Substack writers, you need a website

josefritzishere

TLDR: POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

mertbio

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.

dynm

For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it. [^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.

skippyfish

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.

acmnrs

Alternatively, use an open platform that doesn't lock you in: * Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub> * Offprint<https://offprint.app> * Pckt<https://pckt.blog>

spelk

I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.

doublepg23

I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.

raincole

Did we really learn nothing from Medium's situation?

elgolem89

who reads websites these days?

f311a

Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms. It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on. You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first. A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.

simonw

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.

thataccount

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.

firasd

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

millipede

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.

CM30

Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc. Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself. Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.

8organicbits

The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke. [1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...

wxw

I think https://indieweb.org/POSSE is generally a good compromise. Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.

ryanthedev

If you ever need a home. I built it mainly for me and all the stuff that I work on. https://upubli.sh/

npn

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.

asimpletune

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…