Why I'm moving to Substack
My blog, older than Facebook and Twitter, is going to a place where it can be part of a community
It all used to be so simple.
I had a fun blog called Mostly Modern Media (originally Mostly Modern Music before I started talking more about TV and journalism). Over the years, I de-emphasized it because the audience and the conversations were on Facebook and Twitter.
(Please pardon the obtrusive call to subscribe.)
Now Twitter is X, and supporting it means supporting Elon Musk (which might actually turn out to be a good thing come 2026, but for now, no) and his trashing of a once-vital medium. Facebook is still a vital lifeline for some — I always tell the story of my stepmom using it to communicate with the world right up until she died — but the “feed” is becoming increasingly dominated by repetitive ads and the crankiest of our friends.
I still consider Facebook a necessary evil, and I understand why people feel compelled to share so much political content there. I just need someplace else to go in addition to that, and I hope others will follow. Instagram is OK for what it is, but some of us are better with words than images. I’ve used Medium for a few years, with little success. Threads is downright frightening (and it’s Meta, anyway), Bluesky is a left-wing echo chamber without a critical mass, and Mastodon is a bunch of hippie coders who think it somehow makes sense.
So, to paraphrase David St. Hubbins, you are witnesses at the new birth of Mostly Modern Media Mark II. It’ll have no political content — I’ll still participate in the occasional discussion here and there, under my name or not. It’ll be music, TV, pop culture, life in general, and occasionally sports, just so I’m not propping up another blog.
What I’m hoping is that my Facebook friends, my real-life friends and people I haven’t met yet will come together and we can talk about anything other than the gruesome state of the world.
MostlyModernMedia.com will still exist, with 21 years of archives as well as a frequently updated page on what I’m doing musically.
And to celebrate this milestone, I’ve gone back through to look up the most-read posts in Mostly Modern Media history, and I’m posting two of them per day to get this thing populated.
No. 1: July 12 (p.m.)
No. 2: July 12 (a.m.)
No. 3: July 11 (p.m.)
No. 4: July 11 (a.m.)
No. 5: July 10 (p.m.)
No. 6: July 10 (a.m.)
No. 7: July 9 (p.m.)
No. 8: July 9 (a.m.)
No. 9: July 8 (p.m.)
No. 10: July 8 (a.m.)