I will not subscribe to your newsletter on Substack

2025-09-17

The title could stand on its own as a Bluesky post, but I want to expand on it a little. Substack has a serious Nazi problem, it's well documented and they don't show any signs of stopping. Substack's centralized nature and use of dark patterns pushes people towards these newsletters¹, even literally sending a push notification to them. I don't care that they claim this was an accident; this kind of thing should never happen. Forget about the push notification, a newsletter like that should have been banned long ago. My goal with this post is not to report on the issue itself, there are other places to look if you want to read more about it.

Ultimately, being only on Substack or any other platform with similar issues (like X/Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram) means that you are losing readership. There are several newsletters I would be interested in subscribing to but don't as they are only available on Substack. I know for certain that I am not the only person that feels this way, and I wager that any newsletter on Substack that isn't aimed at a right wing audience suffers from this. If you're set on using Substack then at least mirror posts somewhere else, whether that be a personal site, Patreon, or whatever other location of your choosing.

To be clear, I am empathetic to the people that feel that they are stuck on Substack and unable to move elsewhere, especially since exporting subscribers has recently been at least somewhat restricted. Additionally, popular alternatives like Ghost, Beehiiv, and Buttondown all charge the author upfront after a certain point rather than operating on a cost share model like Substack does, which is definitely more of an obstacle especially for newsletters without premium memberships or any other form of generating revenue. But simply waiting it out, hoping for Substack to get better, is not going to fix this!

Really this post is me saying once again that I really just want to follow people using RSS, please! Once you're past the initial set up (which is minimal with many popular platforms!) it's just a better experience for both the reader and writer. I love using the specific reader that works the best for me, and that's just not possible with the majority of platforms that lock down their UI to a single website or app. For the writers, you can switch platforms/hosts whenever you need to and as long as the feed is located at the same URL (or the old one points to the new one) it's completely seamless for your readers!

Portability between platforms is a benefit of emails too, as long as you can take the list with you. If your emails start coming from a different email address that could cause issues with filters/being marked as spam, but that's why (like with an RSS feed) you should own your own domain and make use of it if you're going to be creating anything on the internet. I get that I'm in the minority for preferring RSS over email, but RSS is making a comeback! I am so thankful for the sites I follow that provide full text RSS feeds for subscribers. Just one more thing that, like effective moderation, Substack doesn't provide.