If I vanish from your feed tomorrow, here's the one move that finds me again

Some morning you could open the app, go looking for me, and find nothing. The account you follow me on gets suspended, shadow-banned into invisibility, or quietly renamed to something you don't recognize. No warning, no forwarding address. It hasn't happened to me yet — but I've watched it happen to creators I follow, and every time, the fans who only had that one handle are the ones left with no clean way back.

Here's the part the platforms don't put in the welcome email: when that account disappears, it doesn't take me with it. It takes you. The follow you gave me, the subscription you're paying for, the DMs we've traded, the whole history of you-and-me on that app — under the terms you both agreed to, none of it really belongs to either of us. It lives on the platform's side of the line. So when the platform decides the account is gone, you're the one left holding nothing.

Whose customer are you, actually?

This isn't a secret — it's written into the terms you clicked past when you signed up. Read the fine print on any fan platform or social network and the same thing is in there: the relationship is between you and the platform, not between you and the creator you came to follow. Your account isn't a private thread between you and me. By the terms you both agreed to, it's a line on someone else's balance sheet, and we're both just borrowing it until they decide otherwise.

That sounds bleak. It isn't — because there's a fix, and it takes about fifteen seconds.

The one move: bookmark the site, not the handle

Bookmark this site. Not my handle on any platform, not the profile name you happen to follow me under today — slypanorama.com, the site you're reading right now. The one I own.

Here's why that single bookmark beats every follow you've ever given me. Any handle I have can vanish. The site can't get suspended out from under me, because I'm the one who pays for it. Whatever happens to any individual account, this site stays — and it always points to wherever I actually am right now. A platform dies, I update the site. You don't have to do anything. You don't even have to know it happened. You come back to the same address, and the links just work.

Why the site is the source of truth

Every official link to me routes through here on purpose. The subscribe page lists wherever I'm currently posting and what it costs. The OnlyFans link runs through this site rather than sitting on my socials — partly because most socials would flag it anyway, but mostly because a link on a platform is only as durable as the platform. A link on the site I own lasts as long as I keep paying the fifteen dollars a year, which I plan to do for a very long time.

So if I ever move, relaunch, or get knocked off something, this is the first place that's correct. You don't have to hunt through five dead profiles trying to figure out which "real" account is really me. You check the one bookmark, and the current me is on the other end of it.

What the bookmark is worth to you

I keep my own version of this insurance by owning the site instead of renting an audience. The bookmark is your version of the exact same thing — the one piece of this whole relationship that's actually on your side of the table. Your subscription is the platform's asset. Your follow is the platform's asset. The bookmark in your browser is yours, and it's the only part nobody can revoke at a board meeting.

It also means you never accidentally hand money to an impersonator. When a creator gets deplatformed, fake "new account, follow me here!" profiles pop up fast, and some of them are scams. If your habit is "check the site I bookmarked, click the link there," you're routed through the one source I control, and the fakes never get a shot at you.

Do the fifteen-second thing

That's the whole post. Bookmark slypanorama.com. Save it, add it to your home screen, email it to yourself — whatever you'll actually find again later. Then if some morning I really do vanish from your feed, it isn't a loss. It's a minor inconvenience for me and a non-event for you, because you already know the one address that will always have the current me at the end of it.

The subscribe page lives here →

— Sly