Sometimes the ‘what’s wrong with substack’ crowd gets very defensive about people saying ‘I don’t like and won’t use substack’. I thought freedom and no moderation was the core tenet of your belief: it should extend to others’ freedom to dislike substack as well
Are there currently any Substack replacements that integrate with ActivityPub?
So I'm currently looking for a Substack substitute for taking donations.
I'd want it to feature a blog (and preferably newsletters too) that include a mix of publicly-accessible posts, as well as posts that are only visible to donors.
And ideally, I want it to also integrate with ActivityPub too.
That might mean a Fediverse post is automatically generated when a new blog post is published. Or potentially the publicly visible blog posts are published in full to the Fediverse.
Now, I know there are a few donations platforms that can handle the first part, such as Ghost and Ko-Fi.
There are also blogging platforms such as WriteFreely/Write.as and Micro.blog that integrate with the Fedi.
And in theory you could do both with a WordPress blog and number of plugins, some paid. But especially with paid plugins, that's likely to get quite expensive quickly. (Not to mention some of the questionable things that have happened at Automattic in recent weeks.)
But are there any platforms out there that support both?
Or is the best option at this stage just to get a Ko-Fi/Ghost account for the donations and donor-only posts, with a separate micro.blog or write.as account for the publicly accessible posts?
In 1903, George A. Wyman rode his motorcycle from San Francisco to New York and became the first person to cross the country on a motor vehicle - car or motorcycle. In the summer of 2016, I followed his route on a Zero DSR electric motorcycle. I'm posting my story on Substack. Here's the latest entry, from Sacramento, California, to Reno, Nevada: https://followingwyman.substack.com/p/05-up-and-over-the-sierra-nevada
I never really felt comfortable with my identity as a Chinese person because I can't read Chinese, don't speak the languages fluently or even have the same culture as most Chinese people. It took me a while to have a sense of humor about it - these days I embrace being called a tropical fruit 😁
As far as I'm concerned, any new media effort that is launched on either #Substack or #Twitter / X -- knowing what we know about those platforms now -- is immediately suspect.
Have you heard about #BridgyFed? Using this free service, I have been able to link my four #Substack publications to the #Fediverse so that each now has a handle that can be followed on #Mastodon and other #ActivityPub platforms. Here they are:
Only on #Mastodon do I see people judging others being on #Substack and #X, seemingly implying that they are better humans for not being on it.
This betrays their massive privilege & ignorance of how cultures outside their own operates on #SocialMedia.
People fm less privileged countries rely on them to get their messages out. Self-hosted options are priced for Americans. It is not "the price of a cup of coffee" for everyone.
So, you are not impressing me with the virtue signalling.
via Matt Taibbi (take with a pound of salt) texts with #ElonMusk are ... unsurprising. Says that #substack had "stolen a massive amount of data" I think that's just porting of social graphs... basically the same tasks that the now defunct tools that let you keep your followers when migrating here used to do.
Elon thinks he owns your #socialgraph. You using it is THEFT.
Some people are just naturally "serf seeking" I think. They want vassals. Don't humor them.
Die #Techlounge ist zurueck & laesst es gleich zu Beginn richtig krachen. Der @DonDahlmann & ich filetieren #Tesla & versuchen wirklich alles, damit es nicht zu polemisch wird.
Platformer's @caseynewton talks with Nilay Patel from @theverge about starting his popular tech newsletter, his inspirations for it, the early days of Substack, leaving that platform for Ghost and the future of online journalism.
If you are journalist who has been recently laid off, or if you know one, check this out!
Ghost, the superb, open source, newsletter platform (and rival alternative to Substack) is offering free subscriptions to help get started with self publishing.
The solution to #Substack isn't to switch to another capitalist. The solution is to cajole all your software developer or tech savvy friends into making it super dead simple to self-host your own blog using #Ghost or any number of good-enough self-hosting blogging platforms.
OR
You can run an existing Fedi-compatible blogging suite for you and several (but < 50) of your friends — making sure at least two work in tech and have a vested interest in the site staying up.
@fka_tabs writes that his move from Substack to Beehiiv went well (with a few glitches, naturally) and I'm so happy to read that. Today in Tabs is one of my long-time favorites.
"There were about 175 new paid subscribers in my first two days on Beehiiv, which looks to me like a direct measure of the demand that was being suppressed by potential customers not wanting to pay for Substack."
Hey techy-Fediverse!
Does anyone know of a good, simple alternative to Substack? We're mainly looking to make short update posts and be able to email those updates out to our subscribers list.
Substack would have been perfect for our needs but Nazis suck, so we're kind of stuck on where to go now... #Substack#Blogging
It's good to see people reconsidering #Substack for hosting newsletters.
If you're looking to start a newsletter, or migrate to a different platform, it can be hard to make sense of the different pricing schemes that each platform uses.
I made a tool to make it easier to compare how much it might cost to host your newsletter on each platform:
Want to move your newsletter to a self-hosted Ghost installation? @wes has written this comprehensive step-by-step guide, covering how much it will cost, what you'll need, how to import your posts and subscribers and more.
Anybody who posts that they're leaving #Substack for a new platform, I will boost whether I have subscribed/followed them or not. Presumably they have good values if they want to leave Substack, and I want to do my part to help them reach their whole audience.