope you’ll subscribe at womensprivacyproject.org to receive all the new Women’s Privacy Project posts moving forward.

Thanks for being here, I’ll see you on the flip side!

Keep on keepin’ on,
KL