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Like, they're not too bad to use but my god the vibe is atrocious. I picked them for my newsletter cos they're free and (unlike Substack) not, to my knowledge, actively in bed with nazis. But goddamn.

Their latest "guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses" email started with "I recently listened to a podcast where MrBeast discussed how switching from voice actors to AI-powered software to translate one of his videos for a non-English-speaking audience created an admittedly worse product but improved the audience retention rate", a sentence near-perfectly designed to make me cringe away from my screen.

I guess the naked amoral capitalism is in some ways less gross than the "app for independent voices" thinly veiled amoral capitalism of Substack etc but urrrgh.

(now to decide if I want to crosspost this to the newsletter lol)

It turns out you can totally make personal blogs on Imzy, they're just a special kind of "community": you choose the "personal community" interest and set posting privileges to be limited to "community leaders" eg yourself.

So I made one and now I have FIFTY invites for anyone who asks to join my "community". So, if you're interested, go ahead and ask. I am unlikely to post there very much but it's nice to have my own space for experimenting with post types if nothing else. I might try making a poll!

And I'm enjoying my imzy dash as a low key tumblr-esque selection of community posts. Most don't have a lot of discussion but it's not totally dead. Time will tell if it's on the way up or down...