Why move from one corporate entity to another? Substack will end up going down the same road in time. Get your own domain, fire up a CMS and start publishing on something you control and own.

We really need to move towards self-hosted content, self-hosted social media, etc, instead of surrendering ourselves to arbitrarily-run walled gardens.

This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. The only thing I like about twitter/facebook/medium/etc. is that I get to see what the whole world would do if they knew how to `vim index.html`.

In this case, it's even harder because it's about maintaining a website synchronized with a mailing list.

Make something open source and ad-free and they'd all run to it, I'm sure.

> This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say.

I agree, so maybe we should work towards making it easier for them.

I was thinking about spending my Christmas break fixing Friendica bugs, but now I'm suddenly thinking about building my own ActivityPub blogging platform (though no doubt one already exists). But of course that's not going to be enough; it needs to be trivial to deploy and host, at little cost. I believe many cloud hosting providers have a free tier. Would be nice if something like this could be easily deployed there. Create a tool that sets the whole thing up, handles the DNS name, the payments, and deploys the site.

In fact, it would be nice if ISPs offered something like that for free with your internet connection, to finally do justice to that 'S' in their name.

Just make a service that easily ports (or reverse proxies) content from Medium and Substack into a static site hosted on Netlify for free with a custom domain.

Users can continue authoring on those platforms but can begin promoting their own-domain version and gradually move their users off.

That used to be a thing they offered. A dial-up or DSL connection and like 25MB of web-hosting.

That's true. In fact, I recently got an email from mine asking if I still wanted to keep my webhosting, because they wanted to get rid of it. I used to have a lot of stuff there, but it got deleted when they mixed something up about my account.

Some of them still do. In France, Orange hosts a free 6Gb static website if you're a client; Free offers 10Gb. I dunno about the other isp

Although that wasn’t much better for longevity than Medium or the like.

So much early web lost from URLs like http://www.myisp.net/~username/

Please avoid building another platform. Odds are there is something that is close that needs a lot of help.

I know sometimes there is a project that looks good but the maintainers are impossible to get along with. Thus there is sometimes a need to start over. Most of the time though what platforms need is more people to help out: fix bugs, write documentation, translate the UI, run UX tests. That is all the thankless unseen when it works work that makes good commercial projects more polished than most open source projects.

Sounds like a vote to stick with my promise to help Friendica. I've got to admit my main issue with it is that it's in PHP. A lot of these platforms seem to be, and I'd rather work on something in, for example, Svelte+Node.js or something.

I don't know much about that space, but there is probably something written in language better than php. Good luck finding it

For an awful lot of people Substack is that place where crackpots, anti-vaxers and nazis post their inane ramblings. Always worth bearing in mind whether you want to align yourself with that.

You could say the same of Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and everywhere else people post content that’s wrong/politically unpalatable.

I've never met a normal or relatively normal person who viewed Substack that way. Most people have the knowledge to separate a handful of blogs from the way a site runs.

"Crackpots often use modern communications mediums to publish their insane ramblings"

You would prefer a centralized and curated old-school publishing mechanism.

> Why move from one corporate entity to another? Substack will end up going down the same road in time. Get your own domain, fire up a CMS and start publishing on something you control and own.

It's quite weird to see people fawning over the latest startup blogging platforms in 2022.

While people have been migrating to/from medium and substack, wordpress.com has been here the whole time, and it's still quite OK. The killer feature it has, of course, is that because it is open source you can export your data and run it yourself should things go sour (or if you just outgrow it).

Whatever features substack/medium/whatever closed source platform may have that you think you really need, the anti-feature of lockin is not worth it.

Medium has been the villain for quite some time now.

But not so fast about Substack... they recently started showing modals.

In the end, running a website costs money. What are you going to do.

Are the modals opt in or configurable by the author?

For what it’s worth I find their modals relatively unobtrusive and easily dismissed. It’s not great but like you said, they need to make a living.

Switch platforms before investors can make their money back. Everyone wins!

Substack also gets lots of revenue from subscriptions. If that's not enough to keep the platform up then perhaps they need to try to take a bigger cut (or not offer service to authors who have too few subscribers).

There's no reason for authors (who are Substack's customers) to want to make the platform more annoying for readers (some of whom are the author's customers). If the author is not making enough money (perhaps because Substack has started taking a bigger cut to cover costs) they need only to improve their writing and/or put more of it behind the paywall in order to get more subscribers.

Those modals are infuriating. Every time you go to SS for a different article, it will nag you.

Does anyone have a uBlock rule to drop them all?

I'm using this in Stylish, a CSS manager browser extension:

  /* Substack modals, nags, etc. */

  [class*="frontend-components-SubscribePrompt"] {
      display: none;
  }

Saved as "Substack" and applied to any page/domain which uses Substack.

Otherwise, for UBO, these two should work:

  ###.frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-module__subscribeDialog--2_6UY.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex-align-center--21WCV.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex-direction-column--2sph3.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex--fK-9V
  ###.frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-module__background--2DQPj

I suspect Substack vary their element names (e.g., the "2_6UY" and "2DQPj" strings in the above list), so that substring matches as I've used in my CSS example should be more robust.

UBO uses the Easylist blocking syntax which ... I can't seem to find documented, so I'm guessing as to the specific patterns. Corrections/clues welcomed.

The problem all these sites have is that the domain starts as a signal of high quality — either because they are initially exclusive like Medium, or pay high-quality writers to move over. Over time, they regress to the mean and the domain becomes a signal of mediocrity.

I understand the need for things like substack to grow an audience, but I maintain that someone who really wants to run a blog for many years should own their audience.

Google results will also rank these “high quality” sites above a self hosted domain. To the point where even a direct string search on an indexed page will never return on Google. Kagi and Brave search do a better job here if you’re looking for content on someone’s self hosted blog.

How long before seeing a comment like the next two paragraphs?

Substack lived long enough to become the villain. It was honestly quite the heel turn, but they’re all in.

As far as I am concerned everyone should just move to ${random_new_platform} at this point.

Substack did already. They have very annoying subscribe modals, and when they pop up, I just close the site.

We shouldn’t move to substack it’ll for sure just repeat history. Just make your own minimal site, especially if you have things worth reading and draws attention

Centralizing stuff in another VC-backed startup is… kind risky[1]?

[1] https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/substack-centralization/