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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unicorns with an audience on their own website telling people to “own their content” is like Taylor Swift saying everyone should pull their catalog from Spotify.

The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.

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.

if you've a chance read a bit on sharecropping, the feudal system.

then you will see a good population of people are willingly getting into serfdom.

Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid!), and these keep growing organically (although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake). It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.

Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.

More details on this journey in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging if you want them!

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

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.

The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.

[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...

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>

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.

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.

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…

[^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.

https://upubli.sh/

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.