If you’re following The Week in Botany on Substack, you might wonder why aren’t there any emails. The answer is that we shifted the mailing list as a matter of urgency in 2024, when we found out that Substack was promoting and paying Nazi newsletters. This isn’t Nazi in the sense of “people whose politics I don’t like”. This is full on white supremacy.

Substack made clear that they were perfectly willing to host Nazis, which means that more will come to the site. Apparently banning them would only make them stronger, which if Substack is sincere, is a really damning comment on the value of Substack. So we took our newsletter and left.

The intention was to take this account down quickly. But I found that people kept signing up to the mailing list and I couldn’t work out how. I’ve now found that while I made an update to the email page on Botany One’s website, it didn’t push to the live site so only I could see it. If you’ve tried signing up to the Week in Botany this way, I apologise. You can now sign up by visiting a recent posting of the Week in Botany, scrolling to the bottom and entering your email. You can then choose to just get the Week in Botany emails.

I’m not going to transfer people across to the mailing list as people have signed up for a few reasons. Some and only some because they wanted to keep up with botanical news. Many others follow this list in the hope I will follow theirs. I can see why, it’s about building a community, which normally I’d support. But in this case we’d be building community into a melting ice floe, because there is a growing Nazi problem. Others follow this list because… well I’m not sure why. Some Substack lists seem to have an awful lot of people with the same surname joining from the same country at the same time. Great, if you want to impress people with numbers, but not if you’re trying to connect with people.

You might think that principles are fine for people who can afford to leave Substack, but they’re also for people with money. Running a mailing list is expensive, if you pay for it. But it doesn’t have to be that expensive. It can even be free.

If I were setting up a site from scratch today, I’d probably choose Ghost or more likely Magicpages, which runs Ghost, but more cheaply. Ghost prices per subscriber per month, Magicpages prices per email per month, so if you send a lot of posts per month Ghost may work out cheaper. Not everyone is willing to pay for their site, but there is also a free option.

WordPress offers a free newsletter option. The catch is there is advertising on your site on the free tier, but you have unlimited subscribers and email sends.

About a day after sending this email, this Substack account will be deleted. I won’t be following your Substack. While your Substack may be lovely, I don’t want alerts like this appearing on my phone.

And I think you don’t either.

Alun