My X account got suspended today. It's the second time this week, and my Reddit appeal is still sitting unanswered. I didn't post links, didn't spam, didn't run any automation — I just showed up as a brand-new account and started sharing what I'm building. Apparently that alone is enough to trip something you can't see.
I was frustrated for about an hour. Then it turned into something more useful.
Here's the thing I should have understood before I ever started promoting: every follower, every post, every little bit of "standing" I'd built up on those platforms is not mine. It lives on someone else's server, under someone else's rules, and it can disappear in a single click I never get to see coming. I'd been pouring all my launch energy into ground I don't actually own. I was building on rented land.
So I did the thing that always calms me down when I'm spiraling — I made a list. Specifically, a list of what actually can't be taken away from me:
- my domain
- the extension itself, and the code behind it
- my Chrome Web Store listing
- the emails of the handful of people who reached out directly
- the skill to build the whole thing again if I had to
That list, it turns out, is the actual company. Everything else — X, Reddit, every platform I was anxiously refreshing — is a channel I'm borrowing. Useful, sometimes powerful, but borrowed.
I'm not quitting the platforms. Reach is reach, and a suspended account doesn't change the fact that that's where a lot of my potential users hang out. What I got wrong was the order. I was treating the rented channels as the foundation and my own assets as an afterthought. It should be the reverse: own the asset first — a site, a store page, some way for interested people to actually email you — and then use the rented channels to point back at it. If a channel dies, the asset survives. That's the entire point, and I'd had it upside down.
The quiet upside is that the one thing no suspension can touch is the product itself. NotebookBloom is a Chrome extension that turns NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) into a real research workbench — citation export (APA/MLA/Chicago/BibTeX), Anki export with the source kept attached, and cross-notebook search. It's on the Chrome Web Store, it's on my own site, and no ban wave decides whether it exists.
If you're a solo maker doing your own launch right now: make the list. Figure out which of your eggs are in baskets you own versus baskets you rent. Then build the owned ones first. I learned it the annoying way so maybe you don't have to.
Site: https://notebookbloom.com · Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fmnhogknjhlaicceielblddajjabjlha
— building NotebookBloom in public
Top comments (1)
Hey shaojie,
this post highlighted a problem, which we often ignore. When technology centres in some centralised spaces, this is somewhat bound to happen. We often rely on some services too much, forgetting that if it goes down for even half a day , everything would turn upside down.
I'll definitely have a look at the chrome extension you're working on, and def leave a feedback if possible.
Looking forward to more such posts.