I'm No Longer on Hashnode 🙁 - Here’s Why

I’ll keep this short: I’m moving away from Hashnode. There are a few reasons, but at the core, it comes down to growth. I still remember publishing my very first Hashnode post on May 2, 2020 - five years ago after many debates with friends about where I should host my dev blog. Haha!

Why I Chose Hashnode Back Then

A few things stood out to me and convinced me:

No paywalls - My friends disliked Medium and its strict paywall rules, and I agreed. Hashnode gave me the freedom to publish without barriers.
Community - Many Nigerian tech experts whom I respected had started using Hashnode, which made it feel natural to join.
GitHub backup integration - This was my favorite feature. I loved being able to connect my GitHub so every article would automatically back up to a repo.

These features made blogging on Hashnode easy and exciting!

So What Changed?

Life did too. I moved abroad for my Master’s degree, got busy, and writing fell a little to the side. Yo! I was mostly writing research papers, lol. But this year, I wanted and needed to fully return to writing. That is my calling! When I revisited Hashnode, though, I realized it no longer felt right for me.

The homepage design didn’t click anymore. The images on my posts looked compressed, which can subconsciously signal “low quality” to readers - even when the content isn’t. Most importantly, the experience no longer felt encouraging. It just didn’t match the stage of growth I’m at now.

I gave Medium another try, but the paywall frustrations returned. It was required that I join their membership program before I could even start my own publication. That was a deal-breaker.

Finding My New Home

Now, I’m happy to say I’ve found my new writing home at Substack. YAY!
It gave me everything I wanted right out of the box, like clean and simple publishing tools, a welcoming feel from the start, amazing UI/UX and and no unnecessary friction…
Most importantly, it made me want to write voraciously again.

Ok, Now What’s Next?

To my subscribers - thank you for sticking with me on this journey. I’ll be moving my writing to Substack, where I plan to take this seriously and go all in again.

👉🏾 Catch me on Fernsology, my new Substack blog: https://fernsology.substack.com/

See you there! ✨