🟤 You Weren’t Wrong. The Links Are Broken.
An open message from Michael Faust Sr.
If you’ve clicked on a post you loved or shared recently — and landed on “Page Not Found” — you’re not alone. You’re not crazy. And it’s not your connection.
The links are dead.
And the work is gone.
The Truth of What Happened
I left Substack to build something real — a permanent home for my writing where no platform could interfere. I followed their official export process. I trusted their system.
But what they delivered wasn’t a usable archive — it was a sabotage job.
They gave me raw text dumps and metadata — not the actual posts, not the formatting, not the files I wrote and built by hand. And once I deleted those posts (thinking I could repost them on my new site), they were gone for good.
Substack doesn’t warn you that your export isn’t functional. They don’t make it easy to rebuild. They certainly don’t offer any recovery once you’ve left. And what they call an “export” is, frankly, a locked trunk without a key.
🕯️ What Was Lost
Two full months of published work.
Every story. Every essay. Every thread you forwarded to a friend. Gone.
They wiped it out behind a curtain of polite policy.
But don’t be fooled — this wasn’t an accident.
It was a deliberate design: make leaving hard, make rehosting harder, and punish those who try.
So yes — I’m placing full blame on Substack.
I honored my part of the deal.
They buried the work the moment I tried to take it back into my own hands.
🔧 What Happens Now
I’m rebuilding. One post at a time.
From memory, from drafts, from whatever fragments I can scrape back.
The new archive will live right here:
📚 The Post Library at intelligent-people.org
This time, it’s permanent.
No platform tricks. No disappearing links. No deletions behind your back.
Just writing. Truthful, accountable, and built to last.
🙏 To My Readers
If you’re angry — so am I.
If you feel like something was taken from you — it was.
And if you shared my work before and now feel embarrassed by dead links — don’t.
That’s on them. Not on you. Not on me.
This is the cost of building something honest in a dishonest ecosystem.
But we’re not done.
And this site — this page — is now the real signal.
Thank you for sticking around.
I’m still writing.
I’m still standing.
And now, no one gets to pull the plug but me.
—
All I have to say about it is this:
The ultimate ream by bad site builds, programmers, customer service, corporate greed and controller’s……….I don’t live for control, I break away and rebuild, if you have faith in me to repair your trust, then please respond to our new site I can only guarantee it will never happen again this watch is independently owned from them.
Michael S. Faust Sr.
Built by hand, not algorithm.
