Consolidating My Platform

I started Horror × Hope at the beginning of October to be an email newsletter and social media brand for sharing my horror and hopepunk fiction. I put it on Ghost, syndicated it to Substack and Medium, and promoted it via dedicated brand social media accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads.

After running it for the last quarter of the year, I now think that was pretty much all wrong.

I was following the advice I kept seeing online about how to build a brand and grow an audience, but it just wasn’t feeling right. I felt like I was performing for algorithms instead of people, and like I was creating “content” instead of art.

I’m extremely proud of what I did with Tribute, Witness, When the Black Wind Blows, We Are All Terrorists Now, and The Gilded King in 2025. I want to write more things like that, not spend all my time repackaging and tailoring the same underlying content to a bunch of different networks with their own special-snowflake rules and their empty promises of algorithmic access to attention.

So here’s what’s changing:

I’m consolidating my online presence down to joshsutphin.com and my personal Bluesky and Mastodon accounts
The Horror × Hope site and its existing posts will soon redirect to their counterparts on joshsutphin.com
The Horror × Hope email newsletter and social media accounts will shut down

I’ve had a separate email list on joshsutphin.com that I’ve been updating with a monthly digest for a while now. If you’re a current Horror × Hope subscriber and you want to continue receiving email updates from me, you can sign up for that right here:

So that’s the TL;DR on what’s changing. The rest of this post goes into my reasoning and how I experienced the last few months of the Horror × Hope approach.

The social media thing

There are too many social media platforms now, and most of them are bullshit.

I’ve long had personal accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Instagram, but when I started Horror × Hope, I decided to create dedicated brand accounts for it, because I’d read so much advice about the importance of maintaining a narrow brand focus, which definitely does not describe my personal accounts.

After almost three months of running these, with nearly-daily posts, I found that I… kind of hate this. The Horror × Hope accounts don’t feel like me so much as they feel like branded ad vectors, and that’s not what I’m out here to do at all.

Plus, managing multiple brand social media accounts and multiple personal social media accounts quickly became burdensome. I leveraged some automations to help make this stuff more manageable—Buffer is the GOAT—but it was still just so much to juggle and it was eating up time and energy and brain space that I wasn’t spending writing. And writing was the whole point of quitting game dev in mid-2024 and taking a sabbatical in the first place!

Also, it turns out there are certain forms of social media—and certain actual platforms—that I actively loathe, and the whole space is getting worse by the day. Musk ruined Twitter, spez ruined Reddit, Meta ruined Facebook and Instagram and Threads, and TikTok and YouTube have always made me want to die.

Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty much all I can tolerate these days, so that’s all I’m gonna use for now.

The newsletter thing

Syndicating an email newsletter turns out to be a huge pain in the ass.

I used Ghost as the canonical home for Horror × Hope, and Substack and Medium as syndication targets for additional reach.

In practice, I found each platform pleasant enough to use—although Medium was utterly, embarrassingly ineffective—but having to manually cross-post from Ghost to the other platforms every week quickly got annoying and burdensome. Each platform uses slightly different aspect ratios for post thumbnails, which required lots of tedious image editing to minimize ugly crops. And I was also treating Ghost’s Fediverse integration and Substack’s Notes feature like additional social media micro-blogs, but I can’t post to those platforms with Buffer, so they were getting manually cross-posted to as well, and just… ugh, enough already.

I also found it a little weird that every individual post was an email. At first that sounded convenient and modern, but it turns out there’s a meaningful difference in voice between how I’d write a blog post vs. how I’d write an email newsletter, and having those be smashed together into the same thing just ended up feeling surprisingly wrong.

So I’m changing two things here:

I’m now sending a monthly digest instead of an email for each and every post. And the monthly email will feel more like a conversational newsletter and round-up than a single-topic blog post or story.
I’m posting new work—stories, reviews, and essays—directly to the site as and when it’s ready, rather than following a rigid content schedule.

The monthly email digest will collect everything, but if you want to follow along in real-time, I highly recommend subscribing to my Atom feed with your favorite feed reader (I love Newsblur), or following me on Bluesky or Mastodon.

The ownership thing

Every corporate-owned platform is enshittifying at light speed. It’s time to reduce our reliance on them.

My site at joshsutphin.com is made with my own homebrew static site generator. It’s extremely DIY, but it’s also extremely mine: I don’t have to worry about someone else’s platform going offline or getting enshittified by some private equity firm or getting AI jammed into it or whatever new technical hells will be invented by MBAs in the Year of Our Collective Suffering Two Thousand Twenty Six.

My only real point of potential corporate failure here is the web hosting company, and since I own the entirety of my code and content and can trivially deploy the whole thing in minutes to any basic web server, moving hosting companies is a total non-issue.

I’ve also built the whole system on long-established and mature standards, using basic HTML, CSS, and plain-vanilla Javascript. The generator runs locally as a node.js process with a codebase that’s all vanilla Javascript with zero third-party frameworks and extremely minimal NPM dependencies, and deployment is simple static HTML, CSS, and image files pushed to the server with rsync.

I picked this tech stack because it’s been around forever, it’s got well-established standards that are fairly predictable across browsers, and since most of the internet—and by extension, the global economy—runs on it, I don’t see it going away any time soon. And if, for some reason, the whole concept of locally-run Javascript vanished overnight, it would be the work of a weekend to port this all over to Python or Rust or whatever feels like the next long-term durable software ecosystem.

The formatting thing

Substack, and Medium impose significant limitations on how you can format post content. (Ghost has limits too, but they’re a little more flexible.) I ran into problems when I wanted to do things like decorative drop caps, offset formatting like the centered excerpt toward the end of Witness, or poetry formatting like in The Gilded King.

I also ran into problems with their home page presentations, which are super inflexible and very locked into a certain type of “newsletter-y” layout. (Ghost, again, has a little more flexibility here, but only a little.)

On my own site, where I control the entire tech stack, I can format anything I like, any way I like, and I can do it in plain HTML and CSS, without having to fight through multiple layers of template and theme abstractions. I care a lot about how my work is presented, and having the freedom to apply that care is extremely valuable.

The focus thing

Going into 2026, I’m aiming to narrow and focus my online footprint in a way that better supports my offline work, which is—and was always supposed to be—the creation and publication of stories.