Substack tries to be too clever with its dickovers and even basic HTML and images. It means that a blog on Substack is unlikely to be indexed properly by the Wayback Machine. A real problem considering how much writing is on Substack.
@manton I migrated from Substack to Micro.blog and the files exported from Substack were an absolute mess! Amazing how much they managed to overcomplicate it
@mattnida Thanks for migrating! The crazy thing is we actually have special code that tries to clean up some of their HTML during import, but it’s not enough.
@manton I have a hard time even thinking about substack accounts as blogs. I am a purist, whatever that means.
@jkratz I don’t have a problem with people want to make a living from their writing, and that is damned hard to do outside a big platform with an army of (possibly) human ad salespeople. I’m not crazy about some of the people substack hosts, so I don’t use it at all. But that’s just me.
@manton I can attest that it’s impossible to get Substack newsletters from the Wayback Machine already. It’s not (just) the dickovers, it’s all the JavaScript they have on the page. I tried it once a few years ago and I think I had to abandon the attempt.
@lmika I tried today and could get some post text, but no post images and no home page text. Not good. I’m going to test Micro.blog’s archiver to see what I can do there.
@manton I wrote some things I found on my attempt here. I think you can get past the dickover, but I remember images and much of the archive being unrecoverable. There isn’t much there.
@manton and you would think people like Scott Knaster would know better about all those tricks and publish elsewhere… But no. 😔