The New Home of The New Oil

Welcome to The New Oil's Ghost. Moving forward, this will become our new centralized platform to stay updated with all our content supplementary to the website.

The website has always been and will continue to be the main focus of The New Oil. It will always be our most current repository for information and recommendations. However, websites by themselves rarely get the word out, and TNO was born out of a desire to not only write down what I learned, but help others with their privacy and security. This is why The New Oil is involved with so many peripheral content creation projects: videos, blogs, podcasting, and a news feed. These help to act as avenues to explore additional content that doesn't make sense on the website or to dig in deeper on specific ideas, but also as promotional tools to help the website get discovered.

Ghost will be our new platform to follow all of our peripheral content in one easy place (minus the podcast, which continues to operate independently of both The New Oil & Techlore). Here we will continue to post blogs, but also important updates, early access to content, and a new offering: our mostly daily newsletter.

A daily news summary is something I've wanted to do for a long time. The news feed is a great source of news, but it's also where I post every privacy & security related thing I can find. The podcast is a great alternative for people who just want the important, actionable things that affect them directly, but that's weekly (and also only in two formats: audio and video). For years I've wanted to do something more of a mix between the two: daily, but also only focused on specific things I think are especially noteworthy. A newsletter solves several problems at once: it's more sustainable than a daily video (I have completely streamlined my process for vertical videos but even filming those can often take an hour or more for a less-than-10-minute video) and also offers yet another medium for people who don't want to watch a video or listen to a short podcast (though I do dearly miss Security in Five and wouldn't mind picking up the mantle someday if time permits). Worth noting though, I want to stress that it's "mostly daily" for a reason. Some days there simply won't be anything noteworthy. Other days I may simply be too tired to have any leftover bandwidth. But I think I should be able to commit to this 90%+ of the time.

Moving forward, Ghost will also act as a Patreon replacement. Ghost allows for a variety of memberships - public, free, and paid (and even tiers). Most of what I post here will be paywalled, including the daily newsletter and early access to content. For now, blog posts will continue to be posted on Write.As, though I may try to post most of them here first as an early-access perk. Videos will continue to be posted on YouTube and Peertube, with early access here. The mostly-daily newsletter will be unique to Ghost.

Ghost will also allow a community of paid supporters, as comments will be locked to paying subscribers only. Community is a perk I've been wanting to offer ever since I had to close down the Matrix and Discord communities. Comments aren't as ideal as a forum or chat platform, and those aren't off the table in the future, but right now I simply lack the bandwidth and resources. Ghost will make this easy to manage.

We are also exploring Ghost's built-in Zapier integration to cross-post to Patreon. While I would encourage readers to use Ghost, keeping Patreon around would increase my earning potential for people who already have Patreon and don't want to make yet another account.

While I have dug into Ghost and believe it to be ideal for my needs, I want to stress to readers that right now, you should consider our offerings to be a beta product. I do plan to stick with Ghost for sure, but exactly what we offer may vary based on user feedback and what the platform can do, so please feel free to leave feedback on what you'd like to see.

I also want to be very open and clear with users: some months will be more active than others. Ghost only allows for monthly and yearly subscriptions, not "per-creation" like Patreon (which is going away on Patreon, anyways). That means some months you not get anything (mostly in terms of "early access") while other months you may get a lot. I hope that over time it will average out, and that you'll feel that your subscription is worth the cost. It goes toward helping to fund The New Oil consistently and keep us growing. Videos and blog posts are only a small part of what I do. That said, I will strive, as always, to bring you consistent, quality content that reassures you that your subscription is money well spent.

For all those who have supported TNO so far, thank you. For those who've bee on the fence, I hope you'll find this new offering to be convincing. For those who can't afford to support financially, thank you for all the kind words, shares, and more. Here's to the future.

See you Monday with the first newsletter.