Join me over there

I'm migrating all my stuff to a platform I control. I hope you'll join me.

TL;DR: I’m writing everything on alistaircroll.com now.

In an era of slop (both AI and human) the only true currency is legitimacy. When we don’t know what’s real; when we’re flooded with too much information to process—that’s we rely on source we trust, someone who’s done the research and hasn’t let us down before.

The other day, I was searching for videos of pigeon dance animations on Instagram. That’s not s weird as it sounds: it turns out that after making 3D models of teapots and donuts, and learning how to animate bouncing balls, animation students tend to animate dancing pigeons. They have no arms, and their movements are jerky anyway.

https://dribbble.com/shots/979572-Pigeon-Dance-animated

And Instagram delivered—at first. The initial results were as promised. But as I scrolled, more and more of the results looked like they’d been generated. And I realized: what if my search was actually a prompt?

There’s no way for me to know if, when I searched “pigeon dance animation”, Meta’s servers kicked into high gear in the background, and let me look at actual students’ work for just long enough to generate videos for me. Why wouldn’t they? It’s already called a feed; time to fill it with swill we don’t have to pay creators for.

My big conclusion is this: In a world where content can be generated, if you don’t own the distribution platform, you’re competing with the distribution platform.

So for a few years now, I’ve wanted to move all of my writing to one place. Sprawl catches up with you; I’ve written on Medium, Substack, Solve for Interesting, Bitcurrent, Human 2.0, Tilt the Windmill, and other places. And those are just sites I was running. I’ve run Wordpress instances, and managed a mailing list on Mailchimp.

And platforms like Mailchimp, Medium, and Godaddy rely on all sorts of filters and dark patterns to stop you from leaving. Medium tries to upsell people to subscriptions and insert ads urging others to write for them; Godaddy turns migrating away into an escape room and monetizes your un-used domains to sell spammy ads; Mailchimp charges you for unsubscribed users until you archive them.

Seriously, Godaddy, what courtesy are you doing anyone here?

Substack isn’t as bad; I really kinda like it, even though it lets you embed polymarkets that literally enable betting on wars.

But it’s still not my platform.

Like many of the companies Cory Doctorow indicts for Enshittification, platforms often reduce churn by holding customers hostage rather than making them happy. I wanted to own my entire stack, from writing to distribution, on an open source platform. Ghost seemed like a good candidate.

Migrating content online is a delicate business. For one thing, important things get linked to. A piece I wrote on Big Data and Civil Rights from 2012 got referenced a lot, and because of Pagerank, prominent sites that link to you improve your reputation. Get it wrong, and you lose that cred. Plus, Ghost is hard, and exfiltrating your posts and domains takes time.

So I sort of let it linger.

And then recently, with the help of some very determined Claude Code agents, I was able to fix it. So I’ve migrated all of my past content (including things here on Medium) to one place: alistaircroll.com. I’ve been writing a lot there lately, about everything from digital government to startup marketing to the societal impact of AI.

You might find one of these interesting for starters:

• The machine fights back: The asymmetry has always been: the institution has machines, the citizen has a phone and their patience. What happens when the citizens can build machines of their own in a matter of hours?

• The vocabulary of agents: Shared jargon is a form of compression, because two people who understand a term can communicate more precisely. What does this mean for tomorrow’s software developer?

• How publishing’s broken, and what to do about it: Last year Emily Ross and I released a new book, called Just Evil Enough. It’s about subverting systems, so we subverted publishing. This is what we learned.

• Lenny’s podcast: Subversive marketing strategies for startups: I got to talk with Lenny Rachitsky about the book, and our shared history at Year One Labs, the incubator we ran that gave birth to Lean Analytics.

Thanks for following me here. If you found my content interesting or useful, I hope you’ll subscribe to me there.