7 ms·

Kind of silly to insist on a newsletter versus a blog and direct folks to a $30 a month service. You can get a free blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.org. You can ge

Kind of silly to insist on a newsletter versus a blog and direct folks to a $30 a month service. You can get a free blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.org. You can get one for $5 at somewhere like Micro.blog. There's plenty of ways to setup a personal blog that works well for both long posts and short posts. All of those have mechanisms to crosspost to social media or turn into a newsletter, if you want. But the focus on that solution is silly-- the open web is here, it's great, and blogs are a solid technology. RSS works well and makes it easy to syndicate all over. I am personally quite happy using Micro.blog for my blog [micro.json.blog](https://micro.json.blog https://micro.json.blog). It's hosted Hugo (which is what I used for my blog before) setup with a micropub service already and hooked into most of the tech and standards coming through the Indieweb movement. Blogs are the answer to twitter. Newsletters are just a potential answer to monetization for a limited set of folks.

closeparen 6y ago
If your audience is hardcore HN readers, this is true. Most normal people have an email address but not an RSS reader. And without that a blog is a completely different thing, requiring you to actively check it. Newsletters can also make things not-completely-public without a user account system.
- jasonpbecker 6y ago
  That's true that most people don't have an RSS reader. It's also true that: 1. Most people don't want your newsletter in their inbox. 2. Most people still find content on social media. 3. RSS _as a technology_ can be used to syndicate to both newsletters and social media. That's why I think POSSE[^1] is the right, powerful concept. On "not-completely-public" content-- I don't think that this post, and most of the "leave Twitter/Facebook" posts are directed at the small number of private accounts-- private accounts don't have the same discovery problem. The exception is if you're talking about "not-completely-public" for the purposes of monetization. To that I say: 1. Twitter doesn't solve that; 2. That's a completely different problem; 3. A blog, syndicated to social media, is still probably the best tool to enable new people to discover your content. Any number of mechanisms, whether Patreon, Locals, Substack, Mailchimp, Memberful, Github Donations, and on and on may make sense for monetization. Wordpress and Tumblr also have built in mechanisms for monetization. But people aren't using Twitter for gated content that folks pay for-- that's just moving the goal posts. [^1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I was just about to come here and mention Micro.blog, and I'm impressed someone beat me to it. :) Of course, you can do it for even more cheaply than that if you're a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort. I like the idea of newsletters, but they strike me as a different kind of solution. Micro.blog is a great compromise between being Twitter-like and still allowing longer blog posts. (And still cross-posting to Twitter, to boot). It's also worth noting that version 3 of the Ghost blogging platform has a newsletter system integrated into it, so if you fall into the "a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort" category, you can use that to put together a newsletter for less than $30 a month. And if you want a newsletter but still want someone else to take care of it for you, there's Substack, which lets you publish newsletters for free and, if you want to go paid, charges 10% plus credit card processing fees, which may end up working out to be cheaper than $30 a month for a lot of low-volume folks. (My own Microblog: https://micro.coyotetracks.org https://micro.coyotetracks.org)

closeparen 6y ago

If your audience is hardcore HN readers, this is true. Most normal people have an email address but not an RSS reader. And without that a blog is a completely different thing, requiring you to actively check it. Newsletters can also make things not-completely-public without a user account system.

jasonpbecker 6y ago
That's true that most people don't have an RSS reader. It's also true that: 1. Most people don't want your newsletter in their inbox. 2. Most people still find content on social media. 3. RSS _as a technology_ can be used to syndicate to both newsletters and social media. That's why I think POSSE[^1] is the right, powerful concept. On "not-completely-public" content-- I don't think that this post, and most of the "leave Twitter/Facebook" posts are directed at the small number of private accounts-- private accounts don't have the same discovery problem. The exception is if you're talking about "not-completely-public" for the purposes of monetization. To that I say: 1. Twitter doesn't solve that; 2. That's a completely different problem; 3. A blog, syndicated to social media, is still probably the best tool to enable new people to discover your content. Any number of mechanisms, whether Patreon, Locals, Substack, Mailchimp, Memberful, Github Donations, and on and on may make sense for monetization. Wordpress and Tumblr also have built in mechanisms for monetization. But people aren't using Twitter for gated content that folks pay for-- that's just moving the goal posts. [^1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

I was just about to come here and mention Micro.blog, and I'm impressed someone beat me to it. :) Of course, you can do it for even more cheaply than that if you're a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort. I like the idea of newsletters, but they strike me as a different kind of solution. Micro.blog is a great compromise between being Twitter-like and still allowing longer blog posts. (And still cross-posting to Twitter, to boot). It's also worth noting that version 3 of the Ghost blogging platform has a newsletter system integrated into it, so if you fall into the "a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort" category, you can use that to put together a newsletter for less than $30 a month. And if you want a newsletter but still want someone else to take care of it for you, there's Substack, which lets you publish newsletters for free and, if you want to go paid, charges 10% plus credit card processing fees, which may end up working out to be cheaper than $30 a month for a lot of low-volume folks. (My own Microblog: https://micro.coyotetracks.org https://micro.coyotetracks.org)