For the sake of transparency.
I know I seem like I have it together, but some days, I am genuinely terrified for my future. I have one amazing freelance client, but as a trans person in tech with soft skills - and as a trans journalist - work started drying up after the election last year.
Globally, companies seem less interested than ever in working with me. In Australia, tech firms decided I was "too controversial" to be associated with.
My partner and I wanted to have a baby this year, but I can't see a path to making that happen. All I have is my writing, and some days it feels like I'm deluding myself into thinking that will be enough.
I have the cash runway to make The Index work for the next few months, but after that it’s down to subscribers.
I made the decision a while ago to never take sponsors or sell ads. All I can do is hope I can keep finding an audience or look for investors who believe in indie media. But that brings its own trouble.
Ok, how can we help? Is there a way to subscribe? It would be easier for people to do this if you had more info and even a subscription link in your profile. Note that people are not fond of #Substack these days, so if you can enable direct payment and bypass them it would be good.
Also, people want to pay via PayPal, Credit Card, and Venmo. There's also Zelle and some other what I would call secondary payment options.
But if it's not easy people won't do it.
My 2 cents.
@Ehay2k There are links to both my sites on my profile, and both are built on Ghost. I wouldn't go near Substack with a ten foot pole. Wrote about that here:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/why-i-wont-write-on-substack/
Just be clear, I'm not trying to be argumentative, just stating what I have seen in the hope that I can be someone helpful. When I look at your Mastodon profile, this is what I see with no actual links:
@Ehay2k oh, that's interesting....this is what the official Mastodon shows me. What app are you using?