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- Hacker News
- A great article written on this theme is “DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KINGDOMS” (2021)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
by aetherspawn - I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com).
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
by mertbio - This saved me when X killed Substack tweets. My Substack uses a custom domain and thus was fine. People tweeted it out with no blocking.by BirAdam
- I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity.
However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI.
I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it.
Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well.
If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish.
[1] https://rafaelquintanilha.com [2] https://codecapital.substack.com
- I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.by doublepg23
- This is true for patreon but not substack. I personally know people who blog on substack not because they care about monetization — I mean, they hardly get any readers who are not a friend already — but because it is "the place" to put long form writing. I can't see the exact subscription number of substack, but if Pareto principle holds, I'd suspect most substack blogs don't have a monetization problem to solve because no one pay for them.by pibaker
- That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
by t-writescode - Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.
In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.
So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
by peteforde - Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
- There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack.
Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money.
Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.
by npn - Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.by millipede
- same for me on medium, but susbstack not necesarily, they seem to be more focused on the author not like mediumby eluru
- Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.by d_k_h
- Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials.
But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
by Silamoth - As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion.
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
by thataccount - > I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
by sfRattan - Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
by 01284a7e - I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist.
We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p
Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app
A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down.
Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website.
It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.
by schlagetown - I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.siteby dirkc
- This looks cool! How does it compare to something like WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/)?
EDIT - OH, I missed you're on the AT protocol, so there's the main difference already.
- can't we just make RSS cool again?!by cpill
- I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
by simonw - This is super useful even if I just grab it as an idea to emulate. Have you used an agent to copy and paste for you ?by pryelluw
- It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.by cosmicgadget
- I really like this approach. I make similar distinctions between posts meant for email, posts that should appear in RSS, posts that belong on the homepage, and posts that should live under /archive without appearing on the homepage.
I use Substack for email distribution too. For the website side, I built an open-source blogging platform called Jant (https://jant.me) around these needs: posts appear on the homepage by default, posts marked as Featured are included in RSS, and posts can also be unlisted. It also syncs everything to GitHub as Markdown, in a repo that works as a complete Hugo site.
by theowenyoung - Hi Simon, I'm not sure I get it completely.
If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails.
My understanding of what it means:
- the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to Substack for that. So you must be massively losing out on blog-driven subscriptions because of the much higher friction (vs having the pop-ups directly on the blog)?
- all of your content is duplicated between the real blog and the Substack copy. How do you avoid Substack cannibalizing all of your blog's traffic, given that they are a bigger domain possibly better optimized for SEO?
- You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.by rsingel
- At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.by drdexebtjl
- I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
by simonsarris - What is "un-distribution"?by tome