That sour, disappointed look flooded onto my wife’s face. She was upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained to me that her Wordpress stats weren’t working like they used to. I poked around and couldn’t find anything obviously amiss in the Jetpack plugin settings, so I told her it was likely a glitch and would clear up. About a week later I got the email.

Wordpress had determined that my wife’s social justice and political analysis blog (https://rimaregas.com) was now deemed a commercial website and that she’d need to pay up in order to continue getting the vital stats she needs to run her site. It is important to note here that we don’t use Wordpress hosting, but Name.com website hosting, so her Wordpress installation is effectively self-hosted, and self-hosted sites have, for many years, been free of the capitalism of the official Wordpress hosting platform run by Automattic.

And how, you might ask, did they determine that the blog was now considered “commercial”? By asking for donations…

Automattic has been shifting the goal posts and clearly want to start milking the self-hosting crowd after spending more than a decade making Jetpack a vital component in almost any Wordpress installation, especially for small bloggers. We didn’t need any of the paid upgrades and the free services offered were more than sufficient. Rima preferred to remain on the blogging platform she’d become accustomed to, but this thing with the stats was the final straw. So, she decided to migrate away from Wordpress and selected Substack, the popular newsletter self-publishing tool that has grown into a blogging platform of its own, as her new platform.

I looked over everything. I combed through the settings and documentation to understand how everything worked and to verify a wide range of items like compatibility with Wordpress post imports and migrating her list of subscribers. One feature I even checked was if Substack had the ability to assign her domain name to her blog, and I was pleased to discover that indeed it did. I worked through the various tasks of getting everything configured for her and to essentially become a mirror of her Wordpress website which, after setting up the aforementioned custom domain with our DNS registrar, would be shut down.

In retrospect I’d made one critical mistake, however… I’d never clicked the link to setup the custom domain.

In all the years I’ve been blogging and working with Wordpress and setting up websites and whatnot I have never once come across what I saw in the image at the top of this post. I’ve seen far lower prices (around $5-10) and even annual fees, but these have always been for commercial systems designed for corporations, and you always expect that kind of chicanery in the enterprise realm, but not on the consumer internet. I’m not a networking guru or anything like that, but I do know that setting DNS (Domain Name Services) to point one address at another address is, in short, a zero cost proposition.

The anger that welled up in me at the thought of having to pay $50 for an automated process that requires no technician involvement and what amounts to a tiny change in a text file on my registrars DNS server which is then propagated to other DNS servers (99.9% of which are not run by Substack) across the entire internet was profound. In fact, I am the one who does all the work, so I’m paying Substack $50 and then doing the work myself? The concept is literally insane. There is no reality in which Substack’s DNS servers are overburdened by custom domain name configurations. Period.

But Rima had already committed and we weren’t going to turn back, so we haven’t, but we also haven’t dropped half a C-note for the privilege of getting to use the domain name we own on her blog. $50 is precious to us, but we will find a time at which we can do it. It just rankles that Substack has chosen to make free revenue from a service that isn’t even their own and costs them nothing to implement.

Caveat emptor, I guess.

PS: Go check out rimaregasblog42.substack.com for some quality writing and to see what Rima’s tracking.

#capitalism #technology #editorial #substack #dns #enshittification