Comment by chemotaxis
5 hours ago
The main thing is that no one wants the hassle of keeping up with 50 mildly-interesting blogs by visiting them regularly. You really need a "push" mechanism of some sort. Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.
Many other social venues are gone too. If you're lucky, you can reach your audience on HN, but it's about the only remaining, successful aggregator of this type. Reddit has grown a lot more insular and many subreddits don't allow outgoing links. Where else do you go?
In this reality, the most practical push mechanism is email, but sending email to thousands of recipients is hard. You pretty much need to pay someone for the privilege if you want to have a reasonable success rate. Substack will do it for you for free, and it also lowers the friction because it gives visitors a familiar UI with a pre-filled address and no concern about phishing / spam / etc.
Beyond that, I don't think Substack is actually that much of a community. They built a good brand by attracting (buying) a bunch of high profile writers, then had an issue with neo-Nazis where they took controversial stances... I don't associate the domain with anything especially good or bad, not different from blogspot.com or wordpress.com. I have a special hatred for medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively paywalled, but that's another story.
And yeah yeah, RSS, but the friction for RSS is much higher.
> Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.
That's an X/Twitter/Facebook problem, not a social media problem. If you're on Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
> Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
Alone... look, I want Mastodon to be successful, but revealed preferences don't lie. Mastodon MAU is about 0.1% that of Twitter, down more than 60% from the peak.
The number of people you want to follow is much smaller than that 0.1%.
Granted, not everyone I want to follow is on Mastodon, but many, many people I do want to follow are. More than I have time to follow. Indeed, many of the people I followed via blogs in the RSS days now are on Mastodon. It's essentially become my RSS reader, and the content is the same.
Ultimately, the constraint is my time - not the percentage of folks using Mastodon.
(And there's also the bridge with BlueSky, but it requires the BlueSky account to actively consent to the bridge).
Reminds me of the time I canceled my Netflix DVD subscription because I could get them for free at my library. Did the library have a collection as large as Netflix? Not even close! But did they have movies on my To Watch list? Yes!
I figured I'd resume the DVD subscription once I ran out of DVDs at the library.
More than a decade later, I still haven't run out. Every year they get more movies I want to watch than I have time for. Who cares that they're only 0.01% the size of Netflix?
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