Substack writers, you need a website

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.

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.

I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.

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.

I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.

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.

I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist.

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.

As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion.

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.

Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.

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.

Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.

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've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.

I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity.

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

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.

A great article written on this theme is “DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KINGDOMS” (2021)

https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

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-...

I wrote this for my own self-hosted blog a few years ago:

> My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good.

I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled.

If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all.

If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.

RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts.

So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page.

And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast.

It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?

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

Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms.

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.

Alternatively, use an open platform that doesn't lock you in:

  * Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub>
  * Offprint<https://offprint.app>
  * Pckt<https://pckt.blog>

Seeing some of the conversations in the comments reminded me of this thread and post from a few years back "Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghos...

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.

I’m the founder of Tertulia so take this with appropriate grain of salt.

I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website.

We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center.

Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/

My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc.

I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.

I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will.

I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:

  - Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/)
  - Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/)
  - Have multiple layouts to suit my needs (https://iahmed.me/resume/ rendered from json at build time for SEO)

On the flip side, I'm not good at SEO :) It works because SEO is not my primary goal, but I'd love to have a bigger audience. The flexibility I'm afforded is an ok compromise.

Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages.

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.

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

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…

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.

My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.

Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out.

Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.

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.

I agree! That's why I built Pagecord. Like Substack it's a blog with a mailing list, but it's also your personal website (pages, for example) with a custom domain. Also, source available.

Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw.

Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :)

https://pagecord.com

https://github.com/lylo/pagecord

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.

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.

Hey! Saw your post — we build websites & online stores and we'll show you a FREE visual preview of YOUR site within 48h, before you pay anything. Happy to prepare one: https://jeiperdsolutions.com

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

The moment I get those popups on Substack or similar, to login to continue reading, those writers have lost a reader.

So yeah, get a website.

Now the friction is close to none, at least for techies.

Set a GitHub repo, use pnpm + Astro, and your favourite AI to migrate data there, brew some coffee, and before you finish it, you have your page up.

It does not prevent you from posting elsewhere. But that way, you have full control both on the fruits of your own work, and how you display it.

There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.

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 used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge.

I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.