I did a quick search for that blog post in the the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t find the post but the Substack newsletter was there. I guess Substack does allows archiving of newsletters with the “substack.com” domain after all (if it’s something that they can even control).

Anyway, here are a few things I’ve found out while browsing through a Substack newsletter in the Wayback Machine:

  • Clicking “Let me read it first” works: it slides away and the most recent posts show up. Guess it’s just a simple HTML overlay blocking the home page.
  • Open all links in a new tab. Just clicking them will run some JavaScript which, I guess, tries to load the post directly from Substack, resulting in an error if the newsletter is taken offline. Opening the link in a new tab will get the post directly from the Wayback Machine.
  • Clicking the archive tab seems to bring up the blog archive briefly, but then some JavaScript — which I guess is trying to load the archive from Substack? — replaces it with an error (why does everything need to be JavaScript?!) I’m guessing that the actual HTML is still there so it might be possible to get it if you disable JavaScript. I haven’t tried this though, so this is only a hypothesis.

As for the post itself, it turns out that it was in my Feedbin archive all along, so the search in Wayback Machine wasn’t actually necessary. Now the trick is to find a way to prevent Feedbin from purging old posts. 😳