Comment by simonw
7 hours ago
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.
You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.
I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.
Sure, tolerate Nazis, give them a place to share their words, let them be part of the mainstream, let them take part in elections, play their dirty tricks and form paramilitaries and win control of government. It's a shame that that leads to certain groups, like Jews, LGBTQ, non-whites, or immigrants getting exterminated, but that's just the price you have to pay for free speech.
What about for going out of their way to find and pay despicable people for their words?
oh it's more than the org. IIRC, it's also the founder.
Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).
At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.
... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
This is super useful even if I just grab it as an idea to emulate. Have you used an agent to copy and paste for you ?
I've not tried that, honestly it's such a quick process already that waiting for some kind of browser automation to copy and paste would likely be slower.
It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.
Email is so well designed, so resilient, and so ubiquitous that's very hard to displace it's use as a central check-in.
Right which is why I'd only suggest the browser as an alternative. Imho a browser is something I open when I proactively am seeking information/entertainment and thereby fits blog reading better than email which is more like an interrupt.