Email blogs and newsletters

December 30, 2014 — March 3, 2024

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Assumed audience:

Nascent producers and consumers of online punditry

Blogs, but for email. Email subscriptions are useful for enabling people who do not know how to read feeds.

Also, some of the providers (e.g. Substack) provide a unified experience of the blogosphere conversation which happens to be on Substack; see Richard Hanania’s argument about the virtues of this. Personally, I’m not that excited about the unified seamless experience that has Hanania interested. It is essentially a standard feed reader but inside Substack’s pay-to-play walled garden with no API; Avoiding that nonsense is why I left Facebook and Instagram, and in particular I am nervous about eventual enshittification of the Substack experience.

Still! For now it seems pretty good. But I get that the nice UX is a battle-tested way of onboarding some idle contributors. Meanwhile, the lack of API achieves vendor lock-in that keeps the writers on board, so it’s commercially savvy to set it up this way.

Anyway, I will continue to read Substack blogs inside Feedly with all my other blogs (but I will laboriously manually cross-sync my subscriptions between Substack’s walled garden and the wider universe).

See Alexey Guzey on affordances and effectiveness of several blog-email providers, backed by an open-rate data experiment. Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown, which highlights some points of friction and interest between Substack and some others. cf The Best Substack Alternatives on WIRED.

1 Ghost

Ghost is a popular email/blog hybrid platform. It is open-source with a fairly cheap hosted option.

Create your own platform on the web. Ghost is a powerful app for new-media creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.

Don’t settle for another basic profile that looks just like everyone else. Make it yours.

Publish by web & email newsletter. An editor built from the ground-up for professionals. Calm by design, with advanced workflows by default. No more suffering through clumsy toolbars or drag & oops. Immerse yourself in the story with an interface that’s invisible until you need it, and powerful when you do.

SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD notes:

Ghost is already open-source, which is the big requirement to get started immediately.…: they plan to stop growing at 50 employees and let other companies take on the growth from there.

(For more about Ghost’s fascinating business model, see here.)

Ghost has interesting integrations, an Open API Documentation and a command-line.

Figure 1

2 Substack

Newsletter-style blogs. Intriguing features such as easy monetization and a legal defence fund for writers. As one of their competitors points out, Substack is missing certain features as well; in particular, there is no automatic integration, no API; you need to use Substack as your backend to use Substack as your front-end.

My life is busy enough without copy-pasting from my well-adapted, easy blog into the Substack author page, but is that menial roadbump worth it to access the semi-gated Substack community? How many social networks do I want to be copy-pasting between?

For now, because the community is good, I attempt to dabble in Substack despite my vexation over its walled garden. Let us see how long that lasts.

On Nazis

Substack has been criticized for hosting Nazis and there has been a small moral panic about that. I oppose Nazism, and yet, I do not participate in this panic. Here are reasons:

  1. Many of the paywall-supporting platforms here could also be easily used by Nazis. Substack is not special in that regard; it is just the one that went viral thanks to a mild branding difference.
  2. Even if Substack were substantively distinguished, I would still not care. The decade-long experiment in trying to win alt-right hearts and minds by deplatforming them seems to have been counter-productive. Silencing opponents has, empirically, strengthened them. I suggest a different approach might be more effective at persuading them to change their minds.

All of which is to say, I do not think that attacking a platform for hosting nazis is effective way to diminish nazism. There is of course more nuance to be wrung from this issue if you want to spend time thinking about it.1 I choose to spend both my performative care and my actual care on better things than yet another platforming dispute in a decade of interminable platforming disputes.

3 Buttondown

Buttondown’s author says:

I had been writing my own personal newsletter for years but struggled with how other tools worked. Simple tasks like cleaning up Markdown, checking links, resizing images, and making sure the email looked right was a huge hassle. It took me away from doing the fun part: writing a great newsletter.

I needed a simple, pleasant tool that took the annoying stuff off of my plate. I also wanted something that was for people like me: not a tool that was really built for big commercial sites or complex editorial teams, but for a small user who wanted to spend more time writing than dealing with an interface.

Third-party integrations Setting up your Buttondown account to work with Zapier, IFTTT, Weebly, Squarespace, Ghost, and more.

Paid subscriptions Buttondown makes it easy and painless for you to get paid for your newsletters. Want to have a free tier? That’s possible, too!

Run by a human Buttondown isn’t a team or a startup or a movement or whatever: it’s just me. I respond to every email personally and deeply care about the problems I’m trying to solve.

Privacy-first Buttondown is GDPR-compliant—and then some. I don’t collect any data about you (or your subscribers), and Buttondown is the only newsletter provider that starts with analytics turned off by default. (If you want lightweight open or link tracking, it’s a single click away.)

Alexey’s review notes:

  • 46% open rate
  • 53% of openers clicked a link
  • looks very nice, a tiny bit worse than Substack (Twitter embeds though behave somewhat worse, so my Best of Twitter newsletter stays with Substack)
  • user interface is great
  • $5/month/1k subscribers (with Buttondown branding and without custom domain)
  • add $29/month for removing Buttondown branding and custom domain that does not work
  • price at 4k subscribers when not removing Buttondown branding and not sending from custom domain: $20/month
  • price at 4k subscribers when removing Buttondown branding: $49/month
  • kinda buggy. For example, it very annoyingly fails to send emails from my domain despite my account’s settings claiming that everything is set up correctly and Buttondown simply ignored several of my support emails about this 🙄

4 Beehiiv

TBD

5 Mailchimp

TinyLetter is one iteration of the hype cycle ago but still seems to be a serviceable platform by Mailchimp. Also there is the mainline Mailchimp.

6 Mailerlite

The ultra-simple option MailerLite includes the ability to subscribe to a blog feed by email on their free program as a service. Here is a worked example: Salman Naqvi – Adding Subscriptions to a Quarto Site. NB since that post was written, MailerLite has changed their free plan to exclude the RSS-to-email feature.

7 Mailchimp

TinyLetter is one iteration of the hype cycle ago but still seems to be a serviceable platform by Mailchimp. Also, there is the mainline Mailchimp.

Footnotes

  1. My favourite take is due to Ken White.↩︎