Recently, Krysta from Pages Unbound posted about whether it’s worth starting a book blog in 2025 and her points about community and freedom from the algorithm were two that resonated with me. As you know, I’ve been pretty much off social media and blogging, but over the many years I’ve been on the internet, I’ve tried
- Blogging
- Xiaohongshu
- Lemon8
- Substack
- Dayre
- Telegram channels
- Goodreads
And the like. It’s pretty much everything except TikTok – and I did try TikTok for like a week before I realised that I’m not a video person. I’ve even started on Letterloop, which seems promising and also, I’ve mentioned I’ve got sparkly object syndrome so that’s another sign of it. So Krysta’s post sparked thoughts on what it was like on the various platforms.
What am I Looking for in an Online Community?
Before I even start talking about the various platforms, I want to talk a bit about why I keep sticking around and talking about books and tea online. Essentially, it boils down to two things:
- I’d like to meet like-minded people
- I’d like to have a place that “keeps” all my reviews so I can reference it
Here and there, there are a few other smaller goals, like figuring out how blogs work, or just wanting to experience the latest hot new social media platform. By over the years, it really has come down to wanting to know more people who love books and tea and building an online memory bank. I’ll be referencing these two points a lot when I talk about the platforms.
I’ve listed a ton of places in the introduction, so for the rest of the post, I will just be talking about the following platforms: Blogging, Substack, Instagram, and Lemon8.
Special mentions: Dayre is great and I’ve met so many people from it (probably it’s the most successful online platform for turning online friends into offline friends in my experience), but it’s also a very hyperlocal app with users based primarily in Singapore and Malaysia so there’s not that much to talk about. I also won’t be talking about Xiaohongshu (Rednote) because I’m primarily on there to read hanfu reviews and find crochet patterns.
My Experience with Blogging
Where do I begin? I started blogging in my teens with blogger and before that, Piczo. I’m not sure if anyone remembers Piczo but that was probably when I was most familiar with using CSS for styling web pages.
That’s how long blogging and I go back. In a way, I blogged through my growing-up years, at one point ending up with three separate blogs because I had the idea that one blog could only focus on one topic. In 2018, I moved from Blogger to Self-Hosted WordPress (first with Bluehost and now with Exabytes as my hosting providers) and… it actually helped increased my connections with the blog community! After Google Reader died, I kind of stopped following blogs, but being able to connect Jetpack to my blog and follow, like, and comment on other blogs was a game changer.
At the moment, I think blogging is one of the most consistent habits I have, even if I am less consistent at it. I like the fact that I can search through the archives (probably the easiest) and by this point in time, there are a few blogs I’ve followed for years and who I feel like I know because we follow each other’s post! I do miss a few bloggers who have gradually fallen silent, but hopefully one day, they will be back! I’ve even gotten some really great recipes from people who read my blog (thanks, Warren!)
Another nice thing about blogging is, as Krysta mentioned, the freedom from the algorithm. Yes, you can get “likes” on your posts and I guess you can measure comments, but somehow these don’t hit as hard as likes on social media platforms do. Blogging gave me a lot of freedom to write without feeling the pressure of producing a “hit”. Perhaps it’s the way I started on Piczo and Blogger, where I didn’t really bother with stats, but so far, blogging is freeing in that there’s no need to feed an algorithm.
The only downside is that it’s pretty expensive to blog. Hosting and domain names do cost money and I don’t earn anything from this, so it can be a burden on the wallet.
My experience with Substack
Substack is one of the newer platforms I joined, but it’s the most similar to a blog so I decided to talk about it next. In fact, I’ve heard of people who claim to use Substack as a blog.
To me, Substack marries the blog/newsletter concept with social media. Their social media element, “Notes” is the first thing you see when you go to substack’s home page (instead of the latest posts of the publication you subscribe to). Compared to blogging, I felt that Substack provided more of the algorithm anxiety – true, people will get your posts if they subscribe, but Notes is so front and center that you judge how you’re doing on it.
Another thing I noticed about Substack is that, perhaps because of the social media element, nearly everybody I see there wants to “grow”. It’s a bit like Lemon8 in that respect, where things are more focused on reaching people or nurturing your audience rather than just writing your thoughts down (which I see more on traditional blogging and apps like Dayre). There may be talk about gentler growth and not being pressured, but the focus is still on growth.
But perhaps the biggest thing about Substack is that it’s a closed ecosystem. If I were to move over there, there’s no way for me to import the blogs that I follow unless they are on Substack, and likewise, I don’t think people can follow me on their existing blog reader. It’s probably not an issue for people who have more people who read them than blogs that they read, but I am online for the sense of community and moving from a traditional blog to substack pretty much implies losing most of the community who I interact with.
You may wonder, why did I even consider moving over to Substack? Well, it’s mostly because Substack is free unless you enable paid subscriptions (and then they take a 10% cut). Compared to what I’m paying for hosting, it’s a lot cheaper. I also liked that Substack lets you write from your phone, which means that you can be a bit more spontaneous with posting/write even when you don’t have access to a computer. (Yes, I think WordPress had a mobile posting option, but I always found it a bit finicky for some reason).
My Experience with Instagram/Bookstagram
I got on to bookstagram when I had more time during the lockdown and wanted to try promoting my books. As it turns out, I’m absolutely terrible at promoting myself and much prefer to talk about the books I’ve read and teas that I’ve drunk.
In general, I liked the bookstagram community because it was easy to find other Singaporean readers! Somehow, the blogosphere is much more international and so it was nice to see what people in my country were reading.
On the other hand, Instagram has pretty much changed all the rules and it feels like a pay to play/pay for exposure platform. I’m also not a fan of all the ads that I see now.
For the time being, I’ve cut my instagram activity down, partly because of the reasons above, and partly because I’ve got no energy to take nice photos (and I can’t even paste my captions into a comment if they are too long). I’d like to keep in touch with the people there and I’m still thinking about how!
My Experience with Lemon8
Lemon8 has a bit of a mixed reputation here. You either like it, or you think it’s full of bad advice. I gave it a go because a friend of mine told me she really, really liked it.
After a while, I found that Lemon8 is great for trying out content. The algorithm does consistently show you to people who don’t follow you, and you can quite easily judge how your post did based on the view count vs interactions. If you’re trying to see what resonates with people, this is a good app to use and it’s pretty easy to customise post.
But it’s a lot harder to make friends there. I tried following some bookish people but the best rapport was with someone whom I had already met on Bookstagram. I think it’s also due to the nature of the algorithm, where you expect people you don’t know to see your content, rather than the people you follow or who follow you.
In the end, I tried it a few months, and then lost steam entirely. I like that there are no character limits (not that I’ve found, anyway), and it could be good for discovery, but it managed to be less community-based than Instagram, which I found to be a surprise.
What now?
As you all know, I’ve been inconsistent when it comes to blogging for last year. I’ve tried some other stuff out, and now I’m pretty sure I’ll stick to blogging – but whether that’s a self-hosted WordPress blog or a Substack, I’m still a bit conflicted. If I could find a way to keep up with everyone on WordPress and have them also see my stuff on Substack, I would probably move over to save the money, but it doesn’t look quite possible at the moment. I do enjoy the interaction – I don’t need this blog to be very popular but I enjoy talking in the comments, especially to people who follow the blog and whom I follow!
All this to say… I’m not sure what I’ll be doing but it’s definitely a writing-based platform for me.