I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.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.

There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack.

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.

Also take into account Substack moderation policy.

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.

unfortunately a lot of people never read history to understand how certain things in the modern world came to be.

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.

The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.

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

If you can generate traffic to your website while having a deep email list as well of people who are alerted when you write, you essentially make yourself unable to be censored or deplatformed. Large companies want you there so they make money from your content, make your own platform and get your own users and you have the keys to the kingdom.

I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup.

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.

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy.

Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), 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.

If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging