Substack writers, you need a website

oh it's more than the org. IIRC, it's also the founder.

I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.

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.

I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features…

Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.

It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.

Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.

Did Wordpress write this?