Twitter's War on Substack

First Twitter blocked engagement on Substack links, now they are marking all links to Substack as unsafe. Hopefully Substack Notes can provide a viable alternative to Twitter.

As a reaction to Substack’s newly announced Notes feature, Elon Musk and Twitter have launched a war on Substack. Substack Notes will be releasing in a few days and aims to create an environment where Substack can be used to share shorter form content that does not require an entire article. In many ways it looks to be a viable alternative to a Twitter feed, but with the notable difference that it doesn’t rely on Twitter’s twisted algorithm and provides an ad free experience.

When Elon Musk initially purchased Twitter, the OSINT community had a lot of worries about the future of Twitter, but there was no real viable alterative, as OSINT can rely heavily on large numbers of short posts. This was one of the reasons that, while Substack was an excellent platform for long form content, it did not meet all the requirements of the community. I hope that this will change shortly with the introduction of Notes.

Yesterday Twitter started by limiting engagement on tweets that linked to Substack articles. This meant that any of these tweets could no longer be liked, retweeted or commented on by anyone, essentially killing them in their tracks.

Following this Twitter started by doing the same to tweets posted by the official Substack account.

https://twitter.com/SubstackInc/status/1644409243989155841

Today Twitter decided to go one step further and has begun marking all links to Substack, including links to my posts, as “unsafe”. This is absolutely ridiculous.

If Substack’s Notes feature manages to deliver on what is promised and provides a viable alternative to Twitter, I will be moving to Substack Notes as my main platform.