Substack writers, you need a website(elizabethtai.com) |
Substack writers, you need a website(elizabethtai.com) |
For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
Stickers are neat too.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.
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.
If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
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.
How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...
so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr
There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.
Not the same with essays or fiction writing
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
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.
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.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
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.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
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.
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.
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.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
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
[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...
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.
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.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.
* Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub>
* Offprint<https://offprint.app>
* Pckt<https://pckt.blog>Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.
It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.
Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
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…
If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss.
An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
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.
[^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.
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.
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.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”
I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.
Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?
Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?
Do you think they can hear it? :)
Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.