Change is a'coming
A transition, a fresh start, and a look to the future
By the time you read this, I will have made a transition to the Ghost(pro) system. But some back story is illuminative. If you really don't care about the nerdy bits and bobs, you can just nod your head, and navigate away.
The story to date
In the depths of the Covid lockdowns, and the aftermath, I was spending upwards of 14 hours a day in my home office. Between my job (then and now remote), and my reinvigorated dicipline for playing guitar, I needed a distraction.
So, I went to my favority VPS provider, spun up a new VM, and installed Ghost. What to call it was something that I struggled with for a few nanoseconds, but then I harkened back to a job a long time ago, and far, far away, where the marketing team (all of us were dudes) dressed in drag as the Spice Girls.
I laughed that I was "Sweaty Spice" the portly one, and that nickname stuck. In fact I began using it as my gamer handle when playing online.
Regardless, as part of the afrementioned Covid induced home confinement, I also began playing video games again, and I had resurrected the Sweaty Spice persona.
The name stuck, and I bought the domain.
Basically, it was online, and I just wrote and published posts, with nobody actually subacribing. After a year or so of this, I was spending more time managing the back end and the system than writing, and I had discovered Substack. The promise was that even those of us niche-y writers, with tiny audiences would be able to publish and they would handle all that messy system stuff. And for the first year it was pretty good. I even gained some subscribers by sharing my posts onb Twitter.
Back then, the platform was simple, clean, and it did what they promised without any drama.
The purchase of Twitter by that fucking Sount African fucker changed the dynamic. The bulk of the Substack authors used Twitter to build the audience, to grow reach, and drive engagement (eyeballs and clicks) that would convert at some rate to paid subscribers.
Then Musk got pissy, and basically blocked any sharing of links to Twitter (this was well before he transitioned it to X). This caused a bit of a panic, but the folks at Substack quickly responded with Notes, their text based ecosystem, that was sorta like Twitter (at least when Twitter was good)[1].
I was wary of it, because I spent a LOT of time building up a community of product managers on Twitter, and starting in 2017 or so, I saw it begin to fall apart, becoming dominated by influencers, and engagement farmers. The classic enshittification cycle.
I feared that Notes would be like that. But, at least at first, it was a lot like Twitter circa 2010.
That was not to last.
One thing I remember, there are waves of people who on Notes exhaled and said that "ah, I am off all social media, and Notes is so peaceful". I kept thinking to myself that they were all fooling themselves, as Notes was just another Social Media system, and boy-howdy did that come true.
In late 2024, there was a kerfuffle about overt Nazi substacks that were growing in subscribers, and that the founders were a-OK with that. In fact, they pulled the usual "libertarian" free speech card out of their pocket and pooh-poohed all the concerned people.
But it turns out that people cared about this. Many left, including Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day), Casey Newton (Platformer) and others. In mid-2025, this also bubbled over:
Casey Newton
I remained, because, well, it was a hobby, and, at least my close to 2,000 subscribers was draining money from their coffers everytime I published.
But, starting in spring 2025, I noticed that my subscriber counts had flatlined. I was still getting sign-up notifications, but they never seemed to add to my subscribers tally.
Turns out that they were removing people from my roles without them actually unsubscribing. That was uncool. Sure, I was a free substack, but their premise was that the larger ones and the 10% skim would fund all of us small fries.
I made plans to decamp, and there was really only one option: Ghost.
I had moved my professional site to Ghost when the original Nazi storm blew up (that was my professional face forward) but it was time to move Sweaty's Corner.
The Self Hosted era
I am technical enough to be dangerous. I am comfortable setting up the VPS, and following the instructions to get things installed and configured. I also looked at the size of my subscriber list, and my email volumes, and I figured that I would be able to run this comfortably for about $40-$45 a month. So three lunches out when I am in the office seemed reasonable. And I would have complete control.
It worked well, but my estimate on the costs wasn't too solid. I had three sites, so to get them to run well, required a 2-vCPU droplet with 16G ram to be comfortable. That took the hosting from $10 to about $25 a month. And about half the months, I have gone above my 50,000 email allocation, adding $5-$10 to the Mailgun bill. Suddenly, I was spending $60+ pretty consistently.
