Substack Writers, You Need a Website: Stop Renting Your Digital Home
I argue that Substack should serve as a distribution tool, not your primary digital home. Relying entirely on platforms like Twitter or Medium makes you a tenant rather than a homeowner, leaving your work vulnerable to corporate rule changes. Instead, adopt the POSSE method: publish on your own site first, then syndicate elsewhere. This approach ensures long-term visibility and protects your creative sovereignty against algorithmic shifts.
When you build your audience entirely on someone else's platform, you aren't a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper.
- simonsarris
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.
- skippyfish
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.
- simonw
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.
- schlagetown
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 wh […]
- peteforde
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.
- thataccount
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.
- millipede
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.
- aetherspawn
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...