Email blogs and newsletters
December 29, 2014 — January 20, 2025
Suspiciously similar content
Assumed audience:
Nascent producers and consumers of online punditry
Blogs, but for email. Email subscriptions are useful for enabling people who do not know how to read feeds.
Also, some of the providers (e.g. Substack) provide a unified experience of the blogosphere conversation that happens to be on Substack; see Richard Hanania’s argument about the virtues of this. Personally, I’m not that excited about the unified seamless experience that has Hanania interested. It is essentially a standard feed reader but inside Substack’s pay-to-play walled garden with no API. Avoiding that nonsense is why I left Facebook and Instagram, and in particular, I am nervous about the eventual enshittification of the Substack experience.
Still! For now, it seems pretty good. I get that the nice UX is a battle-tested way of onboarding some idle contributors. Meanwhile, the lack of API achieves vendor lock-in that keeps the writers on board, so it’s commercially savvy to set it up this way.
Anyway, I will continue to read Substack blogs inside Feedly with all my other blogs (but I will laboriously manually cross-sync my subscriptions between Substack’s walled garden and the wider universe).
See Alexey Guzey on the affordances and effectiveness of several blog-email providers, backed by an open-rate data experiment. Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown, which highlights some points of friction and interest between Substack and some others. cf The Best Substack Alternatives on WIRED.
1 Ghost
Ghost is a popular email/blog hybrid platform. It is open-source with a fairly cheap hosted option.
Create your own platform on the web. Ghost is a powerful app for new-media creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.
Don’t settle for another basic profile that looks just like everyone else. Make it yours.
Publish by web & email newsletter. An editor built from the ground-up for professionals. Calm by design, with advanced workflows by default. No more suffering through clumsy toolbars or drag & oops. Immerse yourself in the story with an interface that’s invisible until you need it, and powerful when you do.
Ghost is already open-source, which is the big requirement to get started immediately.…: they plan to stop growing at 50 employees and let other companies take on the growth from there.
(For more about Ghost’s fascinating business model, see here.)
Ghost has interesting integrations, an Open API Documentation, and a command-line.
2 Substack
The big player in newsletter-style blogs. Intriguing features such as easy monetisation and a legal defence fund for writers. As one of their competitors points out, Substack is missing certain features as well. In particular, there is no automatic integration, no API; you need to use Substack as your backend to use Substack as your front-end.
My life is busy enough without copy-pasting from my well-adapted, easy blog into the Substack author page, but is that menial roadbump worth it to access the semi-gated Substack community? How many social networks do I want to be copy-pasting between?
For now, because the community is good, I attempt to dabble in Substack despite my vexation over its walled garden. Let us see how long that lasts.
As the most technically closed-off platform here, I am nervous about Substack’s vulnerability to enshittification.
X/Twitter and Substack are not friends
Omar Shehata explains the workaround DefenderOfBasic implemented it.
sick & tired of not being able to share links to my articles on twitter. having to share a screenshot and say ‘link in bio’ like a goddamn porn bot” decided “enough is enough” and “made a little tool to circumvent this stupid censorship”.
Substack has been criticized for hosting Nazis and there has been a small moral panic about that. I oppose Nazism, and yet, I do not participate in this panic. I am tired of the expectation that I should obediently line up to take a side in every platforming dispute.
Here are some reasons I am sitting this one out.
- Many of the paywall-supporting platforms here could also be easily used by Nazis. Substack is not special in that regard; it is just the one that went viral thanks to branding differences.
- Even if Substack were substantively distinguished, I would still not care. The decade-long experiment in trying to win alt-right hearts and minds by deplatforming them seems to have been counter-productive. Silencing opponents has, empirically, strengthened them. I suggest a different approach might be more effective at persuading Nazi sympathisers to change their minds.
All of which is to say, I do not think that attacking a platform for hosting Nazis is an effective way to diminish Nazism. There is of course more nuance to be wrung from this issue if you want to spend time thinking about it.1 I choose to spend both my performative care and my actual care on better things than yet another platforming dispute in a decade of interminable platforming disputes.
4 Beehiiv
TBD
5 Mailerlite
The ultra-simple option MailerLite includes the ability to subscribe to a blog feed by email on their free program as a service. Here is a worked example: Salman Naqvi – Adding Subscriptions to a Quarto Site. NB since that post was written, MailerLite has changed their free plan to exclude the RSS-to-email feature.
6 Mailchimp
TinyLetter was the blogging solution from email marketing platform Mailchimp. It seems to be discontinued? Or if it is not, I cannot find it on the Mailchimp website, which suggests it is dead enough for me not to want to use it.