Add to that a major version update that required some fiddling with the node.js version(sorry, really geeky shit there) and a botched upgrade kept throwing alerts and warnings, and my attempts to rectify that failed spectacularly[2].
Anyhow, the next major update will require a transition to using Docker to run the Ghost containers, and I am tapping out. Not because that is too complicated, but it isn't something that I do on a regular basis. And it was beginning to look a little like more than a "hobby".
So, this is moving to a Ghost(pro) hosted instance. And it will actually be a wee bit cheaper.
As if that wasn't enough... Email spam headache
In the background, there's a factor that is tipping the scale. I use Mailgun as a transport mechanism, and it is super reliable. But they are also hypervigilent about preventing spam operators abusing their system(s). And I follow all their rules and recommendations to prevent any negative repurcussions.
But, recently, I have seen a bevvy of new subscribers. Starting in October or November 2025, I was getting 2-3 new subscribers a week. That seemed like a good thing. That I was getting some traction, and people were signing up.
And while it was at that scale, it might have been true.
But in December, I started getting waves of new subscribers. In fact, it was like 60 of them in the month of December.
This felt wrong. So I did some digging. I started looking at the origin of the subscriptions (there is geolocation of the IP address they sub from) and they were places like Germany, The Netherlands, and points in Asia.
Then I looked at the domains. These weren't Gmail accounts, but people's work accounts. So I did simple www lookups. A lot of property management companies, one of them was the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center in DC (that person was in Germany).
The fish was getting stinky.
Then I checked my Mailgun logs, and holy fuck, there were literally hundreds of errors in the logs. Emails I hadn't sent.
Turns out that Ghost has a fairly permissive signup page. You submit an email, and it sends you a magic code, and bam, you are subscribed. What I was seeing in the logs was literally hundreds of attempts a day, most were failures.
I took to the Ghost support forums, and yep, this is an issue, and one that is not easy to fix.
The volumes of these one off emails were enough to cause me to go above my 50K allocation.
Fuck those fucking fuckers.
The common wisdom is that these are attempts by phishers to validate emails they "acquired" on the dark web, using Ghost sites and their permissive (aka friction free) sign up process to confirm a "good" email account. Part of the workflow for them to constuct their attacks. [3]
Honestly, I consulted with a couple of cyber people at work and they said that unless I wanted to rewrite my system (I am not skilled enough), or I wanted to put in place some work around these exploits, again something I am not really skilled enough to do, I would have to live with it.
Le sigh.
The Move
So, it is relatively painless to move the main site to the Ghost(pro) system. Today, I am merely awaiting their assistance to move the images from my local system, and then I will do the configuration of the domain.
THe question is what to do about my other two properties? The professional Product Management blog, and the sarcastic "secret" page.
I do not publish on either of them enough to justify the expense of moving them, but they are taking up hosting and email costs.
But that is for another day.
Anyhow, by the time you read this, the deed will have been done.
The other changes
Since I am paying for this once a year, as long as I have less than 2,500 subscribers, I will pay a little over $500 for the service. That is a bit less than I was on track for spending.
But, I am attaching my Stripe account to this, and will have a single paid tier. There will be nothing extra, no paywall, no expectation of people subscribing, but enough people int he past have asked if they could contribute.
That will be an option, appreciated, but 100% not expected. Everything I write or post will be visible to everyone, and I will not put comments behind the paywall.
And frankly, I hope nobody decides to pay, because then I will feel compelled to write more often.
1 - It should be noted that this shittiness by Musk, and his destruction of any guardrails or content moderation drove Facebook to develop threads, and that the open source system, Mastodon finally began to gain steam. The ultimate launch of Bluesky, Jack Dorsey's post Twitter work also is in this realm of textual social media.
2 - so spectacularly that I almost said "fuck it" and shut the whole thing down. It was a not-fun day.
3 - It turns out that NordVPN (yeah the one that sponsors all those YT videos) is a popular tool to anonymize, but also a lot of these are coming from server clusters that are exiting TOR nodes. A possible fix is to enable Cloudflare, but I fucking hate that answer, and even then, it requires some ongoing monitoring and maintenance. And you know, not "hobby" friendly.
