A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it’s funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.
Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton’s publication Platformer, Molly White’s newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.
. . .
If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don’t have to do anything to continue paying you.
The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I don’t know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there aren’t getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying “don’t like, don’t read” works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesn’t make someone into a Nazi.
That said, I don’t personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.
How do readers access Ghost? I got sucked into a trial membership but I don’t intend to publish, just read, like I can do on substack. I don’t want to be on the problematic platform but can’t figure out how to gradually use Ghost instead, especially since hardly anyone’s over there yet.
It’s hard to give up because some of the musicians I really like post there, and indie musicians are often struggling financially and Substack is simply a bigger platform.
I think i only follow Robert Evans. Have any ghost recs?
What, no Jason Pargin?
Substack has had a Nazi problem since its inception. At first, there was a liberal backlash, but they all eventually went there anyway.
Still remember the decoder podcast where the CEO was asked, would you remove an article that says “we should deport all brown people”, and he danced around how he wouldn’t get into specifics of moderation.
Just your standard ‘Free speech absoluteism’
Can a reader user on Ghost follow multiple Ghost accounts? I haven’t used Substack but my understanding is that it is similar to Patreon and OF in that I can subscribe to multiple accounts and have them show up in a central feed. Can I do this as a subscriber on Ghost? And do multiple servers federate to allow for that?
Newsletters? Google killed RSS so we could have newsletters?
Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.
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I’m following everyone from substack and every other resource on RSS. Nothing dead about it. Maybe someone is unhappy with their particular way of accessing it? I’ve used Feedly ever since Google ruined their own reader. Google abandoned a lot of things during that period of innovation.
RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.
Yes and ironically there are services like kill the newsletter that will re-RSS your tired ass newsletter.
But anyone cool that uses fulltext RSS gets an auto subscribe from me.
