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

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.

I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.

I am surprised that people pay $12/ month for a single Substack newsletter.

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com

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…

In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and send the meaningful data and metadata elsewhere.

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.

For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it.

[^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.

The real pro move is to have zero traffic so it doesn't matter either way

Substack is unreadable for anyone in Australia, as it forces you unnecessarily through age verification.